Andrea Carandini's archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there really was a Romulus--a first king of Rome--who founded the city in the mid-eighth century BC, making it the world's first city-state, as well as its most influential. Rome: Day One makes a powerful and provocative case that Rome was established in a one-day ceremony, and that Rome's first day was also Western civilization's.

His...
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Written by the renowned authority on ancient ships and seafaring Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners has long served the needs of all who are interested in the sea, from the casual reader to the professional historian. This completely revised edition takes into account the fresh information that has appeared since the book was first published in 1959, especially that from archaeology's newest branch, marine archaeology. Casson does what no other author has done: he has put in a single volume the story of all that the ancients accomplished on the sea from the earliest times to the end of the...
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"All ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined."--John Adams

He squared off against Caesar and was friends with young Brutus. He advised the legendary Pompey on his botched transition from military hero to politician. He lambasted Mark Antony and was master of the smear campaign, as feared for his wit as he was for his ruth...
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"Joann Fletcher has the good grace and specialist knowledge to do away with Roman romances. This book's bedrock is Egyptology. . . . Cleopatra was, indeed, not just a 'baleful beauty;' she was great." --History Today

World-renowned Egyptologist Joann Fletcher offers an extraordinary look at one of Egypt's most intriguing leaders--the legendary Cleopatra. In the tradition of biographies by Stacy Shiff, Duane Roller, and Adrian Goldsworthy, and drawing on astonishing new evidence about Cleopatra's life--including tax records, personal correspondence, and the discovery of her p...
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Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultima...
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In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes "an evensong for...
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The book begins with the basic technologies of stone, fire, woodworking, ceramics, metallurgy, glass, and we...
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In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions...
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The authors describe and analyze the spiritual life of three ancient civilizations: the Egyptians, whose thinking was profoundly influenced by the daily rebirth of the sun and the annual rebirth of the Nile; the Mesopotamians, who be...
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