Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. With the long-awaited publication of this book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital and important of ancient myths: that of Inanna, the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.The stories and hymns of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar) are inscribed on clay tablets which date back to 2,000 B.C. Over the past forty years, these cuneiform tablets have gradually been restored and deciphered by a small group of international scholars. In this groundbreaking book, Samuel Noah Kramer, the preeminent living expert on Sumer, and Diane Wolkstein, a gifted storyteller and folklorist, have retranslated, ordered, and combined the fragmented pieces of the Cycle of Inanna into a unified whole that presents for the first time an authentic portrait of the goddess from her adolescence to her completed womanhood and godship. We see Inanna in all her aspects: as girl, lover, wife, seeker, decision maker, ruler; we witness the Queen of Heaven and Earth as the voluptuous center and source of all fertile power and the unequaled goddess of love.Illustrated throughout with cylinder seals and other artifacts of the period, the beautifully rendered images guide the reader through Inanna's realm on a journey parallel to the one evoked by the text. And the carefully wrought commentaries providing an historical overview, textual interpretations, and aannotations on the art at once explicate and amplify the power, wonder, and mystery embedded in these ancient tales.Inanna--the world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible--is tender, erotic, frightening, and compassionate. It is a compelling myth that is timely in its rediscovery."A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade

    They called him Great King, Favorite of the Storm God, the Valiant. He conquered more than forty nations and brought fear and war to the very doorstep of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, but he could not conquer the one woman he truly loved.

    The monumental classic collection that studies the ancient Christian writers and their teachings about the early Church.

    It is the first work of its kind written originally in English. The first volume appeared in 1950. Reviewers were unanimous in heaping praise upon the publication and looking upon it as a breakthrough in studying the Fathers of the Church. To arouse interest in the works of the Fathers, the author provides numerous excerpts in English. These are thought of as samples that, by giving readers a taste of the beauty and sublimity of the Patristic writings, may tempt them to take in hand the original and get their own impression of it, or, if that is too much for them, at least to read it in good translation. Only this, if achieved, will put readers close to Patristic literature, because only then do they sense the atmosphere of Christian antiquity and begin to penetrate its world. The author's experiences as a university professor prompted him to adopt this device. The selections are designed to also show the development of theology in the early centuries and to illustrate the approach of the Fathers to the deposit of faith.

    In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is essentially the same. The demonstration of this recurrent pattern is made not through character-analysis, but through a close examination of the language employed by both the hero and those with whom he contends. The two chapters attempt to present what might, with a slight exaggeration, be called the "formula" of Sophoclean tragedy.A great artist may repeat a structural pattern but he never really repeats himself. In the remaining four chapters, a close analysis of three plays, the Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, emphasizes the individuality and variety of the living figures Sophocles created on the same basic armature. This approach to Sophoclean drama is (as in the author's previous work on the subject) both historical and critical; the universal and therefore contemporary appeal of the plays is to be found not by slighting or dismissing their historical context, but by an attempt to understand it all in its complexity. "The play needs to be seen as what it was, to be understood as what it is."

    

    The Vedic scholars of ancient India put ritualistic, mythological, mystical and natural interpretations on these holy scriptures, while the modern scholars critical approaching the subject from a literary point of view subject them to linguistic, historical and cultural interpretations. The present volume puts the age-old problem of interpreting the Vedas in its proper perspective. It analyses the factors mainly responsible for divergent interpretations, traces the origin and development of various ancient Indian systems of Vedic Interpretation, gives a detailed account of the Vedic commentaries written by ancient and mediaeval Bhasyakaras, and highlights their salient features. Besides, it contains a history of Vedic studies in modern times, discusses current trends and tendencies in the realm of Vedic interpretation, and sums up the results of outstanding contributions made to Vedic studies during the last two hundred years. The present book makes a comparative assessment of the ancient Indian Veda-Bhasyas and modern exegetical studies in respect of their merits and demerits. In the light of a thorough and dispassionate analysis of the Vedic interpretations attempted hitherto, the learned author has for mulated fourteen cardinal principles for an objective, scientific and systematic interpretation of the Vedas.

    

    From the arrogant barbarian Arbogast, who treated the youthful emperor Valentinian as his puppet, to Odovacar, who dismissed the last western emperor and was pronounced king of Italy in 476, the generalissimos' seizure of power led to dissolution and chaos from which would emerge the political patterns of medieval and modern Europe.

    Watercolors of feared Amazons and sea-beasts at the imagined world's end will delight young readers".--School Library Journal. Full-color illustrations.

    Dr. Bush has written a general introduction to the field of apologetics and an introduction to each apologist cited and the work or works from which selections have been drawn. A brief bibliography is also given for each writer. Christians have always been called on to defend their beliefs- certainly no less today than at any other time in history. In this book the outstanding apologists of previous centuries become models, both in the content of their writing and in their methodology, for Christians today. All those who love the Lord and His church and are concerned that many be made aware of the reasonableness of the Christian faith will find this book enlightening and exciting.

    

    Anthony Grafton describes Scaliger's early work as an editor of and commentator on classical texts, setting this into the wider context of classical scholarship in the Renaissance. At the same time he interprets the major changes that Scaliger's work underwent, as responses to pressures exerted by his social situation and emotional life.