Ancient Year

The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople.

Spend a year in the company of the ancient Egyptians, during the twenty-sixth and final year of the reign of Amenhotep II (c.1400 BC), which saw a royal transition bringing Thutmose IV to the throne of Upper and Lower Egypt. Following the Egyptian calendar year, which was divided into three seasons (inundation, sowing and harvest), we will meet a farmer and his family, an embalmer, an artisan, a royal physician, a priest and even a royal wife as they live their lives in Thebes and Memphis during the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom in this year in ancient Egyptian history.

Learn the unbelievable true history of the great warrior tribes of Mexico. More than 13 centuries of incredible spellbinding history are detailed in this intriguing study of the rulers and warriors of Mexico. Dozens of these charismatic leaders of nations and armies are brought to life by the deep research and entertaining storytelling of Peter Tsouras. Tsouras introduces the reader to the colossal personalities of the period.

Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after the conversion of Constantine, he sheds new light on the subsequent stories of Christianity in the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages.

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

In school, you probably were told that Cro-Magnon Man appeared about 35 thousand years ago and after 25 thousand years humanity finally got to the Stone Age. We stayed there for another 7 thousand years to get to something called the primitive Bronze Age and then in the past 5 thousand years almost every bit of civilized development occurred. Your teachers told you it happened so you didn’t even question it. Unfortunately, most of that was a lie. Researchers, anthropologists, archeologists, historians, scientists, teachers, and even clergy all knew it or should have known. OK! Some were ...

When her father and sister are killed, a distant relative invites Salome Alexandra and her mother to live with his family in Jerusalem. Quickly betrothed to a pagan prince half her age, Salome questions God's plan. But when she suddenly finds herself being crowned queen of Judea, she learns that a woman committed to God can change the world.

Britannia: land of mist and magic clinging to the western edge of the Roman Empire. A red-haired queen named Boudica led her people in a desperate rebellion against the might of Rome, an epic struggle destined to consume heroes and cowards, young and old, Roman and Briton . . . and these are their stories.

Empire of the Romans, from Julius Caesar to Justinian provides a sweeping historical survey of the Roman empire. Uncommonly expansive in its chronological scope, this unique two-volume text explores the time period encompassing Julius Caesar's death in 44 BCE to the end of Justinian's reign six centuries later.

The Roman empire was like no other. Stretching from the north of Britain to the Sahara, and from the Atlantic coast to the Euphrates, it imposed peace and prosperity on an unprecedented scale. Its only true rival lay in the east, where the Parthian and then Persian empires ruled over great cities and the trade routes to mysterious lands beyond. Tracing seven centuries of conflict between Rome and Persia, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how these two great powers evolved together

People often believe that the years immediately prior to AD 1000 were, with just a few exceptions, lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn’t yet reached North America, and that the farthest feat of sea travel was the Vikings’ invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blond-haired people in Maya temple murals at Chichén Itzá, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Maya empire?

This 2000-year-old scroll reveals the chronology from Creation through Cyrus' decree that freed the Jews in 536 BC. The Ancient Seder Olam uses Biblical prophecy to prove its calculations of the timeline. We have used this technique to continue the timeline all the way to the reestablishment of the nation of Israel in AD 1948.

A mother and her daughter come to the remote Orkneys to grieve and find themselves instead dealing with a ghostly Viking legend. A Dark Ages king doesn’t realise his wife carries another man’s child and she is desperate for him not to find out. A young woman, who has spent her whole life hiding her supernatural strength, discovers on the eve of her wedding that she is Odin’s daughter. Sir Percival’s sister finds herself trapped in a castle of bloodletting sorcerers with only her sexuality as a weapon.

The liturgical year, beginning on the first Sunday of Advent and carrying through the following November, is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. What may at first seem to be simply an arbitrary arrangement of ancient holy days, or liturgical seasons, this book explains their essential relationship to one another and their ongoing meaning to us today. It is an excursion into life from the Christian perspective, from the viewpoint of those who set out not only to follow Jesus but to live and think as Jesus did.

Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.

The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean....

Empire of the Romans, from Julius Caesar to Justinian provides a sweeping historical survey of the Roman empire. Uncommonly expansive in its chronological scope, this unique two-volume text explores the time period encompassing Julius Caesar's death in 44 BCE to the end of Justinian's reign six centuries later.

There can be no doubt that military conflict between France and England dominated European history in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Hundred Years War is of considerable interest both because of its duration and the number of theatres in which it was fought. Drawing on the latest research for this new edition, Hundred Years War expert Professor Anne Curry examines how the war can reveal much about the changing nature of warfare: the rise of infantry and the demise of the knight; the impact of increased use of gunpowder and the effect of the war on generations of people.

The conclusion of the three-book series that began with Delicatus and continued with Imperatrix. Captured by pirates as a boy and trafficked to the slave markets of Rome, Sporus rose from a poet's plaything to one of the most powerful figures in the Roman Empire. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the ...