First Ancient

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.

Searching for his long-lost father, Bransen Garibond is tricked into journeying across the Gulf of Corona to the wild lands of Vanguard, where he is pressed into service in a desperate war against the brutal Samhaist, Ancient Badden. On an Alpinadoran lake, just below Ancient Badden's magical ice castle, several societies, caught in the web of their own conflicts, are oblivious to Ancient Badden's devastating plans to destroy them.

A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story...

Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young, creator of the popular The Whole Counsel of God blog and podcast, traces the lineage of Orthodox Christianity back to the faith and witness of the apostles, which was rooted in a first-century Jewish worldview. The Religion of the Apostles presents the Orthodox Christian Church of today as a continuation of the religious life of the apostles, which in turn was a continuation of the life of the people of God since the beginning of creation.

THE MAN WHO PRICED THE KINGDOM. Judas Iscariot was the movement's Treasurer and its only true realist. While the other disciples debated theology, he managed the insolvency of a revolution running on miracles and debt. He saw the collision with Rome coming before anyone else. Desperate to save the Messiah from a suicide mission, Judas orchestrated a tactical arrest designed to force a display of divine power. It was meant to be the ultimate political maneuver—a forced move to crown the King. File 003 of The Unsealed Archives documents the fatal calculation of a man who tried to manage the...

The Apostolic Fathers in Modern English Experience the earliest Christian writings, clearly translated for today. This edition presents the complete collection traditionally known as the Apostolic Fathers in fresh, readable modern English, paired with concise, thematic essays at the end of the book that frame the world, worship, and witness of the early church. If you’ve tried public-domain or Victorian renderings and bounced off the archaic phrasing, this volume is built to be faithful, direct, and readable, without dumbing anything down. What’s Included (Complete Texts) 1 & 2 Clement ...

The Solaran Defense Forces make the difficult decision to evacuate the colony of Robichar in order to avoid a direct confrontation. But when Captain Elya Nevers gets shot down during the evacuation, his squadron and the admiral in charge have to think fast to rescue their pilot before the Kryl overrun the system.

Something ancient has been unearthed on Mars… and it’s hungry. In 2052, a squad of Marines from the Earth Military Federation is dispatched to investigate a terraforming colony that has gone mysteriously silent. What they discover is a nightmare: the entire outpost has been brutally slaughtered after unearthing a massive alien structure buried beneath the Martian surface. As the unit delves deeper into the station, they uncover horrifying evidence of what caused the massacre—and realize too late that the true threat is still alive. Now, trapped in the dark corridors of the colony, the...

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

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.

Ki, a member of a nomadic tribe, has figured out how to plant seeds to grow food and invented a dart-thrower, a new weapon that can kill from a distance. Labeled a witch, her sister is the only person who appreciates her genius. That is until Magog, a vicious warrior tribe, attacks, killing her entire family and enslaving her people. The Magog leader discovers Ki’s talent and takes her prisoner, wanting to exploit her knowledge for his own gains.

When people think of ancient Greece, images of philosophers such as Plato or Socrates often come to mind, as do great warriors like Pericles and Alexander the Great. But hundreds of years before Athens became a city, a Greek culture flourished and spread its tentacles throughout the Western Mediterranean region via trade and warfare. Scholars have termed this preclassical Greek culture the Mycenaean culture.

Captain Elya Nevers and the Furies face a different kind of danger back home as they bid farewell to fallen comrades, wade into the murky realm of Solaran politics, and hunt for knowledge about the Telos relics—while being hunted themselves. Overmind X is still at large. She’s hungry to get her talons on the next artifact of alien power. Will she find it before the Solarans get their own house in order? And what terrifying existential threat to the galaxy does she become if they’re too late?

The starving Plymouth colonists fear the biting cold and the endless snow. They are a tiny, desperate island of humanity in a vast, unknown wilderness. But the cold is not the true enemy. The real terror lives in the woods, and it begins with a howl . When a young, arrogant hunter defies the governor and vanishes into the forest, a search party is sent to retrieve him . They find his trail, but it is not alone. Alongside it are massive, humanoid tracks pressed deep into the snow —tracks made by a creature of impossible size and power. The Wampanoag call it the Keteaumûch, the Winter ...

In 1177 BC, the Bronze Age world collapsed. Palaces burned. Trade networks vanished. Writing stopped. But people didn't disappear. For three hundred years, survivors adapted to a world without palaces, without long-distance trade, without the systems their ancestors had built over millennia. They simplified. They migrated. They forgot old skills and invented new ones. And eventually, they built something new—the foundation of the classical world we still inherit today. The First Dark Age tells the forgotten story of what happened after the collapse: How ordinary people lived when the ...

There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts. Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally 'believe' or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries - yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare, or the ghastly spectres haunting the pages of 19th-century Gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older.

The Age of Paradise is the first of a projected four-volume history of Christendom, a civilization with a supporting culture that gave rise to what we now call the West. At a time of renewed interest in the future of Western culture, author John Strickland—an Orthodox scholar, professor, and priest—offers a vision rooted in the deep past of the first millennium. At the heart of his story is the early Church’s “culture of paradise”, an experience of the world in which the kingdom of heaven was tangible and familiar.

From the schism between Rome and Constantinople to the rise of the T'ang Dynasty, from the birth of Muhammad to the crowning of Charlemagne, this erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled.

Gen Beaufont is charged with discovering the truth since she already has a lead on the case. The person behind this is suspected to be the true evil that will push Gen into her ultimate role. This will be her finest hour as she unveils her first real nemesis and the biggest threat to magic.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A lucid, intelligent page-turner” (Los Angeles Times) that challenges long-held assumptions about Jesus Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God...