Ancient History category: 8298 books

Magic has always been a widespread phenomenon in Greek Society, starting from Homer’s Circe (the first ‘evil witch’ in western history) and extending to the pervasive belief in the ‘evil eye’ in the twenty-first century Greece. Indeed, magic is probably the most ancient and durable among...

Infiltration, ambush, assassination, and espionage are the trademarks of the ninja.  Their techniques are precise, timed, and their skills are that of legends.  The mystery and mystique that surround the ninja have been popularized in Hollywood for decades.  Their skills force us to bend our beliefs...

Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and...

Euripides' Bacchae is the magnum opus of the ancient world's most popular dramatist and the most modern, perhaps postmodern, of Greek tragedies. Twentieth-century poets and playwrights have often turned their hand to Bacchae, leaving the play with an especially rich and varied translation history....

What does it mean to say something is beautiful? On the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of objective contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is...

In the first four decades of cinema, hundreds of films were made that drew their inspiration from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Bible. Few of these films have been studied, and even fewer have received the critical attention they deserve. The films in question, ranging from historical and mythological...

Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern...

In How to Mellify a Corpse, Vicki León brings her particular hybrid of history and humor to the entwined subjects of science and superstition in the ancient world, from Athens and Rome to Mesopotamia, the Holy Land, Egypt, and Carthage. León covers subjects as diverse as astronomy and astrology,...

This is part 2 of the Gerald Masseys work about the comparisons between the Judeo-Christian religion and the Egyptian religion. No one ever understood the mythology and ritual of Ancient Egypt so well as Gerald Massey since the time of the Ancient Philosophers of Egypt. This book is one of the best of its kind and a must-have for every student of Egyptian mythology and history.

The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek,...

In ancient Egypt, one of the primary roles of the king was to maintain order and destroy chaos. Since the beginning of Egyptian history, images of foreigners were used as symbols of chaos and thus shown as captives being bound and trampled under the king's feet. The early 18th dynasty (1550-1372 BCE)...

Published in the year 2005, Everyday Life In Ancient Egypt is a valuable contribution to the field of  Ancient Egyptian History.

Modern Western European culture would have been impossible without the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The disciplines of philosophy, drama, history, art, and mathematics all owe an immense debt to these two Mediterranean cultures. At the same time, there are aspects of this legacy that...

Benjamin Isaac is one of the most distinguished historians of the ancient world, with a number of landmark monographs to his name. This volume collects most of his published articles and book chapters of the last two decades, many of which are not easy to access, and republishes them for the first...