The author of such acclaimed books as Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth discusses the primitive roots of mythology, examining them in light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology.

    Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.

    In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities.Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata.Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries.As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes. From the Hardcover edition.

    David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he's built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge. There are occasional trips out to visit his friend Iggy Pop in a mental institution. His latest album is the cocaine-fuelled Station To Station (Bowie: "I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was"), which welds R&B rhythms to lyrics that mix the occult with a yearning for Europe, after three mad years in the New World. Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.

    Edwards wrote this historical, egyptological, and cultural study in in 1877, and it became an immediate best-seller, reprinted in 1888 at home in England and abroad. She travelled throughout Egypt at a time when most women didn't leave home. One of the pioneering Egyptologists of the age, she established the Edwards Chair of Egyptology, occupied first by the great Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.This book is in a sense a seminal work, known to have influenced the modern writings of Elizabeth Peters in her Amelia Peabody Emerson murder-mystery series. (Summary by Sibella Denton)

    It is also a place of extraordinary beauty. Evolutionary biologist Alex Dehgan arrived in the country in 2006 to build the Wildlife Conservation Society's Afghanistan Program, and preserve and protect Afghanistan's unique and extraordinary environment, which had been decimated after decades of war.Conservation, it turned out, provided a common bond between Alex's team and the people of Afghanistan. His international team worked unarmed in some of the most dangerous places in the country-places so remote that winding roads would abruptly disappear, and travel was on foot, yak, or mule. In The Snow Leopard Project, Dehgan takes readers along with him on his adventure as his team helps create the country's first national park, completes the some of the first extensive wildlife surveys in thirty years, and works to stop the poaching of the country's iconic endangered animals, including the elusive snow leopard. In doing so, they help restore a part of Afghan identity that is ineffably tied to the land itself.

    The book explains that the river, its very existence, and its course have been discussed and speculated over for years. The magnificence of the Sarasvati has been detailed in scriptures like the Rig Veda. Historians and archaeologists could not understand how it mysteriously ceased to exist. Some of the even deem the river a myth.This book attempts the deduce facts from fable and makes a strong case for the existence of the river. It goes over the upheavals that the Indian subcontinent went through thousands of years ago, explaining the dry weather, erosion, and tectonic events that changed the terrain, altered river courses, and may have made the Sarasvati disappear. The book then chronicles explorations into the river started, which began around the early nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered by British officials doing topographic explorations.The book also explains the culture around that time, shedding light on the Indus valley civilisation and the rich and flourishing culture of Harappa. The book goes on the show the results of explorations into the river’s origins and course using modern technology like satellite imagery and isotope analysis. The author has also used his proof of the existence of the river to bolster his theory that Aryans were indigenous to India and not foreign invaders.The Lost River was published in 2010 by Penguin India and is available in paperback.Key Features: The book presents evidence for the existence and information about the course and demise of the Sarasvati from various fields of investigation. It contains an extensive appendix with further information and a vast number of footnotes.

    The Oracle of Delphi was one of the most influential figures in ancient Greece. Human mistress of the god Apollo, she had the power to enter into ecstatic communion with him and deliver his prophesies to men. Thousands of years later, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William J. Broad follows a crew of enterprising researchers as they sift through the evidence of history, geology, and archaeology to reveal—as far as science is able—the source of her visions.

    From the dawn of our existence, animals and humans have been constantly redefining their relationship with one another, and entire civilizations have risen and fallen upon this curious bond we share with our fellow fauna. Brian Fagan unfolds this fascinating story from the first wolf who wandered into our prehistoric ancestors' camp and found companionship, to empires built on the backs of horses, donkeys, and camels, to the industrial age when some animals became commodities, often brutally exploited, and others became pets, nurtured and pampered, sometimes to absurd extremes.Through an in-depth analysis of six truly transformative human-animal relationships, Fagan shows how our habits and our very way of life were considerably and irreversibly altered by our intimate bond with animals. Among other stories, Fagan explores how herding changed human behavior; how the humble donkey helped launch the process of globalization; and how the horse carried a hearty band of nomads across the world and toppled the emperor of China.With characteristic care and penetrating insight, Fagan reveals the profound influence that animals have exercised on human history and how, in fact, they often drove it.

