Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.

    He constructs the story like a detective novel, putting pieces of clues together to form the whole puzzle and he makes an incredibly exciting job of it. He writes for the lay reader but he is far from condescening. His language is a joy to read. I agree with BlairBurton that the book is wildly entertaining but I resented his reference to the author as 'the premier theorist of crackpot science.' Velikovsy's 'crackpot' theories are yet to be disproved and his predictions have the uncanny habit of being proved right so that the world of the scientific community is as shaky as the description of the earth in "Worlds In Collision!" Readers will find great rewards in reading all of his works and judging for themselves. While "Oedipus and Akhnaton" is the least 'scientific' of his works it is no less fascinating and eminently readable.

    This comprehensive resource on the construction and use of ancient Egyptian pyramids is perfect for young readers looking to expand their knowledge on history, architecture, and ancient Egyptian civilization.

    Buried there lie answers about the origins of humankind. After a century of investigation, scientists have transformed our understanding about the beginnings of human life. But vital clues still remain hidden. In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies as well as their feats of skill and endurance.The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than twenty species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans. They have revealed how early technology, language ability, and artistic endeavour all originated in Africa; and they have shown how small groups of Africans spread out from Africa in an exodus sixty thousand years ago to populate the rest of the world. We have all inherited an African past.

    They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible—the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire—reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Most of us would like to know the Greek myths better than we do, and books like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf have demonstrated the power of ancient texts to enchant and enthrall us. And yet the modern translations of the Greek myths have sought to instruct, to edify, or to impart a personal philosophy. "Songs on Bronze "is different. With this book, Nigel Spivey--a young Cambridge classicist and rising star as a documentary host--gives us the Greek myths as the spellbinding stories they are. In bold, sensuous prose, he tells of Demeter and Persephone, of Jason and the Argonauts, of the wrath of Achilles and the travels of Odysseus, of Oedipus's crime and Orpheus's excursion into the underworld. In his hands, these stories are revealed anew as outsize tales of love and strife, of secret compacts and open rivalries, of lust and desire. "Songs on Bronze" is a fresh revision of the classics that is likely to become a classic in its own right.

    Attracting hundreds of thousands of readers and stimulating vast debate, it influenced generations of people including countless scientists who went on to do serious work in their fields, and numerous science-fiction writers. It is a measure of the power of the Atlantis myth that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the idea of a submerged Atlantic Ocean continent remains vigorous today, long after Donnelly's work first appeared.A lawyer and politician before he turned to writing, Ignatius Donnelly (1831‒1901) spent many years amassing evidence for his book on Atlantis. Displaying an immense knowledge of Platonic and Biblical material, comparative archeological discoveries, folk traditions of deluges, and geological data supporting catastrophic volcanic activity, Donnelly staggered his readers with "facts" and overwhelmed them with his many brilliant arguments. Despite the many more recent discoveries that have proved many of his "facts" to be false, his arguments still dazzle and his central myth continues to fascinate. The highly appealing idea of a lost continent with a high civilization, one that was the mother of all other civilizations, is one of the most enduring of all human myths and shows no signs of disappearing.A seminal work on Atlantis and a classic in the history of culture, this book is the starting point for anyone sincerely interested in the Atlantis myth. Still the most readable and imaginative of the books on Atlantis, it is a work that will long outlive most of the more recent accounts. As a study of the golden past, it is an enormously intriguing and enjoyable book.

    The acclaimed biography of Alexander the Great.

    The development of archeological thought is analyzed by examining archeological history to determine to what extent its trends reflect archeologists' personal & collective interests.List of IllustrationsPrefaceThe relevance of archaeological history Classical archaeology & antiquarianismThe beginnings of scientific archaeologyThe imperial synthesis Culture-historical archaeologySoviet archaeology Functionalism in Western archaeology Neo-evolutionism & the new archaeology The explanation of diversity Archaeology & its social contextBibliographical EssayReferencesIndex

    Karen L. King tells the story of the recovery of this remarkable gospel and offers a new translation. This brief narrative rejects Jesus' suffering and death as a path to eternal life and exposes the view that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute for what it is--a piece of theological fiction. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala offers a fascinating glimpse into the conflicts and controversies that shaped earliest Christianity.

    Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

    Beginning c.3000 BC with the advent of the first writing system, Van De Mieroop traces the emergence and development of some of the greatest states and powers, stunning cities and major empires, including the Babylonian and Hittite kingdoms, the Assyrian and Persian Empires and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Van De Mieroop's revisions for the 2nd edition aim to make the text even more accessible, and include the very latest research. "This text deserves a place on the shelves of ancient historians and archaeologists, and it will certainly have pride of place in reading lists for courses in Mesopotamian history" - Norman Yoffee.

    They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. They wrote down the timeless myths of Odysseus and Oedipus, and the histories of Leonidas’s three hundred Spartans and Alexander the Great. But understanding these uniquely influential people has been hampered by their diffusion across the entire Mediterranean. Most ancient Greeks did not live in what is now Greece but in settlements scattered across Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine. They never formed a single unified social or political entity. Acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall’s Introducing the Ancient Greeks is the first book to offer a synthesis of the entire ancient Greek experience, from the rise of the Mycenaean kingdoms of the sixteenth century BC to the final victory of Christianity over paganism in AD 391.Each of the ten chapters visits a different Greek community at a different moment during the twenty centuries of ancient Greek history. In the process, the book makes a powerful original argument: A cluster of unique qualities made the Greeks special and made them the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. According to Herodotus, the father of history, what made all Greeks identifiably Greek was their common descent from the same heroes, the way they sacrificed to their gods, their rules of decent behavior, and their beautiful language. Edith Hall argues, however, that their mind-set was just as important as their awe-inspiring achievements. They were rebellious, individualistic, inquisitive, open-minded, witty, rivalrous, admiring of excellence, articulate, and addicted to pleasure. But most important was their continuing identity as mariners, the restless seagoing lifestyle that brought them into contact with ethnically diverse peoples in countless new settlements, and the constant stimulus to technological innovation provided by their intense relationship with the sea.Expertly researched and elegantly told, Introducing the Ancient Greeks is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the Greeks.

    David Abulafia's The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis, and bringing to life pilgrims, pirates, sultans and naval commanders, this is the story of the sea that has shaped much of world history.