From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy.In this engrossing account Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures and the pivot between East and West. The book offers a fresh account of the waning of Rome, the Gothic and Lombard invasions, the rise of Islam and the devastating divisions within Christianity. It argues that the fifth to eighth centuries should not be perceived as a time of decline from antiquity but rather, thanks to Byzantium, as one of great creativity - the period of 'Early Christendom'. These were the formative centuries of Europe.While Ravenna's palaces have crumbled, its churches have survived. In them, Catholic Romans and Arian Goths competed to produce an unrivalled concentration of spectacular mosaics, many of which still astonish visitors today. Beautifully illustrated with specially commissioned photographs, and drawing on the latest archaeological and documentary discoveries, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe brings the early Middle Ages to life through the history of this dazzling city.

    Was late antiquity therefore merely a time of decline? In this vibrant and compact introduction, Gillian Clark shedslight on the concept of late antiquity and the events of its time, showing that this was in fact a period of great transformation. Late antiquity saw Roman law codified, Christian creeds formulated, the Talmud compiled, and the Qur'an composed. If the Goths sacked the city of Rome, the Vandalsbuilt churches in Africa and Attila the Hun received an embassy from Constantinople. Anthony of Egypt and Simeon Stylites offered spectacular new models of holiness, while Augustine and Basil and Benedict devised rules for monastic communities. Late antique artists produced the mosaics of Ravennaand the first dome of Hagia Sophia. And it was also the period when emperors Diocletian in the third century and Justinian in the sixth enacted extensive and much-needed reforms of government.

    For the first time in history, people became civilized. This globe- and time-trotting book vividly describes how a number of major civilizations - the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Khmers, the Etruscans, and more - emerged, thrived, faded, but left a mark on our collective imagination and culture. Memories of some of these civilizations linger in the form of legends. Some left monuments whose meaning seemed inscrutable to later ages. Still others vanished under desert sands, floods, or tropical jungles. This sharply observed and meticulously researched book unearths the stories and the cultures that make us who we are today.

    with one of the worst calamities in history: over a period of several decades, destruction descended upon key cities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing to an end the Levantine, Hittite, Trojan, and Mycenaean kingdoms and plunging some lands into a dark age that would last more than four hundred years. In his attempt to account for this destruction, Robert Drews rejects the traditional explanations and proposes a military one instead.

    A study of buildings, traditions and myth, it describes with precision and eloquence the glory of classical Greece shortly before its ultimate decline in the third century. This volume, the first of two, concerns the five provinces of central Greece, with an account of cities including Athens, Corinth and Thebes and a compelling depiction of the Oracle at Delphi. Along the way, Pausanias recounts Greek legends that are unknown from any other source and quotes a wealth of classical literature and poetry that would otherwise have been lost. An inspiration to Byron and Shelley, Guide to Greece remains one of the most influential travel books ever written.Book 1 AtticaBook 2 CorinthiaBook 7 AchaeaBook 9 Boetia Book 10 Phocis

    He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession. What, they really want to know, can this kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the edges of the village?"–– from "The Gospel of Jesus," overture to The Historical Jesus The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus––who he was, what he did, what he said. It opens with "The Gospel of Jesus," Crossan's studied determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it.The conventional wisdom of critical historical scholarship has long held that too little is known about the historical Jesus to say definitively much more than that he lived and had a tremendous impact on his followers. "There were always historians who said it could not be done because of historical problems," writes Crossan. "There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.'With this ground–breaking work, John Dominic Crossan emphatically sweeps these notions aside. He demonstrates that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity of the sources. The vivid portrayal of Jesus that emerges from Crossan's unique methodology combines the complementary disciplines of social anthropology, Greco–Roman history, and the literary analysis of specific pronouncements, anecdotes, confessions and interpretations involving Jesus. All three levels cooperate equally and fully in an effective synthesis that provides the most definitive presentation of the historical Jesus yet attained.

