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The Triumph of Christianity by Bart Ehrman is another good, readable, book on that topic, although its not a comprehensive history. As the title suggests, its focus is on the growth of the Church, but in order to discuss that it has to also touch on most of the other issues in the Early Church.
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Apr 14, 2021 07:07
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Weird question, but are there any good books on ancient history, African history or imperial China on Audible? I can't help you with Africa or China, but since you liked SPQR, I have some Greece and Rome suggestions that are on Audible. Ghost on the Throne by James Romm is available on Audible. It's about the chaotic years following the death of Alexander the Great, when his empire collapsed into civil war as dozens of different people tried to seize power. This is the one I mostly highly recommend, the story is gripping and the book is very easy to read. Another one a similar subject also on Audible is Phillip and Alexander by Adrian Goldsworthy, which covers the life of Alexander the Great and his father Phillip. This one is a lot longer then Ghost on the Throne, and is written in a somewhat more dry style. However, the life of these two men was so insane that the book is still gripping. Goldsworthy's mostly a Rome guy though, and he also has a number of other books on Audible on that subject. I've not read most of those, so I can't give specific recommendations on them, but he has written biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus which might interest you after reading SPQR. There are also two books on Audible by Paul Cartledge called The Spartans and Thebes. They're both short and very digestible, although his tone in The Spartans is sometimes quite sympathetic to Sparta. He is a Sparta specialist though, so that is sort of to be expected. I'm currently reading/listening to Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD which I was surprised to find on Audible. Its a long (31 hour recording), weighty, fairly academic book of the type you usually don't find on Audible. The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan is another big, weighty one. Kagan is probably the world's leading scholar on that topic, and the book on Audible is a 2003 distillation of his landmark 4 volume work on the topic he published in the 70s and 80s. You may want to avoid this one if you are not able to consult a map of Greece occasionally while listening to it. Not sure if this topic is of interest to you, but another one is Paul by N. T. Wright, about the apostle Paul. N. T. Wright is a very legitimate scholar, and an expert on Paul, but he is also an Anglican bishop, and the book discusses theology as well as history. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Apr 22, 2021 |
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Apr 22, 2021 04:49
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BigglesSWE posted:Quite apart from that, I’m interested in the development of the Hebrew Bible. Anyone has any suggestions? That's a tough question, because there is so much written about that subject and very little agreement among scholars about the topic. If you want to learn about that topic, you are going to want to read more than one book, but a good starting point is Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Freidman. It was first published in 1987 so it might be a little out of date, but a new edition was published in 2019 which might make that less big of a deal.
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Sep 26, 2021 03:58
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StrixNebulosa posted:Okay, this isn't a perfect fit for this thread but close enough I say: Egyptian Star Oracle is a weird kickstarter I'm looking at.  How much do you want to bet that this guy can't actually read hieroglyphs
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Nov 7, 2021 03:10
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SubG posted:This is probably way too narrow, but is there a good history of Fraxinetum out there? I don't know about a book, but I found a 55 page article about Fraxinetum that seems to be generally about the site and its history, and not about one particular aspect: https://www.academia.edu/3537846.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:49
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The Riddle of the Rosetta by Jed Buchwald and Diane Josefowicz was published last year and is probably the most up to date book on the topic you can find. I don't think it covers much past the initial decipherment process though.
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Jan 5, 2022 04:28
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Adrian Goldsworthy has a book on them. Seconding this recommendation, its called The Fall of Carthage, and it's a great book.
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Feb 2, 2022 03:13
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Glah posted:Any recommendations on current books on ancient Sumer? I've been reading The Sumerians -Their History, Culture, and Character by Samuel Kramer and while very interesting, it is from the 70's so I'm left wondering if there have been developments on sumerology after that. Two good options would be Sumer and the Sumerians by Harriet Crawford, which has an updated edition from 2004, and The Sumerian World edited by Harriet Crawford. The Sumerian World is a big multi-author work covering dozens of topics over about 700 pages. If you want an up to date comprehensive overview of everything about Sumer, that's probably the best option (it may be a bit pricey though). Sumer and the Sumerians is much shorter and only has one author.
