Civilisation

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

From the earliest civilizations to the 21st century: a global journey through human history, published alongside a landmark BBC One television series....

Following seven centuries of conflict, The Eagle and the Lion is the epic story of the imperial rivalry between two of the greatest empires of the ancient world—Parthian and Persian—and how they rose and eventually fell....

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style....

From Graham Hancock, best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that's been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world's oceans....

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

So much of our human body is made up of salt that we'd be dead without it...

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic, geographic, or anthropogenic as it is narrative....

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....

While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place....

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline....

Offering a bold new understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going, noted ecologist Mark Bertness argues that human beings and their civilization are the products of the same self-organization.... 

What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight....

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it....

This amazing analysis of family and religious life among the ancient Greeks and Romans is the key to understanding ancient Mediterranean civilizations....

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory....

Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self....

 The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning....

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore....

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East....

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion....

At the end of Eric Cline's bestselling history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C., Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world.

A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.

This provocative and panoramic book shows listeners what they can learn from their ancestors, and how the unwavering ability of prehistoric people to survive and thrive can continue into the present.

We live in an anxious age. Long-held certainties, cherished beliefs, and social trust are crumbling. Don’t expect things to get better. For too long we have taken our Christian heritage—the heritage upon which America was built—for granted. But we’re rapidly, and now inevitably, losing the Christian culture that shaped the American republic. What will take its place is a despotism—and a new paganism, worse than the old, because it will be based on a hatred of Christianity.

Книга английского профессора Чарльза Уильяма Гекерторна Тайные общества всех веков и всех стран – фундаментальное исследование религиозных, политических и прочих тайных обществ, существовавших в разных уголках нашей планеты в разное время и на момент написания книги известных автору. Она вышла в 1875 году и считается базовым классическим трудом по этой теме. В книге можно найти интересные материалы про тамплиеров и ассасинов, гвельфов и карбонариев, манихейцев и франкмасонов, про итальянские ордена и секты второстепенного значения, про практики приверженцев жуткого культа богини Кали.

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart.

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

Als gebürtiger Jude und promovierter Philosoph aus Wien war Friedell vieles: Essayist, Schriftsteller, Dramatiker, Theaterkritiker, Schauspieler, Kulturphilosoph und Kabarettist – seine universelle Karriere endete am 16. März 1938 mit seinem Freitod beim Einmarsch der Nationalsozialisten in Österreich. Geblieben ist neben Friedells berühmt gewordener "Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit" auch die weniger bekannte "Kulturgeschichte Ägyptens und des Alten Orients" und die "Kulturgeschichte Griechenlands", welche er nicht vollenden konnte.

Историческая судьба свела лицом к лицу на Амуре два великих государства, Россию и Китай, два великих народа, и с той поры они пошли рядом, тесно бок о бок, как два соседа по бесконечной дороге жизни. Были между ними разногласия, даже ссоры и столкновения, были взаимопомощь и клятвы в вечной дружбе — всё, как бывает у соседей. И жители этих стран вольно или невольно повторяли и повторяют в своей жизни их отношения. Истории двух семейств, двух родов — русского казака Саяпина и китайского сапожника Ван Сюймина.

Many yoga practitioners explore the benefits of yoga through its poses, but did you know that the magic and mystery of yoga lie within the power of yogic mythology? Myths of the Asanas was the first book to collect and retell the ancient tales of yogic myth to a modern audience, and has since become a beloved resource for yoga practitioners and instructors the world over. This expanded edition contains nine unheard stories about some of the yoga world's most beloved poses.