    Newly revised and containing information from recent excavations and discovered artifacts, Ancient Iraq covers the political, cultural, and socio-economic history from Mesopotamia days of prehistory to the Christian era

    Explore the extraordinary pyramids and artifacts of this ancient civilization from a biblical worldview with archaeologists Dr. John Ashton and David Down. Ashton and Down do not disappoint as they dare to reveal the remarkable corroboration between the Old Testament Bible records and Egypt's historical documents and archaeological finds.Using historically confirmed dates in later Egyptian history and the years between events recorded in the Bible, Ashton and Down construct a timeline of the kings of Egypt which dates back to just two centuries before the biblical dating of Noah's flood. Abraham, Joseph, Moses and Jesus each spent part of their lives in Egypt. In recent years, however, liberal teachers and professors have used the traditional Egyptian chronology to undermine the truth of the biblical record found in the Old Testament book of Exodus.Unwrapping the Pharaohs takes you back in time to study famous Egyptians, their dynasties and structures such as:• Tutankhamen, the boy-king• Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh• Cleopatra• Seneferu, the world's greatest pyramid builder• Pharaohs of the Bible• The Great Sphinx of Giza• The Lost Pyramid on the Saqqara Plateau• And many more intriguing people and placesBoth Christian believers and skeptics will find this well documented and beautifully illustrated research fascinating.Bonus Content:Packaged with this excellent educational resource for those enthralled by history, archaeology and the Bible, is a 90-minute DVD offering a breathtaking journey through the pyramids and temples of Egypt with author and archaeologist David Down.

    Miller In this remarkable, acclaimed history of the development of monotheism, Mark S. Smith explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheistic faith with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional view that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, this provocative book argues that Israelite religion developed, at least in part, from the religion of Canaan. Drawing on epigraphic and archaeological sources, Smith cogently demonstrates that Israelite religion was not an outright rejection of foreign, pagan gods but, rather, was the result of the progressive establishment of a distinctly separate Israelite identity. This thoroughly revised second edition ofThe Early History of God includes a substantial new preface by the author and a foreword by Patrick D. Miller.

    His aim is to account for the evolution of cultural forms as Darwin accounted for the evolution of biological forms: to show how cultures adopt their characteristic forms in response to changing ecological modes."[A] magisterial interpretation of the rise and fall of human cultures and societies."-- Robert Lekachman, Washington Post Book World"Its persuasive arguments asserting the primacy of cultural rather than genetic or psychological factors in human life deserve the widest possible audience."-- Gloria Levitas The New Leader"[An] original and...urgent theory about the nature of man and at the reason that human cultures take so many diverse shapes."-- The New Yorker"Lively and controversial."-- I. Bernard Cohen, front page, The New York Times Book Review

    With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds—the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire—into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization—one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. The emergence of larger and stronger states in the north and east had, by the year 1000, brought patterns of human organization into much greater homogeneity across the continent. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together for the first time, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in the light of modern migration and globalization patterns. The result is a compelling, nuanced, and integrated view of how the foundations of modern Europe were laid.

    535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge.In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago.The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave.Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.

    David Mattingly draws on a wealth of new findings and knowledge to cut through the myths and misunderstandings that so commonly surround our beliefs about this period. From the rebellious chiefs and druids who led native British resistance, to the experiences of the Roman military leaders in this remote, dangerous outpost of Europe, this book explores the reality of life in occupied Britain within the context of the shifting fortunes of the Roman Empire.

    or get them killed. From the depths of the Atlantic off Cape Canaveral Florida, searching for sunken Spanish treasure, to the Andes mountains of Ecuador chasing the legend of a lost golden library, Dr. Colten X. Burnett and the Risky Business team are on a quixotic adventure.While trying to make an honest, well sort of honest living, searching for remnants of the lost 1715 fleet, Risky Business Ltd. becomes entangled in a mystery that covers two continents and may rewrite history.The lure of uncovering a lost civilization, as well as the secrets it holds, motivates the team on their dangerous journey into a cosmological unknown. -Sunken Treasure Lost Worlds is the first book in Hep Aldridge's action and adventure series about Dr. Colten X. Burnett and the Risky Business team Grab a copy today.

    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.