Showing titles in Ancient

Over the centuries, gold had stirred the passions for power and glory, for beauty and security, and even for immortality. No other object has commanded so much veneration over such a long period of time. The most striking feature of this long history is that gold led most of the...

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. 

Writer, broadcaster and recovering comedian Natalie Haynes mixes comedy and conversation to bring the ancient world entertainingly up to date in these four radio series. Each episode sees her profiling a key figure from ancient Greece and Rome, and, aided by her special guests, creating a stand-up show around them. 

Step back to a time when the mysteries of the universe could seem overwhelming. Cycles of nature kept predictable time with the sun, the moon, and the stars, yet crops failed, disease struck, storms ravaged, and empires fell without warning. In the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, people responded to such tumult with a rich variety of religious beliefs.

Published in six volumes between 1776 and 1781, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - for all its renown - can be intimidating. It contains one point five million words, an estimated 8,000 footnotes, a cast of 10,000 historical figures, and a timeline of more than 1,000 years. Yet even today, Gibbon's historical chronicle demands to be understood.

'I loved Goddess with a Thousand Faces. Fascinating, fun and thoughtful and enlightening' JENNIFER SAINT 'A beautiful weave of history, myth and storytelling by one of our most exciting new classicists' DAN SNOW Steeped in ancient magic, dark divinity and wild ways, Goddess with a Thousand Faces...

Long before modern nations and national borders existed, human communities developed their own systems of cooperation, leadership, trade, traditions, and resource management. Life Before Modern Nations explores how families, villages, settlements, and early cities organized everyday life and...

Judea is one of the most important regions in the modern world. As the center of two of the world’s great religions and extremely important to a third, its history has been littered with wars, insurrections, and religious revolutions. To say that it has had a turbulent past is to understate...

Julius Caesar was possibly the most important man of antiquity, if not all of history. Alexander Hamilton once remarked that “the greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar.” Such a tribute, coming from one of the Founding Fathers of the quintessential modern democracy in reference to a...

One broken Republic. One impossible choice. One bargain no honest politician should ever accept.Lucilla Minor has never wanted power. She prefers laws to speeches, ledgers to glory, and believes Rome's problems can usually be solved by competent administration.Then someone offers her the chance...

Un roi barbare a mis Rome à sac en 410, et quinze siècles plus tard, on en accuse encore des adolescents. Ils l'ignorent. D'ailleurs, les bâtisseurs de cathédrales, les auteurs de romans d'horreur et les ingénieurs qui programment aujourd'hui des machines dans des salles obscures...

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. What if all human history could be seen as one vast unfolding story? In *The Outline of History*, H. G. Wells turns from fiction to the grandest subject of all: the rise of life, mankind, civilization, belief, empire, science, war, and the future of...

Bloomsbury presents The Book of Lost Languages: An Epic Quest to Decipher the Past, written and read by Daniel Harbour. ‘Brilliantly conveys the thrill of connecting with the ancient world’ ALEX BELLOS 'All the drama of a political thriller, the intrigue of a detective story, and...

'Terrific ... this is serious but popular history writing at its best' - Spectator The dynamic, expansionist dynasty that forged the Middle Ages. Today, the Carolingians are best known as the dynasty of Charlemagne. In a few remarkable decades spanning the late eighth and early ninth centuries...

La historia de Escocia es rica, variada y está repleta de personajes y acontecimientos fascinantes. En este conciso libro de historia, descubrirá la historia de Escocia desde sus orígenes más remotos hasta la actualidad. Desde los pictos y los romanos hasta las Guerras de Independencia y las...

La storia di Roma comincia con uno stupro: è dalla violenza di Marte, dio della guerra, su una giovane vestale, che nascono Romolo e Remo, i fondatori della città. Raccolti e allattati da una lupa, macchiati dall'infamia del fratricidio, i due gemelli iniettano nel corpo dell'impero più grandioso della storia la natura doppia delle loro origini divine e bestiali: grazia e violenza, sensualità e ferocia plasmano un popolo di poeti sublimi, guerrieri sanguinari e condottieri rapiti dalla vertigine del potere.

In 432 BCE the powerful city-state of Sparta on the peninsula of the Peloponnesus in southwestern Greece declared war on Athens, head of a mighty naval coalition. The war would last until Sparta finally brought Athens to its knees in 404. The Athenian aristocrat Thucydides, suspecting the magnitude of the conflict that was unfolding before his eyes, at once undertook to record its history, exploring the causes and course of the war in the context of his great interest: human nature.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE) wrote some of ancient Rome's greatest poetry, melding languages and cultures with youthful ideals and a realist's recognition of the dictatorial world around him. Horace is famed for his fine phrases, lyric sex, and guidance on how to live, but he was a poet maddened by war, and many of his most self-revealing poems have rarely been seen. He could be sublime and obscene, amusing and abusive, a model of moderation and anything but.

The Fourth Mind is the first book ever to explore the anatomy, brains, genetics, beliefs and capabilities of the unknown entities the author refers to as "the visitors." He maintains that they have a set of abilities he describes as a "fourth mind" that include such powers as telepathy, levitation, the ability to move heavy objects without machinery, and many others. He then shows that there is a rich store of evidence that mankind once possessed these same powers, and that hidden knowledge of them has persisted into the 20th century.

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country. Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people - children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers - who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries.