‘The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Moon: Coffin Texts Spells 154–160’ argues that Coffin Texts spells 154–160, recorded at around the beginning of the 2nd millennium bce, form the oldest composition about the moon in ancient Egypt and in the whole world. The detailed analysis of these spells, based on a new translation, reveals that the spells provide a chronologically ordered account of the phenomena that happen during a lunar month. It is argued that through a wide variety of mythological allusions, the separate texts – after an introduction which explains the origins of the month (spell 154) – describe the successive stages of the monthly cycle: the period of invisibility (spell 155), waxing (spell 156), events around the full moon (spell 157), waning (spell 158), the arrival of the last crescent at the eastern horizon (spell 159), and again the conjunction of the sun and the moon when a solar eclipse can occur (spell 160). After highlighting the possible lunar connotations of each spell, further chapters in the book investigate the origins of the composition, its different manuscripts preserved on coffins coming from Hermopolis and Asyut, and the survival of the spells in the later mortuary collection known as the Book of Going Forth by Day.

How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question in A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries by exploring "meta-framing:" our ever-increasing capability to "step back" from the environment, search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar, and generate "as if" forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. This book demonstrates how analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective capabilities and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances.

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from "past/future" and "anticipation/unexpected" to "extinction/adaptation" and "serial/simultaneous." Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time-not space, as the postmoderns had it-is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question in A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries by exploring "meta-framing:" our ever-increasing capability to "step back" from the environment, search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar, and generate "as if" forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. This book demonstrates how analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective capabilities and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances.

'This is a thought-provoking book that would be of interest to anyone wanting to ponder the concept of time, and to develop more critical thinking skills that may be useful when reading popular science books or articles.'IEEE Electrical Insulation MagazineThe aim of this book is to explain in simple language what we know about time and about the history of time. It is shown that the briefest (as well as the lengthiest) history of time can be described in one or two pages.The second purpose of the book is to show that neither entropy, nor the Second Law of Thermodynamics has anything to do with time. The third purpose is to educate the lay reader how to read popular science books, critically. Towards this goal, detailed reviews of four books on time are presented.There are many popular science books on Time, on the beginning of Time and the end of Time. This book is unique in the following two senses:

Time and Age explores how time is defined by man. It follows the development of our means for measuring time from early methods using the flow of water or the steady burning of candles through to the atomic clock that records time with incredible precision.The classical idea of time as something that progresses at a uniform rate and as something that is the same to all observers was overturned by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The conclusions coming from this theory are described, including the anti-intuitive twin paradox where one twin, returning from a journey to a distant star, is younger than his twin brother.Also covered is how age can be determined in a wide range of situations, such as how we work out the age of the Universe to how we calculate the age of artefacts that are just a few centuries old.

Time and Age explores how time is defined by man. It follows the development of our means for measuring time from early methods using the flow of water or the steady burning of candles through to the atomic clock that records time with incredible precision.The classical idea of time as something that progresses at a uniform rate and as something that is the same to all observers was overturned by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The conclusions coming from this theory are described, including the anti-intuitive twin paradox where one twin, returning from a journey to a distant star, is younger than his twin brother.Also covered is how age can be determined in a wide range of situations, such as how we work out the age of the Universe to how we calculate the age of artefacts that are just a few centuries old.