The Land of the Elephant Kings

The Land of the Elephant Kings PDF Author: Paul J. Kosmin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year The Seleucid Empire (311–64 BCE) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen. Stretching from present-day Bulgaria to Tajikistan—the bulk of Alexander the Great’s Asian conquests—the kingdom encompassed a territory of remarkable ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity; yet it did not include Macedonia, the ancestral homeland of the dynasty. The Land of the Elephant Kings investigates how the Seleucid kings, ruling over lands to which they had no historic claim, attempted to transform this territory into a coherent and meaningful space. “This engaging book appeals to the specialist and non-specialist alike. Kosmin has successfully brought together a number of disparate fields in a new and creative way that will cause a reevaluation of how the Seleucids have traditionally been studied.” —Jeffrey D. Lerner, American Historical Review “It is a useful and bright introduction to Seleucid ideology, history, and position in the ancient world.” —Jan P. Stronk, American Journal of Archaeology

The Land of the Elephant Kings

The Land of the Elephant Kings PDF Author: Paul J. Kosmin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year The Seleucid Empire (311–64 BCE) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen. Stretching from present-day Bulgaria to Tajikistan—the bulk of Alexander the Great’s Asian conquests—the kingdom encompassed a territory of remarkable ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity; yet it did not include Macedonia, the ancestral homeland of the dynasty. The Land of the Elephant Kings investigates how the Seleucid kings, ruling over lands to which they had no historic claim, attempted to transform this territory into a coherent and meaningful space. “This engaging book appeals to the specialist and non-specialist alike. Kosmin has successfully brought together a number of disparate fields in a new and creative way that will cause a reevaluation of how the Seleucids have traditionally been studied.” —Jeffrey D. Lerner, American Historical Review “It is a useful and bright introduction to Seleucid ideology, history, and position in the ancient world.” —Jan P. Stronk, American Journal of Archaeology

Elephants & Kings

Elephants & Kings PDF Author: Thomas R. Trautmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626453X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description
Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

Stalking the Elephant Kings

Stalking the Elephant Kings PDF Author: Christopher Kremmer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description


Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire PDF Author: Paul J. Kosmin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Runciman Award Winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award “Tells the story of how the Seleucid Empire revolutionized chronology by picking a Year One and counting from there, rather than starting a new count, as other states did, each time a new monarch was crowned...Fascinating.” —Harper’s In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, his successors, the Seleucid kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucus I introduced a linear conception of time. Time would no longer restart with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years—continuous and irreversible—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire and identical to the system we use today, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Some rebellious subjects, eager to resurrect their pre-Hellenic past, rejected this new approach and created apocalyptic time frames, predicting the total end of history. In this magisterial work, Paul Kosmin shows how the Seleucid Empire’s invention of a new kind of time—and the rebellions against this worldview—had far reaching political and religious consequences, transforming the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future. “Without Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation of what Seleucus achieved in creating his calendar without end we would never have been able to comprehend the traces of it that appear in late antiquity...A magisterial contribution to this hitherto obscure but clearly important restructuring of time in the ancient Mediterranean world.” —G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books “With erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous discussion of the sources, Paul Kosmin sheds new light on the meaning of time, memory, and identity in a multicultural setting.” —Angelos Chaniotis, author of Age of Conquests

The Land of the Elephant Kings

The Land of the Elephant Kings PDF Author: Paul J. Kosmin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674416171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year The Seleucid Empire (311–64 BCE) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen. Stretching from present-day Bulgaria to Tajikistan—the bulk of Alexander the Great’s Asian conquests—the kingdom encompassed a territory of remarkable ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity; yet it did not include Macedonia, the ancestral homeland of the dynasty. The Land of the Elephant Kings investigates how the Seleucid kings, ruling over lands to which they had no historic claim, attempted to transform this territory into a coherent and meaningful space. “This engaging book appeals to the specialist and non-specialist alike. Kosmin has successfully brought together a number of disparate fields in a new and creative way that will cause a reevaluation of how the Seleucids have traditionally been studied.” —Jeffrey D. Lerner, American Historical Review “It is a useful and bright introduction to Seleucid ideology, history, and position in the ancient world.” —Jan P. Stronk, American Journal of Archaeology

Spear-Won Land

Spear-Won Land PDF Author: Andrea M. Berlin
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299321304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sardis, in western Turkey, was one of the great cities of the Aegean and Near Eastern worlds for almost a millennium—a political keystone with a legendary past. Recent archeological work has revealed how the city was transformed in the century following Alexander’s conquests from a traditional capital to a Greek polis, setting the stage for its blossoming as a Roman urban center. This integrated collection of essays by more than a dozen prominent scholars illuminates a crucial stage, from the early fourth century to 189 BCE, when it became one of the most important political centers of Asia Minor. The contributors to this volume are members of the Hellenistic Sardis Project, a research collaboration between long-standing expedition members and scholars keenly interested in the site. These new discussions on the pre-Roman history of Sardis restore the city in the scholarship of the Hellenistic East and will be enlightening to scholars of classical archaeology.

