Ancient History category: 8298 books

Through the ages, coins have been more than a common standard or a means of exchange between peoples for goods and services. The development of coinage gave men freedom to move beyond their communities, served as a propaganda tool for advancing armies and visually showed people the source of politics...

Ancient Greece was never just one nation: it was a disparate collection of independent city-states, often embroiled in war with each other, with separate governments, their own armies and distinct politics, economies and societies. However, together these vibrant and diverse peoples made one of the...

The classical Athenian 'state' had almost no formal coercive apparatus to ensure order or compliance with law: there was no professional police force or public prosecutor, and nearly every step in the legal process depended on private initiative. And yet Athens was a remarkably peaceful and well-ordered...

Dogon cosmology provides a new Rosetta stone for reinterpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs • Provides a new understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs as scientific symbols based on Dogon cosmological drawings • Use parallels between Dogon and Egyptian word meanings to identify relationships...

An authoritative guide to the Egyptian myths that sheds new light on an ancient way of understanding the world This survey of Egyptian mythology explores how the ancient Nile-dwellers explained the world around them. It delves into the creation and evolution of the world and the reigns of the...

A step-by-step guide to raising kundalini and embodying the dynamic, sexual force, that is the Power of Sekhem. Sex is the most potent force in the universe. A primal power. And sacred sexuality is a gateway to the divine. Something that the ancient Egyptians recognised instinctively. In The Magical...

The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical...

The martial virtues—courage, loyalty, cunning, and strength—were central to male identity in the ancient world, and antique literature is replete with depictions of men cultivating and exercising these virtues on the battlefield. In Women and War in Antiquity, sixteen scholars reexamine classical...

In The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World Yun Lee Too argues that the ancient library was much more than its incarnation at Alexandria, which has been the focus for students of the subject up till now. In fact, the library is a complex institution with many different forms. It can be a building...

This widely acclaimed book offers an introduction to the ancient novel and presents the latest research findings in the field. For this English translation, Professor Holzberg has substantially updated and expanded the German edition of 1986. Niklas Holzberg considers the ancient novel as encompassing...

Women in the Ancient Near East provides a collection of primary sources that further our understanding of women from Mesopotamian and Near Eastern civilizations, from the earliest historical and literary texts in the third millennium BC to the end of Mesopotamian political autonomy in the sixth century...

The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on dress in the ancient world. These recent studies have established the extent to which Greece and Rome were vestimentary cultures, and they have demonstrated the critical role dress played in communicating individuals’ identities,...

The theorem of Pythagoras, Euclid's "Elements", Archimedes' method to find the volume of a sphere: all parts of the invaluable legacy of ancient mathematics. But ancient mathematics was also about counting and measuring, surveying land and attributing mystical significance to the number...

In this book, Nadine Moeller challenges prevailing views on Egypt's non-urban past and argues for Egypt as an early urban society. She traces the emergence of urban features during the Predynastic period up to the disintegration of the powerful Middle Kingdom state (c.3500–1650 BC). This book offers...