Ancient Perspectives

Download or read book Ancient Perspectives written by Richard J. A. Talbert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.

Download or read book Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies written by Agnès Garcia-Ventura and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse approaches—synthetic and analytic, diachronic and transnational—this collection offers critical reflections on the who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran, China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Selim Ferru Adali, Silvia Alaura, Isabel Almeida, Petr Charvát, Parsa Daneshmand, Eva von Dassow, Hakan Erol, Sebastian Fink, Jakob Flygare, Pietro Giammellaro, Carlos Gonçalves, Katrien de Graef, Steven W. Holloway, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, Changyu Liu, Patrick Maxime Michel, Emanuel Pfoh, Jitka Sýkorová, Luděk Vacín, and Jordi Vidal.

Download or read book Ancient Perspectives on Egypt written by Roger Matthews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The allure of Egypt is not exclusive to the modern world. Egypt also held a fascination and attraction for people of the past. In this book, academics from a wide range of disciplines assess the significance of Egypt within the settings of its past. The chronological span is from later prehistory, through to the earliest literate eras of interaction with Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece and Rome. Ancient Perspectives on Egypt includes both archaeological and documented evidence, which ranges from the earliest writing attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC, to graffiti from Abydos that demonstrate pilgrimages from all over the Mediterranean world, to the views of Roman poets on the nature of Egypt. This book presents, for the first time in a single volume, a multi-faceted but coherent collection of images of Egypt from, and of, the past.

Download or read book Liberty written by Valentina Arena and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberty: Ancient Ideas and Modern Perspectives is the first study of the ancient notions of liberty in the interconnected societies of the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium and how they relate to modern political theory. This volume gathers the work of historians of antiquity, whose specialisms are geographically and temporally diverse, together with political theorists and legal and political philosophers interested in conceptions of liberty. Together they discuss the rival understandings of liberty in antiquity and the potential offerings of these ancient societies to our contemporary intellectual world. This book aims to broaden our understanding of the conceptual articulations of liberty in the ancient world, from beyond the Graeco-Roman world to other ancient societies to which this world was connected; and to shed light on rival understandings of liberty in antiquity and the role these might play in the current thinking about this concept. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, History of European Ideas.

Download or read book Ancient Perspectives written by Richard J. A. Talbert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.

Download or read book Rome and China written by Walter Scheidel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion. Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar ways: both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China). These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.

Download or read book Ancient Anger written by Susanna Braund and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anger is found everywhere in the ancient world, starting with the very first word of the Iliad and continuing through all literary genres and every aspect of public and private life. Yet it is only recently, as a variety of disciplines start to devote attention to the history and nature of the emotions, that Classicists, ancient historians and ancient philosophers have begun to study anger in antiquity with the seriousness and attention it deserves. This volume brings together a number of significant studies by authors from different disciplines and countries, on literary, philosophical, medical and political aspects of ancient anger from Homer until the Roman Imperial Period. It studies some of the most important ancient sources and provides a paradigmatic selection of approaches to them, and should stimulate further research on this important subject in a number of fields.