Ancient World: Comparative Histories

The first book to explore the religious dimensions of the family and the household in ancient Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity. • Advances our understanding of household and familial religion, as opposed to state-sponsored or civic temple cults • Reconstructs domestic and family religious practices in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Israel, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Emar, and Philistia • Explores many household rituals, such as providing for ancestral spirits, and petitioning of a household's patron deities or of spirits associated with the house itself • Examines lifecycle rituals — from pregnancy and birth to maturity, old age, death, and beyond • Looks at religious practices relating to the household both within the home itself and other spaces, such as at extramural tombs and local sanctuaries

The Gift in Antiquity presents a collection of 14 original essays that apply French sociologist Marcel Mauss's notion of gift-giving to the study of antiquity. • Features a collection of original essays that cover such wide-ranging topics as vows in the Hebrew Bible; ancient Greek wedding gifts; Hellenistic civic practices; Latin literature; Roman and Jewish burial practices; and Jewish and Christian religious gifts • Organizes essays around theoretical concerns rather than chronologically • Generates unique insights into gift-giving and reciprocity in antiquity • Takes an explicitly cross-cultural approach to the study of ancient history

The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy presents a series of essays that trace the Greeks' path to democracy and examine the connection between the Greek polis as a citizen state and democracy as well as the interaction between democracy and various forms of cultural expression from a comparative historical perspective and with special attention to the place of Greek democracy in political thought and debates about democracy throughout the centuries. • Presents an original combination of a close synchronic and long diachronic examination of the Greek polis-city-states that gave rise to the first democratic system of government • Offers a detailed study of the close interaction between democracy, society, and the arts in ancient Greece • Places the invention of democracy in fifth-century BCE Athens both in its broad social and cultural context and in the context of the re-emergence of democracy in the modern world • Reveals the role Greek democracy played in the political and intellectual traditions that shaped modern democracy, and in the debates about democracy in modern social, political, and philosophical thought • Written collaboratively by an international team of leading scholars in classics, ancient history, sociology, and political science

Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World presents a cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which ancient civilizations thought about the past and recorded their own histories. • Written by an international group of scholars working in many disciplines • Truly cross-cultural, covering historical thinking and writing in ancient or early cultures across in East, South, and West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas • Includes historiography shaped by religious perspectives, including Judaism, early Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism

Through a series of original essays by leading international scholars, The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives offers a comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire's role and achievement and, more broadly, establishes Rome's significance within comparative studies. • Fills a gap in comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire's role and achievement • Features contributions from more than a dozen distinguished scholars from around the world • Explores the relevance of important comparativist themes of state, empire, and civilization to ancient Rome

On Human Bondage-a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson's groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death-assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies. • Discusses the novel ideas of social death and natal alienation, as Patterson first presented them 35 years ago and as they are understood today • Brings together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, as well as a final chapter by Patterson himself that responds to and expands upon the other contributions • Provides insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre-colonial South Asia to early modern Europe and the New World • Delves into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery

Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories conducts a comparative investigation of why certain ancient societies produced explicit concepts and theories of peace and others did not. • Explores the idea that concepts of peace in antiquity occurred only in periods that experienced exceptional rates of warfare • Utilizes case studies of civilizations in China, India, Egypt, and Greece • Complements the 2007 volume War and Peace in the Ancient World, drawing on ideas from that work and providing a more comprehensive examination

This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, who have analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviews of a wide range of pre-modern societies. • Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity through to the Age of Discovery • Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies around the globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from the Greeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India • Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials

The Adventure of the Human Intellect presents the latest scholarship on the beginnings of intellectual history on a broad scope, encompassing ten eminent ancient or early civilizations from both the Old and New Worlds. • Borrows themes from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946), updating an old topic with a new approach and up-to-date theoretical underpinning, evidence, and scholarship • Provides a broad scope of studies, including discussion of highly developed ancient or early civilizations in China, India, West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas • Examines the world view of ten ancient or early societies, reconstructed from their own texts, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine • Considers a diversity of sources representing a wide array of particular responses to differing environments, circumstances, and intellectual challenges • Reflects a more inclusive and nuanced historiographical attitude with respect to non-elites, gender, and local variations • Brings together leading specialists in the field, and is edited by an internationally renowned scholar