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.

Ancient Perspectives

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

Get Book

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.

Ancient Perspectives on Aristotle's De Anima

Ancient Perspectives on Aristotle's De Anima PDF Author: Gerd van Riel
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058677729
Category : Philosophy of mind
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Aristotle's treatise On the Soul figures among the most influential texts in the intellectual history of the West. It is the first systematic treatise on the nature and functioning of the human soul, presenting Aristotle's authoritative analyses of, among others, sense perception, imagination, memory, and intellect. The ongoing debates on this difficult work continue the commentary tradition that dates back to antiquity. This volume offers a selection of essays by distinguished scholars, exploring the ancient perspectives on Aristotle's De anima, from Aristotle's earliest successors through the Aristotelian Commentators at the end of Antiquity.

Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies PDF Author: Agnès Garcia-Ventura
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646020871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse approaches—synthetic and analytic, diachronic and transnational—this collection offers critical reflections on the who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran, China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Selim Ferru Adali, Silvia Alaura, Isabel Almeida, Petr Charvát, Parsa Daneshmand, Eva von Dassow, Hakan Erol, Sebastian Fink, Jakob Flygare, Pietro Giammellaro, Carlos Gonçalves, Katrien de Graef, Steven W. Holloway, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, Changyu Liu, Patrick Maxime Michel, Emanuel Pfoh, Jitka Sýkorová, Luděk Vacín, and Jordi Vidal.

Ancient Perspectives on Egypt

Ancient Perspectives on Egypt PDF Author: Roger Matthews
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315434911
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The allure of Egypt is not exclusive to the modern world. Egypt also held a fascination and attraction for people of the past. In this book, academics from a wide range of disciplines assess the significance of Egypt within the settings of its past. The chronological span is from later prehistory, through to the earliest literate eras of interaction with Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece and Rome. Ancient Perspectives on Egypt includes both archaeological and documented evidence, which ranges from the earliest writing attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC, to graffiti from Abydos that demonstrate pilgrimages from all over the Mediterranean world, to the views of Roman poets on the nature of Egypt. This book presents, for the first time in a single volume, a multi-faceted but coherent collection of images of Egypt from, and of, the past.

Liberty

Liberty PDF Author: Valentina Arena
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000245772
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Liberty: Ancient Ideas and Modern Perspectives is the first study of the ancient notions of liberty in the interconnected societies of the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium and how they relate to modern political theory. This volume gathers the work of historians of antiquity, whose specialisms are geographically and temporally diverse, together with political theorists and legal and political philosophers interested in conceptions of liberty. Together they discuss the rival understandings of liberty in antiquity and the potential offerings of these ancient societies to our contemporary intellectual world. This book aims to broaden our understanding of the conceptual articulations of liberty in the ancient world, from beyond the Graeco-Roman world to other ancient societies to which this world was connected; and to shed light on rival understandings of liberty in antiquity and the role these might play in the current thinking about this concept. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, History of European Ideas.

New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare

New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare PDF Author: Garrett Fagan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004187340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare explores the armies of antiquity from Assyria and Persia, to classical Greece and Rome. The studies illustrate the ways in which technology, innovation, cultural exchange, and tactical developments transformed ancient warfare by land and sea.

Ancient Anger

Ancient Anger PDF Author: Susanna Braund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945000X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Anger is found everywhere in the ancient world, starting with the very first word of the Iliad and continuing through all literary genres and every aspect of public and private life. Yet it is only recently, as a variety of disciplines start to devote attention to the history and nature of the emotions, that Classicists, ancient historians and ancient philosophers have begun to study anger in antiquity with the seriousness and attention it deserves. This volume brings together a number of significant studies by authors from different disciplines and countries, on literary, philosophical, medical and political aspects of ancient anger from Homer until the Roman Imperial Period. It studies some of the most important ancient sources and provides a paradigmatic selection of approaches to them, and should stimulate further research on this important subject in a number of fields.

Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World

Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World PDF Author: Victor H. Mair
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824841670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Do civilizations independently invent themselves or are they the result of cultural diffusion? The contributors to this volume do not attempt to provide a definitive answer to this contentious question, one of the most debated issues of the past century. Instead, they shift the focus from theory to reality by presenting empirical evidence on a wide range of cultural phenomena in history and prehistory, thereby demonstrating the processes whereby cultural traits are acquired and modified—the dynamics of transmission and transformation. The range of topics covered in this volume is of extraordinary breadth: the distribution of belt hooks and belts from the steppes to North and Central China; textile exchange in the third millennium B.C.; the spread of bronze metallurgy across Asia; the adaptation of complicated technologies by distant peoples; the mechanisms whereby bronze implements were used to convey political messages in East Asia; the ethnogenesis of the Turks; the complex interrelationships among migratory and settled peoples in western Central Asia during the Bronze Age; the origins of the enigmatic Chinese goddess known as Queen Mother of the West; an account of hunting with trained cheetahs; and the use of abundant botanical and zoological evidence to affirm that the Old World and the New World must have been in contact long before the fifteenth century. Rounding out the volume is a survey of the problem of modernocentrism.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia PDF Author: Jane R. McIntosh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 157607966X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The first general introduction to Mesopotamia that covers all four of the area's major ancient civilizations—Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia. Ancient Mesopotamia: New Perspectives ranges from the region's cultural beginnings to its Persian "liberation," from simple farmers to mighty kings, from the marshy Gulf shores and Arabian desert sands to the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros mountains. It is the first volume to capture the entire sweep of Mesopotamia's four major ancient cultures (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian) in one concise and captivating volume. Ancient Mesopotamia reveals how archaeologists, geologists, geographers, and other scientists have pieced together an understanding of some of the most complex and accomplished civilizations in history: their economies, social orders, political systems, religions, intellectual accomplishments, and material culture. It offers a wealth of information and insights into the glorious past of a land in turmoil today.

The Ancient Indus Valley

The Ancient Indus Valley PDF Author: Jane R. McIntosh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576079082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This work is a revealing study of the enigmatic Indus civilization and how a rich repertoire of archaeological tools is being used to probe its puzzles. The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives takes readers back to a civilization as complex as its contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Egypt, one that covered a far larger region, yet lasted a much briefer time (less than a millennium) and left few visible traces. Researchers have tentatively reconstructed a model of Indus life based on limited material remains and despite its virtually indecipherable written record. This volume describes what is known about the roots of Indus civilization in farming culture, as well as its far-flung trading network, sophisticated crafts and architecture, and surprisingly war-free way of life. Readers will get a glimpse of both a remarkable piece of the past and the extraordinary methods that have brought it back to life.