The Middle Maccabees

The Middle Maccabees PDF Author: Andrea M. Berlin
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 0884145042
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 523

Get Book Here

Book Description
A focused, interdisciplinary examination of a tumultuous, history-making era The Middle Maccabees lays out the charged, complicated beginnings of the independent Jewish state founded in the second century BCE. Contributors offer focused analyses of the archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and textual evidence, framed within a wider world of conflicts between the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Syria, and the Romans. The result is a holistic view of the Hasmonean rise to power that acknowledges broader political developments, evolving social responses, and the particularities of local history. Contributors include Uzi ‘Ad, Donald T. Ariel, Andrea M. Berlin, Efrat Bocher, Altay Coşkun, Benedikt Eckhardt, Gerald Finkielsztejn, Christelle Fischer-Bovet, Yuval Gadot, Erich Gruen, Sylvie Honigman, Jutta Jokiranta, Paul J. Kosmin, Uzi Leibner, Catharine Lorber, Duncan E. MacRae, Dvir Raviv, Helena Roth, Débora Sandhaus, Yiftah Shalev, Nitsan Shalom, Danny Syon, Yehiel Zelinger, and Ayala Zilberstein. Features Up-to-date, generously illustrated essays analyzing the relevant archaeological remains A revised understanding of how local and imperial histories overlapped and intersected New analysis of the book of 1 Maccabees as a tool of Hasmonean strategic interest

Naming the Elephant

Naming the Elephant PDF Author: James W. Sire
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780830827794
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this companion volume to The Universe Next Door, James W. Sire offers his refined definition of a worldview and addresses key questions about the history of worldview thinking, the existential and intellectual formation of worldviews, the public and private dimensions of worldviews and how worldview thinking can help us navigate an increasingly pluralistic universe.

Lost World of the Golden King

Lost World of the Golden King PDF Author: Frank L. Holt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520953746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on ancient historical writings, the vast array of information gleaned in recent years from the study of Hellenistic coins, and startling archaeological evidence newly unearthed in Afghanistan, Frank L. Holt sets out to rediscover the ancient civilization of Bactria. In a gripping narrative informed by the author’s deep knowledge of his subject, this book covers two centuries of Bactria’s history, from its colonization by remnants of Alexander the Great’s army to the kingdom’s collapse at the time of a devastating series of nomadic invasions. Beginning with the few tantalizing traces left behind when the ‘empire of a thousand cities’ vanished, Holt takes up that trail and follows the remarkable and sometimes perilous journey of rediscovery. Lost World of the Ancient King describes how a single bit of evidence—a Greek coin—launched a search that drew explorers to the region occupied by the tumultuous warring tribes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Afghanistan. Coin by coin, king by king, the history of Bactria was reconstructed using the emerging methodologies of numismatics. In the twentieth century, extraordinary ancient texts added to the evidence. Finally, one of the ‘thousand cities’ was discovered and excavated, revealing an opulent palace, treasury, temple, and other buildings. Though these great discoveries soon fell victim to the Afghan political crisis that continues today, this book provides a thrilling chronicle of the search for one of the world’s most enigmatic empires.

The Ruin of Kings

The Ruin of Kings PDF Author: Jenn Lyons
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1250175488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Kirkus Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy pick for 2019! A Library Journal Best Book of 2019! An NPR Favorite Book of 2019! "Everything epic fantasy should be: rich, cruel, gorgeous, brilliant, enthralling and deeply, deeply satisfying. I loved it."—Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians When destiny calls, there's no fighting back. Kihrin grew up in the slums of Quur, a thief and a minstrel's son raised on tales of long-lost princes and magnificent quests. When he is claimed against his will as the missing son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds himself at the mercy of his new family's ruthless power plays and political ambitions. Practically a prisoner, Kihrin discovers that being a long-lost prince is nothing like what the storybooks promised. The storybooks have lied about a lot of other things, too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, and how the hero always wins. Then again, maybe he isn't the hero after all. For Kihrin is not destined to save the world. He's destined to destroy it. Jenn Lyons begins the Chorus of Dragons series with The Ruin of Kings, an epic fantasy novel about a man who discovers his fate is tied to the future of an empire. "It's impossible not to be impressed with the ambition of it all . . . a larger-than-life adventure story about thieves, wizards, assassins and kings to dwell in for a good long while."—The New York Times A Chorus of Dragons 1: The Ruin of Kings 2: The Name of All Things 3: The Memory of Souls