HIS 1090: Ancient & Medieval World: Books

After the Ice is the story of a momentous period when a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods--and one which contains the origins of civilization itself.

Ranging from Greece's first beginnings in the Bronze Age through the tumultuous Hellenistic era dominated by Alexander the Great, this volume offers a truly wide-ranging portrait, blending the traditional political and military approach with a more modern accent on social and cultural history.

In this overview of life in the ancient Near East, Daniel Snell surveys the history of the region from the invention of writing 5000 years ago to Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE.

Considering the topic of time in antiquity, juxtaposing cultures and societies, yields remarkable intersections, continuities, and discontinuities in the ways people have engaged with temporality. One of the most persistent dichotomies we find across many premodern societies is that between cyclical and teleological time--time marching inexorably forward, toward a goal, and the markers of nature that seem repetitive, cyclical, and fundamentally stable. Over the millennia much ingenuity has been directed at these models. Specific examinations range from the construction of time and space in prehistory, Roman Britain, quantifications of time in Assyria and Babylonia, through aspects of time in classical India, the Hebrew Bible, China, Greece, and the Roman Empire. With contributions by John C. Barrett (University of Sheffield), Marc Brettler (Brandeis University), Chris Gosden (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford), Astrid Möller (University of Freiburg), David Pankenier (Lehigh University), Alex Purves (University of California, Los Angeles), Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge), Ludo Rocher (University of Pennsylvania), and Michele Renee Salzman (University of California, Riverside).

Here, Harry Sidebottom looks at how the Western Way of War was constructed and maintained by the Greeks and Romans and why this concept is so prevalent today.

Luke Pitcher's book offers undergraduate students of classics the first comprehensive introduction to historiography in antiquity on the market. It unites the nitty-gritty of the historian's trade (the finding and managing of data) to an awareness of the importance of style, form, allusion and composition.