Ancient category: 10855 books

Primary source documents and detailed entries reveal what ancient Egypt was like, using the objects and artifacts of daily life from the period covering the Predynastic era through the Græco-Roman period (5000 BCE to 300 CE). • Features anecdotal information about daily life that helps to...

In recent decades, study of the ancient Egyptian natural world and its classification has adopted innovative approaches involving new technologies of analysis and a multidisciplinary general view (ethnolinguistics, geobotanics). This collection of papers focuses on one particularly important aspect...

This is the first book-length treatment of supplication, an important social practice in ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Despite the importance of supplication, it has received little attention, and no previous study has explored so many aspects of the practice. Naiden investigates the varied...

In 427 B.C., the Ancient Greek city-state of Athens was flourishing. Approximately 80 years earlier, the Athenians had formed the first self-representative democracy in history, the Peloponnesian War against Sparta had only just started, and Socrates was only beginning to lay the foundation of what...

One of the most devastating weapons of the Middle Ages, the crossbow probably originated in the Western Roman Empire early in the fourth century, its design perhaps suggested by the balista, an ancient form of catapult. This book is the only work ever devoted exclusively to this widely used bowstring...

The Assyrian Empire is in some respects unique in history. Despite the proverbial tendency of history to repeat itself, there has been no duplication of the tragic history of this wonderful body politic. It rose to be the most powerful of nations; it reached out and gained the widest empire that had...

This book examines the concept of 'nonsense' in ancient Greek thought and uses it to explore the comedies of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. If 'nonsense' (phluaria, lēros) is a type of language felt to be unworthy of interpretation, it can help to define certain aspects of comedy that have proved...

These thirty essays were presented to Alan L Boegehold, a distinguished philologist and an inspirational teacher, on the occasion of his retirement and his seventy-fifth birthday. The contributions fall into two categories, each one reflecting Boegehold's diverse interests in classical studies: the...

This book explores the relationship between sport and democratization. Drawing on sociological and historical methodologies, it provides a framework for understanding how sport affects the level of egalitarianism in the society in which it is played. The author distinguishes between horizontal sport,...

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation....

This volume explores film and television sources in problematic conversation with classical antiquity, to better understand the nature of artistic reception and classical reception in particular. Drawing inspiration from well-theorized fields like adaptation studies, comparative literature, and film,...

A professor of Greek rhetoric, frequent letter writer and influential social figure, Libanius (AD 314–393) is a key author for anybody interested in Late Antiquity, ancient rhetoric, ancient epistolography and ancient biography. Nevertheless, he remains understudied because it is such a daunting...

Ancient Myths are very popular nowadays. Children and elders all around the world love to read about Gods and heroic adventures and feats of well-known champions. Perseus is a son of his mother Danae. Zeus himself is his father. Brave and powerful Perseus meets Evil and destroys it. After Perseus...

Writing during the reign of emperors Trajan and Hadrian, Juvenal drew on Roman legend and the history of preceding imperial dynasties as a means of scrutinizing cultural upheavals in the Rome of his day. Tacky foreigners, the nouveaux riches, women who don’t know their place, bloodthirsty—even...