His dream was at times characterized as a benevolent interest in the brotherhood of man, sometimes as a brute interest in the exercise of power. Green, a Cambridge-trained classicist who is also a novelist, portrays Alexander as both a complex personality and a single-minded general, a man capable of such diverse expediencies as patricide or the massacre of civilians. Green describes his Alexander as "not only the most brilliant (and ambitious) field commander in history, but also supremely indifferent to all those administrative excellences and idealistic yearnings foisted upon him by later generations, especially those who found the conqueror, tout court, a little hard upon their liberal sensibilities."This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander's life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. After he was named hegemon of the Hellenic League, many philosophers came to congratulate Alexander, but one was conspicuous by his absence: Diogenes the Cynic, an ascetic who lived in a clay tub. Piqued and curious, Alexander himself visited the philosopher, who, when asked if there was anything Alexander could do for him, made the famous reply, "Don't stand between me and the sun." Alexander's courtiers jeered, but Alexander silenced them: "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes." This remark was as unexpected in Alexander as it would be in a modern leader.For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander's darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander's career. Full backnotes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests.

    The London lectures of Dr. John henrik Clarke and Dr Yosef ben-Jochannan were delivered for the minority Ethnic Unit of the Greater London Council in 1986. Since then there had been a great demend for these lectures, which were recorded along with an extensive question and answer period. Dr clarke has edited these lectures and has expanded the collection to include important biographical notes on both Dr ben-Jochannan and himself as well an invaluable reading guide on African history.

    Hutton draws upon a wealth of new data to reveal some important rethinking about Christianization and the decline of paganism.

    In this important new book Professor Sanders, whose Paul and Palestinian Judaism changed the course of Pauline studies, again argues against the prevailing views. He believes that flaws in method have produced a false impression of the Judaism of the period, for example, that the Pharisees were all-important and actually ran Jewish Palestine or that the Mishnah offers a description of general practice. In contrast, through thorough examination of the sources and by means of case studies, Sanders shows that what was important was 'common Judaism', the people and their observances, daily, weekly, seasonal and annual practices and the beliefs that bore directly on them. Early rabbinic legal material should be seen not as a set of rules, but as debates to be set within the context of real life, and parties such as the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes must be seen in proper relation to the Judaism of ordinary priests and people. Here then is a remarkably comprehensive presentation of Judaism as a functioning religion: the temple and its routine and festivals; questions of purity, sacrifices, tithes and taxes; common theology and hopes for the future; and descriptions of the various parties and groups culminating in an examination of the question 'who ran what?'. No other work offers such a detailed, clear and well argued account of all aspects of Jewish religion of the time. Written in a style easily accessible to any interested reader as well as to scholars, this book provides the major resource for study of Palestinian Judaism, whether by Jews or Christians, for years to come.

    Presented here is the first of two parts of the first of two volumes.

    Petronia clutched the baby close to her, and the kindly soldier shielded her with his cloak. Suddenly a terrifying blast made the ground tremble beneath their feet. They must find somewhere to hide from the volcano's fury. . . .The archaeologist carefully scraped the dirt away from the nearly 2,000-year-old skeleton lying on Herculaneum's ancient beachfront. When Sara Bisel knelt down for a closer look, she noticed a sword lying beside it. Could this be a Roman soldier, she wondered. Sara knew that if she listened carefully, these bones could tell her an amazing story. . . .

    Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remains a figure of awe, but her pagan functions are glossed over. She perches, crow of battle, on the dying warrior CuChulainn's pillar stone, but her role as his tutelary deity, and as planner and fomentor of the whole tremendous Tain, the war between Ulster and Connacht, is obscured. Unlike the Anglo-Irish authors who in modern times treated the same material in English, the good Irish monks were not shocked by her sexual aggressiveness. They show her coupling with the Dagda, the 'good god' of the Tuatha De Danann before the second battle of Mag Tuired, but they conceal that this act - by a goddess of war, fertility and sovereignty - gives the Dagda's people victory and the possession of Ireland. Or they reduce the sovereignty to allegory - when Niall of the Nine Hostages sleeps with the Hag she is allegorical of the trials of kingship! With the English invasion and colonization, the power of the goddesses diminishes further. The book shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture. That this fall shows a loss in the recognition of the roles of women seems evident from the texts. This human loss only begins to be restored when, presiding over the severed heads in Yeats's The Death of Cuchulain, the Morrigu declares, 'I arranged the Dance.'

