Tilling the Hateful Earth

Tilling the Hateful Earth PDF Author: Michael Decker
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780199565283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A study of the agrarian landscape and economy of the late-antique eastern Mediterranean. Michael Decker describes the ways in which Roman farmers succeeded in producing food surpluses, fuelling a surge in population and a flowering of cultural expression and economic prosperity in the century before the arrival of Islam.

Tilling the Hateful Earth

Tilling the Hateful Earth PDF Author: Michael Decker
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780199565283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A study of the agrarian landscape and economy of the late-antique eastern Mediterranean. Michael Decker describes the ways in which Roman farmers succeeded in producing food surpluses, fuelling a surge in population and a flowering of cultural expression and economic prosperity in the century before the arrival of Islam.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

The Making of the Medieval Middle East PDF Author: Jack Tannous
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691203156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Largely agrarian and illiterate, Christians often called “the simple” outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history

Treasure in Heaven

Treasure in Heaven PDF Author: Peter R. Brown
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The "holy poor" have long maintained an elite status within Christianity. Differing from the "real" poor, these clergymen, teachers, and ascetics have historically been viewed by their fellow Christians as persons who should receive material support in exchange for offering immeasurable immaterial benefits—teaching, preaching, and prayer. Supporting them—quite as much as supporting the real poor—has been a way to accumulate eventual treasure in heaven. Yet from the rise of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Syria to present day, Christians have argued fiercely about whether monks should work to support themselves. In Treasure in Heaven, renowned historian Peter Brown shifts attention from Western to Eastern Christianity, introducing us to this smoldering debate that took place across the entire Middle East from the Euphrates to the Nile. Seen against the backdrop of Asia, Christianity might have opted for a Buddhist model by which holy monks lived by begging alone. Instead, the monks of Egypt upheld an alternative model that linked the monk to humanity and the monastery to society through acceptance of the common, human bond of work. This model of Third World Christianity—a Christianity that we all too easily associate with the West—eventually became the basis for the monasticism of western Europe, as well as for modern Western attitudes to charity and labor. In Treasure in Heaven, Brown shows how and why we are still living—at times uncomfortably—with that choice.

Torah, Temple, and Transaction

Torah, Temple, and Transaction PDF Author: Alex J. Ramos
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978704518
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
In this book, Alex J. Ramos examines production, consumption, and transaction in the regional economy of Galilee during the Early Roman period. Drawing on literary sources—including biblical texts, Josephus, and the Mishnah—and archaeological evidence, he assesses the ways that the Roman and Herodian states, settlement patterns, and Jewish religious obligations would have shaped household economic behavior. Approaching the topic through new institutional economics, Ramos considers the role of state institutions of administration and taxation and religious institutions derived from the Torah and the Temple in structuring for Galilean Jews the incentives, priorities, and costs of economic decision making. In contrast to classical economic assumptions of what is economically “rational” behavior, he considers the ways that the laws of the Torah defined the bounds of rational and socially permissible approaches to economic production, consumption, and transaction. Ultimately, Ramos argues that state institutions played a rather indirect and weak role in shaping the economy through much of the Early Roman Galilee; religious institutions, by comparison, played a more formative role in defining economic behavior.

Land and Temple

Land and Temple PDF Author: Benjamin D. Gordon
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311042102X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This exploration of the Judean priesthood’s role in agricultural cultivation demonstrates that the institutional reach of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE–70 CE) went far beyond the confines of its houses of worship, while exposing an unfamiliar aspect of sacred place-making in the ancient Jewish experience. Temples of the ancient world regularly held assets in land, often naming a patron deity as landowner and affording the land sanctity protections. Such arrangements can provide essential background to the Hebrew Bible’s assertion that God is the owner of the land of Israel. They can also shed light on references in early Jewish literature to the sacred landholdings of the priesthood or the temple.

The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity

The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Nathanael J. Andrade
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108321518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
How did Christianity make its remarkable voyage from the Roman Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent? By examining the social networks that connected the ancient and late antique Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, central Asia, and Iran, this book contemplates the social relations that made such movement possible. It also analyzes how the narrative tradition regarding the apostle Judas Thomas, which originated in Upper Mesopotamia and accredited him with evangelizing India, traveled among the social networks of an interconnected late antique world. In this way, the book probes how the Thomas narrative shaped Mediterranean Christian beliefs regarding co-religionists in central Asia and India, impacted local Christian cultures, took shape in a variety of languages, and experienced transformation as it traveled from the Mediterranean to India, and back again.

Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World PDF Author: J. A. Baird
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845266
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
Explores the possible dialogues between textual and archaeological sources in studying housing in the ancient Mediterranean world.

The World of Kosmas

The World of Kosmas PDF Author: Maja Kominko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020883
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
New study of the Christian Topography, a sixth-century illustrated treatise, and its intellectual milieu.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500-AD 1420

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500-AD 1420 PDF Author: David Eltis
Publisher:
ISBN: 0521840678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 603

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Book Description
In this volume, leading scholars provide essay-length coverage of slavery in a wide variety of medieval contexts around the globe.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420 PDF Author: Craig Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009158988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 603

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Book Description
Medieval slavery has received little attention relative to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome and in the early modern Atlantic world. This imbalance in the scholarship has led many to assume that slavery was of minor importance in the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice of slavery continued unabated across the globe throughout the medieval millennium. This volume – the final volume in The Cambridge World History of Slavery – covers the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes by assembling twenty-three original essays, written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in their respective fields. The volume demonstrates the continual and central presence of slavery in societies worldwide between 500 CE and 1420 CE. The essays analyze key concepts in the history of slavery, including gender, trade, empire, state formation and diplomacy, labor, childhood, social status and mobility, cultural attitudes, spectrums of dependency and coercion, and life histories of enslaved people.