Showing results for "The Continuum" in Ancient

Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea? Based on ten years of research and a lifetime of immersion in Mongol culture and tradition, Emperor of the Seas brings this little-known story vibrantly to life.

The Persian Continuum traces how the Achaemenid Empire’s administrative genius, religious pragmatism, and infrastructural vision shaped a vast world stretching from the Aegean to the Indus—and how Alexander’s lightning conquests disrupted but did not erase that order. Through a sequence of richly drawn chapters, the book follows the Persian high tide under Xerxes, the long wars and negotiations with Greek city-states, and the empire’s resilient governance from Egypt to Bactria.

In Cypria, named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to The Odyssey, British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical history of the island of Cyprus, from the era of goddesses and mythical beasts to the present day. This sprawling, evocative and poetic book begins with the legend of the cyclops and the storytelling at the heart of the Mediterranean culture. Christofi travels to salt lakes, crusader castles, mosques and the eerie town deserted at the start of the 1974 war.