Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment - the "Urszene" - of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres. The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.

When thinking about the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel's haunting words resound like an echo of the sea and its millenary history. From Prehistory until today, the Mediterranean has been setting, witness and protagonist of mythical adventures, of encounters with the Other, of battles and the rise and fall of cultures and empires, of the destinies of humans. Braudel's appeal for a long duree history of the Mediterranean challenged traditional views that often present it as a sea fragmented and divided through periods. This volume proposes a journey into the bright and dark sides of the ancient Mediterranean through the kaleidoscopic gaze of artists who from the Renaissance to the 21st century have been inspired by its myths and history. The view of those who imagined and recreated the past of the sea has largely contributed to the shaping of modern cultures which are inexorably rooted and embedded in Mediterranean traditions. The contributions look at modern visual reinterpretations of ancient myths, fiction and history and pay particular attention to the theme of sea travel and travellers, which since Homer's Odyssey has become the epitome of the discovery of new worlds, of cultural exchanges and a metaphor of personal developments and metamorphoses.

The importance of Bessarion's contribution to the history of Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy and culture during the 15th century is beyond dispute. However, an adequate appreciation of his contribution still remains a desideratum of scholarly research. One serious impediment to scholarly progress is the fact that the critical edition of his main philosophical work "In Calumniatorem Platonis" is incomplete and that this work has not been translated in its entirety into any modern language yet. Same can be stated about several minor but equally important treatises on literary, theological and philosophical subjects. This makes editing, translating and interpreting his literary, religious and philosophical works a scholarly priority. Papers assembled in this volume highlight a number of philological, philosophical and historical aspects that are crucial to our understanding of Bessarion's role in the history of European civilization and to setting the directions of future research in this field.

This book is written by E.A. Wallis Budge, who was fanatically interested in Ancient languages. Fatherless and leaving school at 12 he worked as a clerk for W.H. Smith and studied Hebrew and Syriac in his spare time. He became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language, so spent his spare time in the British Museum where he was allowed to study cuneiformtablets in the office. He often walked to St Paul's Cathedral to study during his lunch break and when the organist noticed his passion for Assyrian he contacted Budge's employer, the Conservative Member of Parliament W.H. Smith, as well as the former Liberal Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and asked them to help Budge. They agreed to help him raise the money to attend Cambridge University, where Budge studied Semitic languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic, continuing to study Assyrian on his own. Hence, this book is a work of passion, elucidating nine of the most fascinating and important Egyptian legends. These include The Legend of the Creation, The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind and The Legend of Isis and Osiris. This version comes complete with the nineteen original illustrations.

In 1869 the late Richard Henry Dana, Jr., prepared a new edition of his "Two Years Before the Mast''. In presenting the first 'author's edition' to the public, he has been encouraged to add an account of a visit to the old scenes, made twenty-four years after, together with notices of the subsequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the reader is made acquainted. The popularity of this book has been so great and continued that it is now proposed to make an illustrated edition with new material.

This exciting third volume of David M. Honey's comprehensive history of Chinese thought begins with China after nomadic invaders overran the northern regions of the historic kingdom. The differentiation between scholarly emphases-northern focus on the traditional pedagogical commentary, and southern classical school's more innovative commentary-led to an emphasis on the interpretation of the overall message of a text, not a close reading of smaller sections. As Honey explains, serious attention to the phonological nature of Chinese characters also began during in this long era. Based on the work of earlier Sui dynasty classicists, Kong Yinga and his committee produced the Correct Meaning commentary to the Five Classics during the early Tang Dynasty, which is still largely normative today. The book demonstrates that the brooding presence of Zheng Xuan, the great textual critic from the Eastern Han dynasty, still exerted enormous influence during this period, as his ritualized approach to the classics inspired intellectual followers to expand on his work or impelled opponents to break off in new directions.

