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24711 results in Ancient history

Page 1 of 1236

Beyond Magic in the Roman World
  • Reconstructing Cultural Alterity and Ritual Deviance
  • Andrew Durdin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026

The Social Networks of Early Medieval Trading Emporia
  • Harbouring Strangers in a Viking World
  • Søren Michael Sindbæk
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Trading emporia emerged in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages and were the first coin-based markets and urban settlements in this region. In this study, Søren Sindbæk proposes a new account of the origins of these trading centres by tracing their role in hosting strangers. Sindbæk proposes that 'weak' social ties is a widely overlooked middle ground in pre-modern societies that bridge the gap between 'strong' family ties and formal institutions. By adapting cultural norms, networks, and institutions, it was possible to combine a high level of trust within an open form of society. Emporia developed when the ancient conventions of hosting and guest-friendship became insufficient to accommodate the growing connections between peoples brought together through seafaring. Sindbaek demonstrates that the history of emporia is closely linked to the expansion of maritime trade, colonization, piracy, and warfare - the basis for what we know today as the Viking Age.

Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East
  • Dylan R. Johnson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East offers a comprehensive study on the enactment of law from the mid-third to mid-first millennium BCE. Unlike the biblical tradition, whereby all law emanates from Israel's divine sovereign, ancient Near Eastern kings were the most common agents to assume the moniker of 'lawgiver'. Their unrivaled access to the higher moral order of justice granted them a 'functional divinity' in the eyes of their subjects. Considering key theories about the origin, nature, and function of law, Dylan Johnson analyzes the world's earliest legal collections, not as isolated objects, but within the context of the legal regimes from which they emerge. His study offers new insights into the prevailing regimes and royal and elite justice as reflected in these collections. Questioning the assumption that lawgiving was a coercive attempt to monopolize legal authority, Johnson also develops new explanations that reveal the subjects of the law as social agents who helped construct and maintain legal power.

Language and Civil Conflict in the Greco-Roman Tradition
  • Daniel Sutton
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Offering new readings on language and civil conflict in a variety of Ancient Greek and Roman texts, this study puts these reflections from the classical world in dialogue with contemporary philosophy and political theory. Daniel Sutton focuses on Thucydides, Plato, Sallust, and Tacitus, exploring the ways in which the figure of paradiastole (often termed 'rhetorical redescription') was deployed to explain the conflicts of value which underpinned civil strife. These texts paint vivid pictures of what happens to language during civil discord: pictures which seem increasingly familiar today. Simultaneously, they grapple deeply with what it means to search for timeless values in times of conflict. This study demonstrates how ancient texts can offer us new ways of understanding the role of language in civil discord, of restoring political dialogue in fractious times, and of approaching intellectual history itself.

Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily
  • Sofia Bianchi Mancini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Sicilian curse practices have often been misread through Athenocentric paradigms. This book repositions Sicily at the centre of inquiry, offering the first holistic analysis of legal curse tablets (defixiones iudiciariae) from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with particular focus on Selinous, Akragas and Kamarina. Moving beyond isolated textual readings, it situates these inscriptions within the legal, social and political environments that shaped their production. The study provides new editions and drawings of key tablets – revisited after decades of neglect – while addressing palaeographic, chronological and editorial issues. For the first time, it also assembles a complete set of images of all major examples, making them fully accessible. By embedding curses within civic life and predominantly elite rivalries, it reveals them as 'paralegal' instruments in the renegotiation of status, authority and power. Sicilian legal curses thus emerge as independent from, rather than appendices to, their better-known Attic and Athenian counterparts.

Locality and Agency in the Iron Age Mediterranean
  • Edited by Erich Kistler, Christian Heitz, Birgit Öhlinger, Peter Van Dommelen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Against the background of the interest in ancient Mediterranean connectivity and globalization, the present volume examines local places and local communities. Exploring the interplay between the local and the global, the focus shifts from long-distance connections and 'global' trends to the local dimensions of Mediterranean interactions, highlighting how local contexts engaged with their long-distance counterparts. Given the transformative nature of this period and region, our focus is firmly on the western Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BCE. Discussions of the local places and local communities of the Iron Age West Mediterranean are wrapped around the twin notions of agency and locality. We argue that everyday local agency produces locality in an ongoing dialectic, ranging from collaboration to struggle, with globalizing influences and colonial forces. The eighteen West Mediterranean case studies are organized around the themes of 'Indigeneity and locality', 'agency and empowerment' and 'practice and production'.