    By combining difficult, often fragmentary primary sources with sociological and anthropological methods, Patterson produces a unique approach to the study of early Ireland—one that challenges previous scholarship. The second edition includes a chapter on seasonal rhythm, material derived from Patterson’s post-1991 publications, and an updated bibliography.

    Written by two distinguished Egyptologists, the book covers art, architecture, monuments, society, daily life, hieroglyphics, and the pyramids.

    Outler's widely acclaimed introduction to Volume 1 of The Works of John Wesley in a single inexpensive paperback. No student of John Wesley will need to be reminded of Albert Outler's stature, or the significance of his contribution to twentieth-century Wesleyan studies. Contents A Career in Retrospect The Preacher and His Preaching The Sermon Corpus Theological Method and the Problems of development Wesley and His Sources On Reading Wesley's Sermons

    Mayan art and architecture were the inspiration for the spectacular cut-paper artwork.

    The organization of armies of the ancient world, their performance, their military operations, and their ability to raise the art of warfare to towering heights are the focus of this carefully documented volume. An examination is made of all the major military establishments of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Pertinent evidence is gathered from a number of disciplines and integrated into a coherent whole. Corroborative evidence is drawn from modern analysis when accepting or rejecting the claims of ancient writers. Where that was lacking, the authors conducted empirical studies of ancient weapons, which led to a better understanding of how ancient battles were really fought. The book concludes with description and analysis of the armies of the ancient world placed in a modern perspective.From Sumer to Rome provides a detailed portrait of the world's earliest military establishments. A number of military innovations and developments that came to fruition in the Iron Age and that remained are traced. An empirical analysis of all the major weapons of the ancient armies is made. The factors that played dominant roles in outcomes are explored and thorough analysis of military medical care systems is provided. This book will be an excellent addition to the libraries of military historians, students of ancient warfare and weaponry, and the general reader.

    An anthology presenting translations of sixty documents from a golden age of ancient Egyptian culture (c. 2081-1600 BC), the documents illustrate all aspects of life and the place of literacy in an early civilisation. The 'voices' range from the high formal literature of religious rituals and royal monuments to the hurried requests of the bureaucrats and the jokes of harrassed workmen. They tell a tale not only of the intellectual beliefs of the elite, but of family feuds, love and murder, as well as the pastoral dreams of a society trying to attain its vision of absolute order in a chaotic universe.

    

    

    Of the three books covered in this volume, Book I presents Thucydides' aims in writing the work and the historical background to the war. Books II and III describe the main events of the first five years of the war (431-426) and include Pericles' funeral oration, the plague of Athens, the revolt of Mytilene, the destruction of Plataea, and civil war in Corcyra.Thucydides intended his work to be an everlasting Possession and the continuing importance of his work is undisputed. Simon Hornblower's commentary, by translating every passage or phrase of Greek commented on, for the first time allows the reader with little or no Greek to appreciate the detail of Thucydides' thought and subject-matter. It is the first complete commentary written by a single author this century and explores both the historical and literary aspects of the work. A full index is provided at the end of the volume.

    The evidence in this edition supports Haywood's earlier arguments, and advances the view that Viking ships and sea borne activities were not as revolutionary as is commonly believed.

    This book attempts to synthesize the archaeology and history of this region from the beginnings of human settlement to the rise of Islam. Drawing on a wide array of archaeological, epigraphic and literary sources, Dr Potts presents a comprehensive study of the area in two volumes. This first volume covers the Pleistocene to the Achaemenian period. It includes almost all the published evidence for the prehistory and history of the Persian Gulf.

