Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Glen Warren Bowersock
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 161168322X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Political and military developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam

Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Glen Warren Bowersock
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 161168322X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Political and military developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity PDF Author: Nicola Di Cosmo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108548105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity PDF Author: Nicola Di Cosmo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108547001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1284

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Book Description
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Fall of the Roman Empire PDF Author: Peter Heather
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195325419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
Shows how Europe's barbarians, strengthened by centuries of contact with Rome on many levels, turned into an enemy capable of overturning and dismantling the mighty Empire.

Empires of Ancient Eurasia

Empires of Ancient Eurasia PDF Author: Craig Benjamin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107114969
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.

Justinian's Flea

Justinian's Flea PDF Author: William Rosen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780670038558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, author Rosen tells of history's first pandemic--a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated th

The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity

The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Guy G. Stroumsa
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198738862
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book presents how ancient Christianity must be understood from the viewpoint of the history of religions in late antiquity. The continuation of biblical prophecy runs like a thread from Jesus through Mani to Muhammad. And yet this thread, arguably the single most important characteristic of the Abrahamic movement, often remains outside the mainstream, hidden, as it were, since it generates heresy. The figures of the Gnostic, the holy man, and the mystic are all sequels of the Israelite prophet. They reflect a mode of religiosity that is characterized by high intensity. It is centripetal and activist by nature and emphasizes sectarianism and polemics, esoteric knowledge, or gnosis and charisma. The other mode of religiosity, obviously much more common than the first one, is centrifugal and irenic. It favors an ecumenical attitude, contents itself with a widely shared faith, or pistis, and reflects, in Weberian parlance, the routinization of the new religious movement. This is the mode of priests and bishops, rather than that of martyrs and holy men. These two main modes of religion, high versus low intensity, exist simultaneously, and cross the boundaries of religious communities. They offer a tool permitting us to follow the transformations of religion in late antiquity in general, and in ancient Christianity in particular, without becoming prisoners of the traditional categories of patristic literature. Through the dialectical relationship between these two modes of religiosity, one can follow the complex transformations of ancient Christianity in its broad religious context.

The Victory of Reason

The Victory of Reason PDF Author: Rodney Stark
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 158836500X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark’s view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.In explaining the West’s dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted “truths.” For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic–or even Protestants–he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of “exuberant invention.” By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as “inconsistent with human virtue”–which helps further underscore that Augustine’s times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West’s future glories. This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time. The Victory of Reason proves that what we most admire about our world–scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce–is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.

Blood and Boundaries

Blood and Boundaries PDF Author: Stuart B. Schwartz
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 168458020X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Spain and Portugal's policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Schwartz examines the three minority of groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants posed a special problem for colonial society: Their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of cleanliness of blood regulations that discriminated against converts and other parts of the population. These groups often found legal and practical means to challenge the efforts to exclude them, creating the dynamic societies of Latin America.

Law and Power in the Making of the Roman Commonwealth

Law and Power in the Making of the Roman Commonwealth PDF Author: Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
With a broad chronological sweep, this book provides an historical account of Roman law and legal institutions which explains how they were created and modified in relation to political developments and changes in power relations. It underlines the constant tension between two central aspects of Roman politics: the aristocratic nature of the system of government, and the drive for increased popular participation in decision-making and the exercise of power. The traditional balance of power underwent a radical transformation under Augustus, with new processes of integration and social mobility brought into play. Professor Capogrossi Colognesi brings into sharp relief the deeply political nature of the role of Roman juridical science as an expression of aristocratic politics and discusses the imperial jurists' fundamental contribution to the production of an outline theory of sovereignty and legality which would constitute, together with Justinian's gathering of Roman legal knowledge, the most substantial legacy of Rome.