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Apr 26, 2022 23:05
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FPyat posted:Anything that gives me more understanding of the local differentiation of particular islands, regions, and cities would be of particular interest. Another question that captures my curiosity is why Japanese politics went so terribly wrong in the 1920s. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 by Eiko Maruko Siniawer sounds like a book you would like. It's not exclusively about the 1920s, but you need to cover a lot more ground than just the 1920s themselves to answer that question.
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Sep 17, 2022 20:22
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Sailor Viy posted:Do you have a link to any thorough/interesting critiques of Dawn of Everything? Reading it I was definitely vacillating between "this is so cool" and "hmm, that seems like a reach", even though I'm broadly sympathetic to the authors' politics. https://notevenpast.org/a-false-dawn/ I think this is a pretty good concise critique, written by a UT anthropology professor. The core issue he has with the book is summed up in this quote from the review: quote:
For a lengthier critique, a historian at Stanford wrote a 15 page critique that covers a variety of issues he has with the methodology and conclusions of the book: https://www.academia.edu/69494234/R...ory_of_Humanity There's also a number of other critical reviews out there, here's two other critical reviews by three anthropologists: https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/. Here's another one by a Stanford archaeologist, which is focused on his disagreement with *The Dawn of Everything's* interpretation of archaeological evidence: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720603 (It's less negative than some of the other ones, and more narrow). There's some others out there too, these are the ones I could find with a quick search.
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Oct 14, 2022 02:41
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PittTheElder posted:Alexander to Actium is the first thing that comes to mind, not sure if there's something better written in the last 30 years It remains the definitive text on the period, but its also about a thousand pages, so its not for the faint of heart. Also, since no one has mentioned a recommendation for Ptolemaic Egypt, I'd suggest The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies by J. G. Manning for Hellenistic Egypt. Edit: Also, if you're into Economic History, J. G. Manning also has a great book about the Economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean World in the mid 1st millennium BC before the rise of Rome, which covers a lot of stuff about the Hellenistic Period, called The Open Sea CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 04:33
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Punkin Spunkin posted:Any good books on the Christian theological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries? Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins is exactly what you are looking for
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Apr 24, 2023 03:26
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Anyone know of any books in English about the early modern Arabian Penninusla? Somewhere in the ballpark of 1500 to 1800 (although I'm flexible on dates). Specifically about Arabia itself, not the broader Indian Ocean world.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:38
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escape artist posted:I'm finishing up Lies My Teacher Told Me and I love it. Also enjoyed Ibram Kendi's Stamped From The Beginning. What else should I read along these lines? Already read / enjoyed Zinn The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
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Aug 9, 2023 17:10
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The stuff with trying to argue against the severity of Assyrian atrocities comes in large part from people writing in response to the traditionally dominant narrative of Assyria that is based on Biblical sources, which present Assyria as the greatest evil the world has ever seen, and trying to contextualize the Biblical account with a more balanced picture that makes heavy use of the documents from the Assyrians themselves. This effort can certainly go to far, but it doesn't serve any useful purpose if we just read the Biblical account of Assyria as the greatest evil to ever exist at face value without trying to critically assess these ideas based on all the other available evidence (as past generations of scholars often did). A lot of the most aggressive "whitewashing" of Assyrian atrocities comes out of the work of Karen Radner, and checking my copy of the book, she is the person who Frahm cites in the footnote on page 148 were he talks about other scholars who have argued for the use of the term "resettlement" rather than "deportation." That's something proposed by Radner that has not achieved much support from others, including Frahm himself (in the following line Frahm says "this view might be overly generous"). And even Radner certainly acknowledges the brutal nature of Assyrian deportations, despite wanting to reframe how they are understood by scholars today. Radner has spent a lot of her career studying the intellectual and scholarly culture of the Assyrians, and she has spent a lot of her time pushing back aggressively against the traditionally dominant view of Assyria as a primarily militaristic empire of uncultured brutes (which is largely based on studies of the Bible and Assyrian royal inscriptions). A