Author: Paul Cartledge
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1760981788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
Continuously inhabited for five millennia, and at one point the most powerful city in Ancient Greece, Thebes has been overshadowed by its better-known rivals, Athens and Sparta. According to myth, the city was founded when Kadmos sowed dragon’s teeth into the ground and warriors sprang forth, ready not only to build the fledgling city but to defend it from all-comers. It was Hercules’ birthplace and the home of the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus solved, winning the Theban crown and the king’s widow in marriage, little knowing that the widow was his mother, Jocasta. The city’s history is every bit as rich as its mythic origins, from siding with the Persian invaders when their emperor, Xerxes, set out to conquer Aegean Greece, to siding with Sparta – like Thebes an oligarchy – to defeat Pericles' democratic Athens, to being utterly destroyed on the orders of Alexander the Great. In Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, the acclaimed classical historian Paul Cartledge brings the city vividly to life, and argues that it is central to our understanding of the ancient Greeks’ achievements – whether politically or culturally – and thus to our own culture and civilization.
Author: Dominique Battles
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 041596993X
Category : Eteocles (Greek mythology)
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The first comprehensive study of the classical legend of Thebes in the Middle Ages.
Author: Nicholas Rockwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317218280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Thebes offers a scholarly survey of the history and archaeology of the city, from 1600 BCE – 476 CE. Discussions of major developments in politics, war, society and culture form the basis of a chronological examination of one of Greece’s most powerful and dynamic cities. By taking a broad view, the book’s account speaks to larger trends in the ancient Mediterranean world while also demonstrating how Thebes was unique in its ancient context. It provides an up-to-date examination of all available information: topographic, demographic, numismatic, epigraphic, archaeological and textual discussions provide the most complete, current picture of ancient Thebes and illustrate the value of an interdisciplinary approach.
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307429679
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Known and loved throughout Egypt as a work that celebrates the national character, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Thebes at War tells of a high point in Egyptian history–ancient Egypt’s defeat of Asiatic foreigners who had dominated northern Egypt for two hundred years. With a visit from a court official and a provocative insult, the southern pharaoh’s long simmering resentment boils over, leading him to commit himself and his heirs to an epic struggle for the throne. Filled with the grand clash of armies, staggering defeats, daring escapes, and glorious victories, and written at a time when Egypt was again under the sway of foreign powers, Thebes at War is a resounding call to remember Egypt’s long and noble history.
Author: James Romm
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501198017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
The thrilling look into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great's destruction of Thebes--and the saga of the greatest military corps of the age, the Theban Sacred Band.
Author: Sophocles
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855487
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 92
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Book Description
Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history. In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.
Author: P.W. Pestman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004427813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
The choachytes (or morticians) of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes provided a rich documentation linking the city of the living on one side of the Nile with the city of the dead on the other. The family archives of these choachytes deal to a large part with their professional role in serving the dead entrusted to their care, but they are also virtually our only source of information about the city of Thebes, whose physical remains were ruthlessly obliterated in the nineteenth century. This material constitute one end of a chain which links the temple statues of Amun's servants and descriptions of their houses on the one hand with their tombs and their tomb inventories on the other, allowing us to identify individual choachytes from their papers. The papyrological finds can thus provide an exact dating for objects that might otherwise be only dated to within several centuries, while the objects themselves and the tomb architecture provide a factual dimension to historical and legal documents which might otherwise remain flat and arid. It was in order to draw attention to the richness of all the constituent parts of this documentation that a number of scholars were invited to present their views on Graeco-Roman Thebes at a colloqium held from 9 to 11 September 1992 in Leiden, the Netherlands. The survey papers and communications presented at this colloqium are published here.
Author: Daniel W. Berman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107077362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
This book shows how the legendary past of Greek Thebes influenced the development of the city's landscape from the time of the oral epics to the Roman period. It will appeal to readers with interests in the relationships between Greek myth, ancient topography and archaeology, and the development of urban space.
Author: Allen Drury
Publisher: WordFire +ORM
ISBN: 161475280X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a political thriller set during the religious revolts surrounding Tutankhamun’srise to power in Egypt. The spectacular conclusion to the Egyptian epic begun in A God Against the Gods. After his brother’s assassination, a new pharaoh must take the throne and battle the corrupt and violent priesthood. His name is TUTANKHAMUN. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Allen Drury paints a vivid, dramatic picture of the most tumultuous times in one of the greatest empires in human history. Following the murder of Akhenaten and the beautiful Nefertiti and the religious uproar that threatens to tear Egypt apart, the pharaoh has to defy the gods in order to rule his people. A masterly recreation of ancient Egypt with all its pomp, glory, politics, and treachery, Return to Thebes brings legendary titans of history to life, with all their tragic—and all too human—flaws.
Author: Daniel W. Berman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316240703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
How does a city's legendary past affect its present? Thebes remains a city with one of the richest traditions of myth in all of Greece - it was the home of Cadmus, Oedipus, and Hercules, and the traditional birthplace of Dionysus. The city's topography, both natural and built, very often plays a significant role in its myths. By focusing on Greek literature ranging from the oral epics to the travel writing of the Roman Empire, this book explores the relationship between the city's spaces as they were represented in the Greek literary tradition and the physical realities of a developing city that had been continuously inhabited since at least the second millennium BC. Spurred on especially by the city's catastrophic sack by Alexander the Great in 335 BC, the urban topography of Thebes came more and more to reflect the literary, even fictional, constructions of its mythic past.
