Ancient Language

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.

Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than 7,000 languages that exist today.

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

This volume celebrates six such languages - Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew - by first introducing listeners to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace achieves striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf attains remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English.

Here, Cosimo proudly presents Book 2 of Ancient Egypt, in which Massey reads the prehistoric story of human civilization that can be studied in the language of ceremonial rites, ancient customs, and ritual dance, and consequently explores the resultant concept that religion evolved out of expressions of human fertility and sexuality–particularly as embodied in the primeval symbols of blood, sacrifice, and motherhood–and formed the first influences on Judeo-Christianity.

The origin of a saviour in the guise of a little child is traceable to Child-Horus, who brought new life to Egypt every year as the Messu of the inundation. This was Horus in his pre-solar and pre-human characters of the fish, the shoot of the papyrus, or the branch of the endless years. In a later stage the image of Horus on his papyrus represented the young god as solar cause in creation.

Here, Cosimo proudly presents Book 1 of Ancient Egypt, in which Massey argues that “primitive man” found no human agency in the phenomena of the natural world, which led to a woeful misinterpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics by the Greeks and Romans as well as a misunderstanding of the essence of Egyptian mythology. As a consequence, Massey contends, a deep fount of wisdom of the ancients has been lost, and he goes on to reveal how it can be rediscovered.

This is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology.

All effective debaters, whether they know it or not, employ Aristotle's 3 basic principles of effective argument that form the spine of Rhetoric. In Poetics, Aristotle draws a dramatic distinction between poetry and history. This collection also includes Aristotle's body of work that has come to be identified as Logic.

In contrast to Kyoto, which stands out for its beauty, in Nara visitors can feel the strength of Japan at that time as it attempted to "create a nation".