The Mediterranean in Antiquity
  • New Perspectives from Prehistory to the Byzantine Period
  • Edited by Rubina Raja
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • This is a cross-disciplinary study of the Mediterranean, which combines archaeology, historiography, ecology, climate, globalization, and network theories. It situates the Mediterranean both within and beyond traditional area studies, promoting broader, comparative, and cross-disciplinary approaches to antiquity. Its nine contributions, written by internationally recognized scholars within their respective study areas, challenge existing frameworks and encourage scholars to rethink how the Mediterranean is conceptualized, drawing on renewed concepts and diverse evidence. The studies guide the reader to desert environments such as the Sahara, Egypt, Palmyra, and Greece, while exploring topics including urban religion, mythology, social complexity, and iconography.

Japan and Ancient Greece
  • Culture and Possession
  • Michael Lucken
  • Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise
  • Edited by Phillip Mitsis
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Japan and ancient Greece. Placed side by side, these two concepts give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera - half Apollo, half samurai; half Venus, half geisha - set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept? In this groundbreaking study - translated into English for the first time - Michael Lucken analyses the manifold ways in which Japan has adopted and engaged with ancient Greece in the period from the Meiji restoration to the present. This invaluable and timely volume not only demonstrates that the influence of ancient Greece has permeated all aspects of Japanese public and cultural life, but ultimately illustrates that the reception of Classics is a global phenomenon.

The Archaic and Early Classical Greek World
  • Using Coins as Sources
  • Keith Rutter
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The western tradition of coinage began in Asia Minor around 650 BCE and from there the idea spread quite rapidly to other parts of the Mediterranean. This book describes and evaluates developments in coinage down to the period of the Persian Wars, ending in 479. Early coinage was not monolithic. The new medium of exchange proved attractive to a variety of rulers and societies – kings, dynasts, tribes, city–states with varying forms of governance. The physical characteristics of the coins produced were another source of difference. Initially there was no fixed idea of what a coin should look like, and there were several experiments before a consensus emerged around a small, circular metal object with a design, or type, on both sides. This book provides students with an authoritative introduction, with all technical terms and methodologies explained, as well as illustrations of over 200 important coins with detailed captions.

Roman Rural Archaeology
  • Society, Economy, and Culture
  • Edited by Gijs Willem Tol, Astrid Van Oyen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated. Rural areas witnessed the presence of some of the most durable symbols of Roman imperial hegemony, such as aqueducts and paved roads. It was mainly here that native and Roman traditions collided and were negotiated. This volume, containing 30 chapters by leading scholars, leverages recent methodological advancements and new interpretative frameworks to provide a holistic view, with an empire-wide reach, of the importance of Roman rural areas in the success of ancient Rome.
Slavery in Capitalism

Slavery in Capitalism
  • A Deep History
  • Tâmis Parron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • The enslavement of Africans in the Americas profoundly shaped the continent's demography, cultures, languages, and legal systems, playing a decisive role in modern economic growth and the rise of industrial capitalism. Yet, its historical interpretation remains contested. One view sees modern slavery as beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, disconnecting it from earlier traditions in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Another claims slavery is a universal institution, unchanged across millennia. Moving beyond this dichotomy, the book offers a new framework for the study of Black slavery in the Americas. It situates slavery within a broader and older human geography: a world region of enslavement that dates back to the deep historical formation of the Mediterranean basin. By tracing the emergence of modern slavery from within this ancient system, the book sheds new light on its conditions of existence, collapse, and reconfiguration up to the present day.

Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity
  • Robin Whelan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • How did the state become Christian in late antiquity? Many scholars have traced the Christianization of the Roman world in the centuries following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 CE. Robin Whelan, however, turns his attention away from the usual suspects in such accounts-emperors, empresses, bishops, ascetics, and other holy people-to consider a surprisingly understudied set of late ancient Christians: those who served the state as courtiers, bureaucrats, and governors. By tracing the requirements of regimes, the expectations of subjects, and patterns of engagement with churches and churchmen, he argues that that those who served the state in late antiquity could be seen-and indeed, could see themselves-as distinctly Christian authority figures-just as much as the emperors and kings whom they served, and the bishops and ascetics whom they governed. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Appropriation and Religion in the Greek and Roman Worlds
  • Edited by Andreas Bendlin, Jitse H. F. Dijkstra
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Appropriation, 'making something one's own', is a modern way of thinking about social practices. This volume highlights the potential of this critical concept for the investigation of everyday religious practice – and more generally, everyday social practice – in Antiquity. Appropriation foregrounds the agency of the social actors against the strictures imposed by the dominant culture's social order, whose ideas and practices they make their own, altering them in multiple, often subtle ways. How does appropriation transform pre-existing, traditional practices? What are the dominant structures against which the actors operate? Which tactics do they use? These are only some of the questions this volume seeks to address. The critical term 'appropriation' has yet to be fully discovered by classicists; the case studies in this volume, ranging from classical Greece to Late Antique Egypt, endeavour to demonstrate its pertinence to the study of religion in Antiquity.
The Advent of Iron

The Advent of Iron
  • Robert Downes
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Before the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE, smelted iron was virtually unknown in the Near East. Yet by the turn of the millennium iron had already begun to displace copper alloys across the region. This Element will explore the extent to which this phenomenon may have arisen as a consequence of technological developments within preceding traditions for the extraction of copper from its ores. It presents a new approach incorporating a reappraisal of current knowledge with a series of integrated experiments to reveal the frequency of iron extraction during the copper smelting practices of the Late Bronze Age Near East. Armed with these insights the author seeks to address how iron metallurgy may have developed from existing extractive traditions and the implications this has for our wider understanding of technological change within past cultures.
Animals and Society in the Iron Age to Persian Period

Animals and Society in the Iron Age to Persian Period
  • Economy, Culture and Environment
  • Lidar Sapir-Hen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
Climate and Environment in the Southern Levant, 1300–300 BCE

Climate and Environment in the Southern Levant, 1300–300 BCE
  • 1300–300 BCE
  • Dafna Langgut
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Past climate fluctuations significantly shaped human ways of life. This Element reconstructs the Southern Levant climate (ca. 1300–300 BCE) using high-resolution, well-dated paleoclimate records. Results show a 150-year arid phase ending the Late Bronze Age, likely driving the collapse of eastern Mediterranean complex societies. The Iron Age I saw a return to humid climate conditions, fostering highland settlement expansion and supporting the rise of the biblical kingdoms. This was one of the region's most profound cycles of collapse and revival. During Iron Age II, climate conditions were moderate, similar to today. The Achaemenid period began with brief aridity, followed by renewed humidity. Pollen evidence, along with additional data such as charcoal remains, was employed to trace environmental changes, including variations in the composition of natural vegetation. Human impacts on the environment were also identified, including fruit tree cultivation, deforestation, overgrazing, the introduction of new plant species, and landscape terracing.
Language and Script in Achaemenid and Hellenistic Central Asia

Language and Script in Achaemenid and Hellenistic Central Asia
  • Rachel Mairs
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • This Element examines – for the first time in a single volume – the written evidence from the 'Far East' of the Hellenistic world (Bactria, Sogdiana, Arachosia, Gandhara). It examines how successive invaders of this region, from Persia, Greece and India, left their linguistic and textual mark. It reviews the surviving Hellenistic-period written material from archaeological sites in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan in Aramaic, Greek and Prakrit.

Belief in Greek and Roman Religion
  • Edited by Ralph Anderson, Pramit Chaudhuri
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • For the Greeks and Romans, the world was full of gods, but this fundamental aspect of their experience poses major challenges to modern understanding. The concept of belief has been central to meeting those challenges but has itself been hotly debated, and has at times even been rejected as a supposedly Christianising anachronism. Others, meanwhile, have argued that a culture-neutral model of belief is both possible and essential, while the advent of the cognitive science of religion has offered new possibilities for understanding ancient religious worlds. The essays in this volume trace the historical development of the modern concept of belief, examine ancient debates about the nature of human knowledge of the divine, and draw on perspectives from anthropology, cognitive science and early modern history as well as classical studies to explore the nature and role of belief in Greek and Roman religion in ancient literature, society, experience and practice.
Developing Maritime Economies of the Pre-Colonial Massim, Papua New Guinea

Developing Maritime Economies of the Pre-Colonial Massim, Papua New Guinea
  • The Making of an Island World and the Foundations of Kula
  • Ben Shaw
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • The Massim region of Papua New Guinea has been the focus of intensive ethnographic interest for over a century because of sociocultural practices and maritime economies that connect island populations, including the famed Kula ring. Ethnographic models of Kula have been critiqued as ahistorical and heavily influenced by colonial interventions. This volume explores the long-term history of Massim maritime economies from a predominantly archaeological perspective, but draws on ethnographic, linguistic and biomolecular information. Maritime economies have connected islands for at least 17,000 years, with parallels to historically documented networks emerging over the last 3000 years. The Massim region can be considered as a network of decentralized, micro-world economies that frequently overlapped, were shaped by local value systems, clan affiliations, and defined by strategic advantages of location, natural resources and technologies. Maritime interaction in the Massim shaped cultural and linguistic diversity, providing a comparative case study for maritime economies globally.
Cultural Memory in the Hebrew Bible

Cultural Memory in the Hebrew Bible
  • Genesis to Kings
  • Ronald Hendel
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • The relationship between the biblical representations of the past and the history of the second and early first millennia BCE is best comprehended by the concept of cultural memory. This volume investigates the dynamics of cultural memory in the Hebrew Bible, with case studies on the ancestors, the Exodus, the conquest, and Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The texts create a monumental past by a mixture of memory, forgetting, revision, and re-actualization, motivated in various measures by religion, politics, the landscape, ethnic relationships, and cultural self-fashioning. The archaeology of the Levant illuminates the complicated pathways between history and biblical memory.

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