    He argues that it is essential to understand tragedy's interaction with the practiceof Greek democracy. In The Political Art of Greek Tragedy he focuses on the works of Aeschylus to examine the close relationship between drama and politics at the beginning of the great age of Greek tragedy."Christian Meier has produced an outstanding new account of the politics of Athenian tragedy, interpreting political' broadly and illuminating Athenian religious ritual and theatrical experience by a systematic and subtle use of the comparative method."--Paul Cartledge, Clare College, Cambridge.

    

    Ctesias is a remarkable figure: he lived and worked in the Persian court and, as a doctor, tended to the world's most powerful kings and queens. His position gave him special insight into the workings of Persian court life and access to the gossip and scandal surrounding Persian history and court politics, past and present. His History of Persia was completed at a time when the Greeks were fascinated by Persia and seems very much to cater to contemporary interest in Persian wealth and opulence, powerful Persian women, the institution of the harem, kings and queens, eunuchs and secret plots.Presented here in English translation for the first time with commentaries, Ctesias offers a fascinating insight into Persia in the fifth century BC.

    Then & Now presents modern photographs of the most visited ancient sites throughout the world as they appear today and superimposes acetate overlays that offer vivid artist's reconstructions of the same scenes in their period of greatness. 24 photographs; 24 acetates; 7 schematics; full-color throughout.

    A phonetic version and definition are provided for each word, along with a helpful Index to English equivalents of Egyptian words in the text.

    Now, this newest addition to the REBUILDING THE PAST series offers a detailed and accessible review of this turbulentand exciting time in the world's history, written and illustrated especially for young readers aged 10 to 14. In fact-filled essays, from a wide range of historical sources, Roy Burrell vividly describes the early kings and emperors of Rome, the physical layout of the city, army life and major battles, the Barbarian threat, and eventual fall of Rome. But what makes this story of Rome's rise and fall soirresistable to children is its focus on the average citizen. What food and drink was most popular? How did people earn a living? What were the homes like -- did they have indoor plumbing? What games did the children play? These are the kinds of questions that children ask, and Burrell has madesure he has the answers. Through fictional eye-witness accounts that are the trademark of the series, the reader hears first-hand how momentus events of history touch ordinary men and women. An eighty year old man discusses how Rome changed as it grew, a twelve year old boy describes a typical family visit to the publicbaths, a slave talks of his chances for freedom, and other citizens from all classes and walks of life speak directly to the reader to tell what it was like to live in Rome. But perhaps the most remarkable part of this exciting new book is the contribution of the acclaimed children's illustrator, Peter Connolly. He excells in THE ROMANS with maps, cross-sections, detailed drawings, and even a complete scale model of what Rome may have looked like at the height of itsglory. A child's curiosity and interest will be piqued before he or she reads a single word. THE ROMANS is an excellent addition to school, classroom, or home library. It's non-fiction at its best -- accurate, detailed, and thorougly fascinating.

    Gothic tribes played a major role in the destruction of the western half of the Roman Empire between 350 and 500, establishing successor kingdoms in southern France and Spain (the Visigoths), and in Italy (the Ostrogoths).Our historical understanding of this `Migration Period' has been based upon the Gothic historian Jordanes, whose mid-sixth-century Getica suggests that the Visigoths and Ostrogoths entered the Empire already established as coherent groups and simply conquered new territories. Using the available contemporary sources, Peter Heather is able to show that, on the contrary, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths were new and unprecedentedly large social groupings at this time, and that many Gothic societies failed even to survive the upheavals of the Migration Period. Dr Heather's scholarly study explores the development of Visigothic and Ostrogothic societies, their rise to power, and the complicated interactions with the Romans which helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire.

    It was a time that saw the crossing of the frozen Rhine by various German tribes; the sack of Rome by the Goths and Vandals; the great invasion of the Huns; the emergence of powerful feuding landlords and endemic peasant revolts; and the grasping of power by the German warrior aristocrats. This book fully describes the historical background and gives detailed instructions on war-games armies, paper and pencil games and rules for miniature games. The numerous maps and drawings perfectly complement the text. Relive the epic battles and turmoil of the Barbarian Invasions and recreate on your war-games table the struggles which led to the end of the Classical World.