    This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them.Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world.

    But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does. In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better. Brilliant and insightful, Life as We Made It is an essential book for the decades to come.

    It takes the core information about tea but presents it in a highly original and entertaining way. It uses infographics and illustrations to convey facts and figures as well as other informative content.With five parts, the book starts off with a celebration of tea-drinking around the world: from drinking masala chai in tea shacks in India or from a samovar in Russia, to the dramatic pouring of Moroccan mint tea and the brewing of a salty butter tea in Tibet.Part two is an illustrated timeline that takes you through the history of tea in a humorous and engaging way.Part three - From Plant to Pot - explains in a simple but informative way the origins of different teas, where they come from and how they are processed. Take a visual journey, with the tea leaf, and see what happens during the processing business as well as learning about the different types of tea and what each needs to bring out its very best in terms of taste. It's here, too, that we meet the people behind the tea estates that teapigs deal with.Part four explains everything you ever wanted to know about drinking tea. Should you slurp or sip your tea? Follow in the steps of a tea taster and learn how to taste like a pro. Is a cup or a bowl best for drinking tea? The book takes a look at all kinds of drinking vessels from across the globe. To dunk or not to dunk - that is the question? Teapigs subscribers give their top 10 biscuits to dip in a cup of tea, does your favourite biscuit feature?And how can tea influence your mood? The fun but informative mood-o-meter shows you how to pick the right tea to cheer you up or calm you down. Plus, discover a whole tea chest of health-related benefits.The last part of the book is packed with 30 or so recipes, offering inspiration for using tea in cooking or partnering recipes with the best teas.

    Explored are the issues behind forty artefacts from ancient times to the present, and from cultures across the world, to ask a question that concerns us all: how easily can we recognize love in history? Concise and beautifully illustrated with objects from the British Museum’s far-ranging collection, A Little Gay History provides an intriguing and valuable insight into the range, diversity and complexity of same-sex experiences. It has been named a Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Honor Book for 2014.AuthorR. B. Parkinson is internationally known as a specialist in Ancient Egyptian texts and a curator of ancient Egyptian culture at the British Museum. His books for the British Museum Press include Voices from Ancient Egypt, The Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun, and (for children) The Pocket Guide to Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

    Uncovered ancient maps and writings show the real ruins of four of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World that were thought to have vanished from the earth. The secrets hidden within those Wonders explode the very foundations of what we thought we knew about the world and where we had come from. Listed by the Dallas Community Colleges as a "must read," WHEN ROCKS CRY OUT ties together riddles from the Old Testament with ruins of abandoned cities that are thousands of years old...and thousands of miles away from where we thought those cities would be. Often reading like a page-turning novel, this could be one of the most important books written in the last 500 years. From the discovery of Egypt's lost ancient capital, Memphis, to a stunning hidden burial city built by the Pharaohs, to the secret ruins of King David's famed city, this book moves past recent promises about 'codes' and brings you to the real-life secret that was the explosive reason for the creation of the codes. Da Vinci's Code? Solomon's Key? Those clever puzzles can't reach the significance of the mysteries unraveled in this book. And the things in this book are real! WHEN ROCKS CRY OUT...it is a book for those who have reached a point in their life when they just want to know the truth. Finally, we can trace where our 'blood' has been and what our 'blood' has done.

    He knows where priceless antiquities are buried, who is digging them up, and who is fencing and buying them. In this fascinating book, Atwood takes readers on a journey through Iraq, Peru, Hong Kong, and across America, showing how the worldwide antiquities trade is destroying what's left of the ancient sites before archaeologists can reach them, and thus erasing their historical significance. And it is getting worse. The discovery of the legendary Royal Tombs of Sipan in Peru started an epidemic. Grave robbers scouring the courntryside for tombs--and finding them. Atwood recounts the incredible story of the biggest piece of gold ever found in the Americas, a 2,000-year-old, three-pound masterpiece that cost one looter his life, sent two smugglers to jail, and wrecked lives from Panama to Pennsylvainia. Packed with true stories, this book not only reveals what has been found, but at what cost to both human life and history.