Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - General

Based on their enormously complex calendars that recorded cycles of many kinds, the Aztecs and other ancient Mesoamerican civilizations are generally believed to have had a cyclical, rather than linear, conception of time and history. This boldly revisionist book challenges that understanding. Ross Hassig offers convincing evidence that for the Aztecs time was predominantly linear, that it was manipulated by the state as a means of controlling a dispersed tribute empire, and that the Conquest cut off state control and severed the unity of the calendar, leaving only the lesser cycles. From...

For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components.

This highly innovative book...

This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when "books" were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. To the founders of the first public libraries of the Greek world goes the credit for creating the prototype of today's library buildings and the science of organizing books in them.

Casson recounts the...

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

The great Biblical flood so described in Genesis has long been a subject of fascination and speculation. In the 19th century the English archbishop James Ussher established it as having happened in the year 2348 B.C., calculating what was then taken as the age of the earth and working backward through the entire series...

An overview of the title subject.

The Kings of Celtic Scotland examines the formation and development of the early medieval Scottish Kingdom. Using a study of the individual monarchs, from the 9th to 11th centuries, the supremacy of the Scots in northern Britain is placed in the wider context of Irish and English history. This study uses family history and literature in conjunction with political narrative and places medieval Celtic history into the tradition of Scottish historical research.

Covering the very beginnings of Western civilization, this biographical dictionary introduces readers to the great cultural figures of the ancient world, including those who contributed significantly to architecture, astronomy, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and theology. While focusing on great cultural figures of the Mediterranean basin, such as Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, the volume also includes those who impinged on Greco-Roman Civilization such as Hannibal Barca and King Darius of Persia. Showing how the era's intellectual milieu was...

Until recently little was known about ancient Nubia and day-to-day lives of the Nubian people aside from knowing it was a civilization contemporary with, distinct from, and living under the shadow of Ancient Egypt. Nubia existed from about 3500-300 BCE, close to 3,000 years. Thanks to recent massive archeological surveys, we now have a much clearer picture of Nubian civilization, what they ate, how they dressed, how they cared for their dead, their military triumphs and defeats, where their cities were built, and what they looked like. Of course they underwent dramatic changes over time,...

For Ancient Greece as well as Ancient Rome, the Trojan War provided a history that seemed possessed of a power as magnetic as it was malleable; thus, in this single source these two great civilizations were able to find two distinct sets of heroes, two distinct sets of virtues, and two eternal poets. But different as Greece and Rome's experience of the Trojan War may have been, they united in an identical longing for a heroism that was attainable in the present only by reaching out for an impossible past. In Carol Thomas and Craig Conant's broad and varied account, the reader will have the...