The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the early modern era

The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the early modern era PDF Author: Lynn Harry Nelson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN: 9780155403925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description

The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the early modern era

The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the early modern era PDF Author: Lynn Harry Nelson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN: 9780155403925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description


The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the modern era

The Human Perspective: The ancient world to the modern era PDF Author: Lynn Harry Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780155013452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description


Battling the Gods

Battling the Gods PDF Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

The Unending Frontier

The Unending Frontier PDF Author: John F. Richards
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520230750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
John F.

Ancient Perspectives

Ancient Perspectives PDF Author: Richard J. A. Talbert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome PDF Author: Susan Wise Bauer
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070891
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 897

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Book Description
A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own. This is the first volume in a bold series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage of years and cultural interconnection. This old-fashioned narrative history employs the methods of “history from beneath”—literature, epic traditions, private letters and accounts—to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled. The result is an engrossing tapestry of human behavior from which we may draw conclusions about the direction of world events and the causes behind them.

Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World

Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World PDF Author: Christer Jorgensen
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312348199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World describes the combat techniques of soldiers in Europe and North America from 1500 to 1763. The book explores the unique tactics required to win battles in an era where the musket increasingly came to dominate the battlefield, and demonstrates how little has changed in some respects of the art of war.

The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World

The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World PDF Author: Christopher Schliephake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108802370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
What can a study of antiquity contribute to the interdisciplinary paradigm of the environmental humanities? And how does this recent paradigm influence the way we perceive human-'nature' interactions in pre-modernity? By asking these and a number of related questions, this Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Offering new perspectives to think about what directions the ecological turn could take in classical studies, it revisits old material, including ancient Greek religion and mythology, with central concepts of contemporary environmental theory. It also critically engages with forms of classical reception in current debates, arguing that ancient ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.

Fungi in the Ancient World

Fungi in the Ancient World PDF Author: Frank M. Dugan
Publisher: American Phytopathological Society
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Fungi in the Ancient World is a comprehensive review on the impact of fungi in helping to shape ancient civilizations. Mushrooms, mildews, molds, and yeast had a surprisingly profound impact on: diet, custom, politics, religion; human, animal, plant health; art, folklore, and the beginnings of science. This insightful book is a gateway to current methodologies for investigation of the co-evolution of plants, fungi, and humans from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. The book includes a historical perspective on co-evolution of fungi with early agriculture that provides documented summaries of contemporary research in this area, from archaeology to molecular-genetics.

Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East

Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East PDF Author: Paul Erdkamp
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030811034
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 669

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Book Description
Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. This book contributes to the multi-disciplinary debate between scholars working on climate and society from various backgrounds. The chronological boundaries of the book are set by the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic on the one end and the rise of early-modern states in global political and economic exchange on the other. In order to stimulate comparison across the boundaries of modern periodization, this book ends with demography and climate change in early-modern and modern Italy, a society whose empirical data allows the kind of statistical analysis that is impossible for ancient societies. The book highlights the role of human agency, and the complex interactions between the natural environment and the socio-cultural, political, demographic, and economic infrastructure of any given society. It is intended for a wide audience of scholars and students in ancient economic history, specifically Rome and Late Antiquity.