New Books in Ancient History

Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023). Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Apostate, ruled Rome as sole emperor for just a year and a half, from 361 to 363, but during that time he turned the world upside down. Although a nephew of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, Julian fought to return Rome to the old...

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. Wicked Problems for Arc...

Two strangers meet in a trapped elevator. One is an archaeologist, the other isn’t. A simple question, ‘What do you do?’, becomes the springboard for a dialogue that weaves a fascinating tale. In How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator (William Collins, 2024) archaeologist Dr. Theodore Papakostas takes us on a spectacularly iconoclastic and hugely engrossing journey through ancient Greece,...

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dog...

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, this Graeco-Macedonian imperial power introduced a linear and transcendent conception of time. Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, prog...

Recent scholarship focused on the role of embodiment within cognition and communication reminds us that part of how we “know” is through our physical senses. We only know the softness of a kitten by touching its fur, or the tastiness of bread by eating. How might this influence our understanding of biblical texts, such as Jesus’s claim, “I am the bread of life,” and the invitation to eat? Sensing...

After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neig...

What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed to our own intrinsic animal nature. Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity...

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and...

Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossola...

The ancient Indian Vedas contain sentences of rather varied content, including religious statements ("Varuṇa truly is the king of the gods"), words of wisdom ("Thought is quicker than speech") or even banal observations ("Wife and husband wash each other's back"). The well-known Erlangen Indo-Europeanists and Indologists Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996) and Johanna Narten (1930-2019) collected such sente...

Powerful religious elements for living in the aftermath of trauma are embedded within North African Christian hagiographies. The texts of (1) The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2) The Account of Montanus, Lucius, and their Companions, and (3) The Life of Cyprian of Carthage are stories that offered post traumatic pathways to recovery for its historical readership. These recovery-oriented belie...

In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians. That event kicks off Rachel Kousser’s book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Mariner Books, 2024), which...

The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in 5 Minutes (Equinox Books, 2024), co-edited by Philippe Guillaume and Diana V. Edelman, is a digestible, concise, reader-friendly introduction to biblical scholarship for undergraduate students and lay readers alike. Written without technical language or jargon by diverse specialists in Hebrew Bible, its 83 chapters welcome readers into a range of topics, inc...

Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Laura Lieber proposes an account of hymnody as a performative and theatrical genre, combining religious and theatrical studies to examine how performers...

The Second Epistle to Timothy is, by any standard, a remarkable document. Even as the apostle urges his friend and coworker hasten to Rome for a final meeting, the intimacy and urgency of Paul's words make clear his awareness that Timothy might not arrive in time to say goodbye. This makes the epistle deeply personal. But Paul has a much larger purpose in view than just Timothy's consolation. The...

Eyal Regev's The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale UP, 2019) is he first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the entire New Testament, this study examines Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Temple in the first century and provides both Jews and Christians with a better understanding of their respective faiths and how they grow out of this ancient institut...

In A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (T&T Clark, 2019), Kenneth Atkinson tells the exciting story of the nine decades of the Hasmonean rule of Judea (152 - 63 BCE) by going beyond the accounts of the Hasmoneans in Josephus in order to bring together new evidence to reconstruct how the Hasmonean family transformed their kingdom into a state that lasted until the arrival of the R...

Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during th...

Written in Rome as a book with revelatory intentions, the early Christian work known as the Shepherd of Hermas flourished especially in the second, third, and fourth centuries CE, was quoted as scripture by several church fathers, and, on the balance of manuscript attestation and translations from Greek to other languages, “is one of the most widely attested early Christian texts” (Lookadoo, 25)....

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one's last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible. A Life of Ps...

In The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2024), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Known for his sharp tongue and deep thought, Yājñavalkya is associated with a number of "firsts" in Indian religious literary history: the fi...

The Gnostic Trilogy is the best-known and most important work by the ascetic philosopher and teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Among the writers of his age, Evagrius stands out for his short, perplexing, and absorbing aphorisms, which provide sharp insight into philosophy, Scripture, human nature, and the natural world. The first part of the trilogy, the Praktikos (The Practiced One), provides a diagnos...

Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women--whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power--were up to something much more interesting than...

The nature and reliability of the ancient sources are among the most important issues in the scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is noteworthy, therefore, that scholars have grown increasingly skeptical about the value of these materials for reconstructing the life of the Teacher of Righteousness.  Travis B. Williams' book History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of...