lot of other scholars in the field would agree that she sometimes goes too far in this argument, but her work, and the work of others who are of like mind with her, has been very influential in pushing back on the older (biblically based) narrative of Assyria as a uniquely hyper-militarized society. And her work, and the work of others, on Assyrian deportations has revealed some very important insights that previous generations of scholars had failed to realize because of their unwarranted assumptions about Assyria. Older scholarship tended to assume a priori that Assyrian deportees were enslaved. Radner and others have shown through careful study of administrative records relating to deportees in the Assyrian heartland that this isn't true -- they actually had the same legal status, from the perspective of the state administration, that ethnic Assyrians who are recorded in the same documents did, and there are examples that can be seen in administrative documents of deportees who hold privileged and high paying positions. This is a case where earlier scholarship had been deeply biased by the Biblical narrative and stereotyped ideas of Assyria as a prototypical example of "Oriental despotism," and it had prevented people from understanding the actual realities of how Assyrian deportation worked. Of course this doesn't mean that being deported by the Assyrians was not a violent and brutal event, but if you end your analysis there, you will miss out on the complexities of the situation -- and that is what Radner has spent her career arguing. Most other scholars don't go along with her ideas about the term "deportation" being too reductive, but pretty much everyone is in agreement that Assyrian deportation policy is much more complicated and nuanced than past generation of scholars who uncritically accepted the Biblical narrative thought it was.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:14
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Mr_Roke posted:I'm reading this too but only about a quarter of the way though. Kaldellis is a church/religious historian by background, so its not surprising that the focus of the book is a little bit slanted. Most of the time that is the case for huge, synthetic history books like that one, no one is a specialist in everything, but every historian is a specialist in something, and when they write about broad topics they generally bring their own area of specialty in more than someone else might.
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Apr 11, 2024 01:39
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Eric Cline's 1177 BC is an excellent book, but its very much not a "bible of historical text on the bronze age collapse." I would definitely still recommend reading it, as it by far the best and most accessible introduction to the Late Bronze Age Near East, but Cline's conclusions about the the scale of the collapse, the collapse as a pivotal "turning point" in history, and the nature of the causes of the collapse, are far from universally held, and some of them are now increasingly becoming minority views among scholars. They're by no means fringe, or unsupported, but there is a great deal of controversy about the subject, and Cline is a member of the school of thought that argues for a widespread and pivotal Collapse caused by the breakdown of interconnected networks that states depended on. All of these ideas can be challenged, and in particular, a lot of recently collected paleoclimatic data has been used to argue for a much narrower "collapse" that only effected certain places at specific times, rather than the century-long cascading breakdown that Cline argues for, and that this was not the result of a the breakdown of interconnected networks of trade and elite interaction. There's also a broader theoretical debate about how unique the Bronze Age collapse really was, compared to the fall of dynasties in previous and subsequent eras. The late bronze age and early iron age holds a rather special place in Western discourse, due this being when Homeric Greece and early Biblical Israel was, and so there is an argument made by some that an excessive focus on these two topics leads people to overstate the importance of the collapse as a broader historical turning point, and overstate the uniqueness of the collapse. People holding this position point out that the two places that were effected most severely by the bronze age collapse were Greece and the Levant, and argue that because these two places are critically important in the Western narrative of history, they are given disproportionate importance. A Babylonian-centric view of history might view things quite differently. The 12th and 11th centuries BCE, when many things were going pretty poorly in Greece and the Levant, was a period of Babylonian resurgence, where the size and power the kingdom expanded, and an era of flourishing intellectual culture. The Epic of Gilgamesh was compiled and redacted into its best known form during this century, for example. Unfortunately, there's not really any other good broad-scale and accessible book about the subject from an alternative point of view, so I don't have an additional supplementary recommendation, although I do know of an archeologist who makes a point of always referring to the "so-called Bronze Age collapse," even in casual conversation, who is writing a large-scope book right now about the topic. This is not to say don't read Cline's book, it is excellent, just be aware that Cline is a partisan of a specific viewpoint in an ongoing academic debate about the Bronze Age collapse.
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Apr 23, 2024 15:08
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