Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes in his introduction to this new edition, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

    Janell Carroll clearly conveys foundational biological and health issues, extensively cites both current and classic research, and addresses all material in a fresh and fun way; her book helps teach students what they need, and want, to know about sexuality. Her focus takes into account the social, religious, ethnic, racial, and cultural contexts of today's students. Dr. Carroll has used feedback from the first edition to add even further value to this popular title-streamlining student pedagogy and providing dynamic learning opportunities through Active Summaries at the end of chapters, a new online student tutorial, new video components, and content for Classroom Response Systems. This continues to be the text most representative of today's students, incorporating new sexual position art, a new pronunciation guide, and (for instructors) a new cross-cultural Slang Guide.

    Jerry Toner shows what can be learnt from new approaches to ancient history, from analysing the bones of the dead in Pompeii or assessing the impact of environmental change, and considers how we can discover what it was like to live back then. He looks at every period, not just classical Athens and Republican Rome, but the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander and the Christian-dominated later Roman Empire. Greece and Rome, he argues, must be fitted into the global history of their day: what did Persians think of Greeks and how does the Roman empire stack up to China's?With vivid examples and animation from award-winning Cognitive at every stage, this is the ideal introduction to the ancient world for general readers and students.

    This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentuous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late pre-Hellenic archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religious and economic history of an ancient civilization.

    The book draws a fascinating picture of the deep links between the cultures across the Mediterranean and explores the ways in which these civilizations continue to be influential to this day. Beginning with the emergence of the earliest Egyptian civilization around 3500 BC, Charles Freeman follows the history of the Mediterranean over a span of four millennia to AD 600, beyond the fall of the Roman empire in the West to the emergence of the Byzantine empire in the East. The author examines the art, architecture, philosophy, literature, and religious practices of each culture, set against its social, political, and economic background. Especially striking are the readable and stimulating profiles of key individuals throughout the ancient world, covering persons like Homer, Horace, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, and Alexander the Great. The second edition incorporates new chapters on the ancient Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East, as well as extended coverage of Egypt. Egypt, Greece and Rome is a superb introduction for anyone seeking a better understanding of the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean and their legacy to the West.

    From the ancient Romans to the present day, their real nature has been obscured by a tangled web of preconceived ideas and stereotypes.Barry Cunliffe seeks to reveal this fascinating people for the first time, using an impressive range of evidence, and exploring subjects such as trade, migration, and the evolution of Celtic traditions. Along the way, he exposes the way in which society's needs have shaped our visions of the Celts, and examines such colorful characters as St. Patrick, Cu Chulainn, and Boudica.

    2600-2400 b.c.) were vast astronomically sophisticated temples, rather than the pharaonic tombs depicted by conventional Egyptology. In March 1993, a tiny remote-controlled robot created by Rudolf Gantenbrink, a German robotics engineer, traveled up airshafts within the Great Pyramid of Giza and relayed to scientists video pictures of a hitherto unknown sealed door within the pyramid. Bauval, a British engineer and writer who has been investigating the pyramids for more than ten years, and Gilbert, a British publishing consultant, use Gantenbrink's tantalizing discovery as a launching pad for an extended analysis of the purpose of the mysterious airshafts, which lead from the Great Pyramid's chambers to its exterior, and of the placement of other Fourth Dynasty pyramids. They were sited, the authors argue, to coincide with the key stars of Orion, a constellation that had religious significance for the Egyptians. Bauval and Gilbert claim that the shafts were pointed directly at important stars in Orion--that is, at those stars as they were placed in ancient times. Using astronomical data about stellar movement, they argue that the Orion stars coincide exactly with the pyramids' positions in approximately 10,400 b.c.--a period the Egyptians called the First Time, when they believed the god Osiris ruled the Earth. The authors also speculate that the mysterious space within the Great Pyramid discovered by Gantenbrink contains the mythical Benben stone, which the Egyptians linked to the creation of the world. The book's contentions are sometimes far-fetched and certainly unlikely to put scholarly controversy about the pyramids to rest. Still, this is an enjoyably radical rethinking of the mystery of the pyramids, with some ingenious arguments made in lucid style.A revolutionary book that explains the most enigmatic and fascinating wonder of the ancient world: the Pyramids of Egypt. "[An] absorbing and fascinating work of archaeological detection...clearly and rivetingly told...the book is highly and compulsively readable."--London Sunday Times. 16-page black-and-white inserts.

    It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.

    Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day. Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was--more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?--and what it can tell us about ordinary life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica. Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd's memorable rock concert to Primo Levi's elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

    He charts life in Roman Britain from the first Roman invasion under Julius Caesar to the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West around AD 500.

    In Bonifacio's Bolo, Ambeth Ocampo adds even more interesting bits to another scrapbook of history.

    At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Borneo. In Eden in the East, Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia—rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed—was the lost civilization that fertilized the Great cultures of the Middle East 6,000 years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, creation stories, myths, linguistics, and DNA analysis to argue that this founding civilization was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.

    Completely updated and revised by preeminent historian J. M. Roberts, this volume features ninety up-to-date maps, new sections, and extremely well-written and accessible articles throughout. Truly global and comprehensive, it succeeds in conveying the staggering diversity of the human experience across a vast range of climates and conditions. This is the one book for anyone interested in the variety and grandeur of history’s march.

    This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum.A pharaoh's forgotten decree, cut in granite in three scripts--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek--the Rosetta Stone promised to unlock the door to the language of ancient Egypt and its 3,000 years of civilization, if only it could be deciphered. Capturing the drama of the race to decode this key to the ancient past, John Ray traces the paths pursued by the British polymath Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology" ultimately credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. He shows how Champollion "broke the code" and explains more generally how such deciphering is done, as well as its critical role in the history of Egyptology. Concluding with a chapter on the political and cultural controversy surrounding the Stone, the book also includes an appendix with a full translation of the Stone's text.Rich in anecdote and curious lore, "The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt" is a brilliant and frequently amusing guide to one of history's great mysteries and marvels.

    Who was the first king of ancient Egypt, and who was the last? Which Egyptian queens ruled in their own right? What in fact do we know about the 170 or more pharoahs whose names have down to us?