For centuries, the epics, legends and myths of Mesopotamia's ancient civilization lay buried under the desert sands, along with great cities like Babylon, Nineveh, Ur, and Ashur, waiting for the day when archaeologists would reveal them to the modern world. These myths represent some of the earliest literature ever found. Peopled with characters like the goddess Ishtar and the warrior-king Gilgamesh, they are filled with universal themes that resonate even today.
Gods, goddesses, and legendary heroes are brought to life in the stunning illustrations and exciting stories of Myths and Civilization of the Ancient Greeks. The civilization behind the myths is also shown in historical reconstructions of architecture, artifacts, and scenes from daily life. This book shows how the mythology and civilization of this ancient people were intertwined. Book jacket.
This highly visual book researches ancient Egyptian civilization by covering its origins, myths, cuisine, and daily life. Illustrating all aspects of its societies, this book offers readers a window into this intriguing world.
In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of 'godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities. Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.
This book takes a deep dive into the world's longest continuous civilization, examining both myth and factfrom the dawn of farming and the early bronze-makers, to the great dynasties that united China. Stunningly illustrated historical pages and carefully retold myths introduce young readers to the glories, riches, romance, and mystery of Chinese civilization. Includes sections on creation myths, gods, society, religion, agriculture, medicine, daily life, art, entertainment, war and weapons, inventions and construction, trade, and education, writing, and literature.
Drama, death, glory and love flowed through the blood of the Egyptians under the watchful eyes of their Gods & Goddesses... Ancient Egypt was one of the greatest & most powerful civilizations in the world ever And of all ancient civilizations, Egyptians rule supreme when it comes to mystery and fantasy...From the lavish colors of their papyruses to how they mastered building technology thousands of years before anyone else, and to the legends surrounding the lives and deaths of their kings. Egyptians are an eternal source of awe. Not only did they know how to build great structures, they also knew how to have fun. They loved beer and board games, they used makeup, and they allowed women more freedom than many other women in the ancient world. You see, Game of Thrones has nothing on the intricacies, wars, and battles Egyptian dynasties fought for thousands of years. Ancient Egypt has it all: drama, love stories, myths, massive buildings, death, destruction and pain. Let’s listen to them and explore their timeless stories! All of this and much more including: The Timeline Of Ancient Egypt: The Rise & The Fall Discover The Gods & Goddesses of Ancient Egypt + Their Classic Stories The Mystery & Miracle of How The Pyramids Were Built (was it aliens? or astronomy?) Cleopatra's Legacy: The Most Famous Pharaoh & Femme Fatale The Afterlife, Burials, Tombs & How An Ancient Egyptian Mummy Was Made Isis & Osiris: The Greatest Love Story of All Time The Mummy Curse - What Killed People Who Opened King Tut’s Tomb? Decoding The Secrets Of Egyptian Hieroglyphs Interesting Facts About Egyptian Culture: Art, Music, & Literature Ra, The Sun God of Ancient Egypt: Facts, Symbol & Powers - And much, much more... This book will fuel your appetite for all the amazing (and perhaps frightening) things Ancient Egyptians were and did. Begin your journey of discovering not only Ancient Egypt but also it’s legends, mythology and much more with this book.
Popular, authoritative look at the world of archaeoastronomy, the study of ancient peoples' observation of the skies and its role in their cultural evolution. 208 illustrations.
This book attempts to come to grips with a set of widely ranging but connected problems concerning myths: their relation to folktales on the one hand, to rituals on the other; the validity and scope of the structuralist theory of myth; the range of possible mythical functions; the effects of developed social institutions and literacy; the character and meaning of ancient Near-Eastern myths and their influence on Greece; the special forms taken by Greek myths and their involvement with rational modes of thought; the status of myths as expressions of the unconscious, as allied with dreams, as universal symbols, or as accidents of primarily narrative aims. Almost none of these problems has been convincingly handled, even in a provisional way, up to the present, and this failure has vitiated not only such few general discussions as exist of the nature, meanings and functions of myths but also, in many cases, the detailed assessment of individual myths of different cultures. The need for a coherent treatment of these and related problems, and one that is not concerned simply to propagate a particular universalistic theory, seems undeniable. How far the present book will satisfactorily fill such a need remains to be seen. At least it makes a beginning, even if in doing so it risks the criticism of being neither fish nor fowl. Sociologists and folklorists may find it, from their specialized viewpoints, a little simplistic in places; and a few classical colleagues will not forgive me for straying far beyond Greek myths, even though these can hardly be understood in isolation or solely in the light of studies in cult and ritual. Others may find it less easy than anthropologists, sociologists, historians of thought or students of French and English literature to accept the relevance of Levi-Strauss to some of these matters; but his theory contains the one important new idea in this field since Freud, it is complicated and largely untested, and it demands careful attention from anyone attempting a broad understanding of the subject. The beliefs of Freud and Jung, on the other hand, are a more familiar element in the situation and have given rise to an enormous secondary literature, much of it arbitrary and some of it absurd. The author has tried to isolate the crucial ideas and subject them to a pointed, if too brief, critique; so too with those of Ernst Cassirer.