BOOKS AND READERS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME by FREDERIC G. KENYON. Originally published in 1932. PREFACE: THIS book is the outcome of a course of three lectures which I was invited by the University of London to deliver at King's College in March 1932. The material has been slightly expanded, but the general scale of treatment has not been altered. It does not claim to replace the standard works on ancient book-production, but to supple ment them, and that especially with regard to the period during which papyrus was the principal material in use. It is in respect of this period that our knowledge has increased in the course of the last two generations. The object of this book is to bring together and make available for students the results of these discoveries. In particular, use has been made of the remarkable collection of papyrus codloss . recently acquired by Mr. A. Chester Beatty, which has greatly extended our knowledge of this transitional form of book, which appears to have had a special vogue among the Christian community in Egypt. Although the subject of the book is primarily bibliographical, namely, the methods of book-con struction from the date of Homer ( whenever that may have been) until the supersession of papyrus. . in the fourth centur f yJLera ne of vi Preface its main objects has been to show the bearings of the material and form of books on literary history and criticism, and to consider what new light has been thrown by recent research on the origin and growth of the habit of reading in ancient Greece and Rome. F. G. K. Contents include: I. THE USE OF BOOKS IN ANCIENT GREECE i II. THE PAPYRUS ROLL . . . .38 III. BOOKS AND READING AT ROME . 73 IV. VELLUM AND THECODEX . . . 86 APPENDIX 120 INDEX . . . . . .134 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A poetess with tablets. and stylus. Naples Museum-Photograph, Anderson . . . Facing page 16 A papyrus roll open. British Museum . 40 Papyrus roll before opening. British Museum 48 Teacher and students with rolls. Treves Museum. Photograph, Giraudon . . . Facing page 56 A book-box ( capsa) containing rolls with sillybi page 59 A reader holding a roll of papyrus . . 64 Roman inkpots. British Museum . Facing page 74 Roman pens and styli. British Museum 80 A papyrus codex. Heidelberg University Between pages 88 and 89. THE USE OF BOOKS IN ANCIENT GREECE. UNTIL within a comparatively recent period, which may be measured by the lifetime of persons still living, our information with regard to the physical formation and the habitual use of books in ancient Greece and Rome was singularly scanty. Our ancestors were dependent on casual allusions in Greek and Latin authors, intelligible enough to those for whom they were written, but not intended for the information of distant ages, and in no case amounting to formal descriptions.

This volume sheds light on how particular constructions of the 'Other' contributed to an ongoing process of defining what 'Israel' or an 'Israelite' was, or was supposed to be in literature taken to be authoritative in the late Persian and Early Hellenistic periods. It asks, who is an insider and who an outsider? Are boundaries permeable? Are there different ideas expressed within individual books? What about constructions of the (partial) 'Other' from inside, e.g., women, people whose body did not fit social constructions of normalness? It includes chapters dealing with theoretical issues and case studies, and addresses similar issues from the perspective of groups in the late Second Temple period so as to shed light on processes of continuity and discontinuity on these matters. Preliminary forms of five of the contributions were presented in Thessaloniki in 2011 in the research programme, 'Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian and Hellenistic Period,' at the Annual Meeting of European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS).

Quadratic equations, Pythagoras' theorem, imaginary numbers, and pi - you may remember studying these at school, but did anyone ever explain why? Never fear - bestselling science writer, and your new favourite maths teacher, Michael Brooks, is here to help. In The Maths That Made Us, Brooks reminds us of the wonders of numbers: how they enabled explorers to travel far across the seas and astronomers to map the heavens; how they won wars and halted the HIV epidemic; how they are responsible for the design of your home and almost everything in it, down to the smartphone in your pocket. His clear explanations of the maths that built our world, along with stories about where it came from and how it shaped human history, will engage and delight. From ancient Egyptian priests to the Apollo astronauts, and Babylonian tax collectors to juggling robots, join Brooks and his extraordinarily eccentric cast of characters in discovering how maths made us who we are today.