The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack...

Moses Finley (1912-1986) was one of the most widely read scholarly historians and journalists of his age, having grown famous with The World of Odysseus; and he exercised a transformative influence on the study of the history of Greek and Roman antiquity. In this centenary volume distinguished ancient historians and Americanists analyse Finley's political and intellectual evolution, and attempt to understand the paradoxes of the young leftist and victim of McCarthyism whose work owes more to Weber than to Marx and of the young Jewish scholar (Moses Finkelstein) who distanced himself...

In this impressive synthesis, William Harris narrates the history of the sectarian communities of Mount Lebanon and its vicinity. He offers a fresh perspective on the antecedents of modern multi-communal Lebanon, tracing the consolidation of Lebanon's Christian, Muslim, and Islamic derived sects from their origins between the sixth and eleventh centuries.

The identities of Maronite Christians, Twelver Shia Muslims, and Druze, the mountain communities, developed alongside assertions of local chiefs under external powers from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The chiefs began interacting in a...

Perched between three continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe - the Levant is a crossroads of world history. Presently the domain of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians, with Turkey on its northern margins, the Levant epitomizes cultural complexity and geopolitical turbulence. This book surveys the pageant of peoples, armies, empires, and regimes that have featured in the Levant's dramatic story since Pompey came from Rome chasing pirates more than 2,000 years ago. The completely revised new edition features updates on Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Lebanon's paralysis since the...

Perched between three continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe - the Levant is a crossroads of world history. This completely revised edition includes a special chapter on the convulsion in Syria since 2011, which has made the largest country in the Levant a theater of horror.

A renowned historian of the Levant offers a panoramic account of the intertwined, borderless wars wracking Syria and Iraq.