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Ages ago, elves and dwarves unknowingly migrated between Universes via a Junction. Jenneva and Egam believe they have found a Junction and plan a trip with Alexander to test the theory and investigate the origins of the elves and dwarves. Because they believe that the perennial animosity between the two races is due to misunderstandings about their histories, the mages include the prince of elves and the prince of dwarves in the group. Trouble begins at the very start of the journey as Egam ...
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Does Job convincingly argue against a fixed system of just retribution by proclaiming the prosperity of the wicked, an argument that runs contrary to traditional biblical and ancient Near Eastern wisdom? Addressing this question, Dominick Hernández gives careful consideration to the rhetoric, imagery, and literary devices used to treat the issue of…
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Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) provides a major reassessment of this monumental figure in the Western religious and political tradition, tracing the remar…
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At this point of the scholarly debate on the nature of Second Temple pseudepigraphy, one may ask why another look at the problem is needed. Second Temple Pseudepigraphy: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Apocalyptic Texts and Related Jewish Literature (de Gruyter, 2014) is not the definitive answer to that problem but it proposes different paths - or …
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A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the B…
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Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from. For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provide…
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From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the s…
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Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, tra…
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We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to make the academic publishing industry grow and to promote groundbreaking academic publications to scholars, students and enthusiasts globally. Based in the renowned publishing city of Leiden, we eat, sleep and breathe publishing! Matteo Barbato’s The Ideology of Democratic Athens: I…
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From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an importan…
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Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders of their urban centres in the Nile Valley. Regarded as angels and warriors, the wisdom of the Desert Ascetics formed part of the oral and literary tradition of wonder-working saints whose commitment to…
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From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the i…
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Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses: For the abandonment of all views He taught the true teaching By means of compassio…
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In Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington, 2012), William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opp…
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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 empero…
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'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 b…
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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…
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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 reck…
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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 lon…
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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 b…
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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 a…
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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 Wes…
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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 t…
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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 mat…
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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) a…
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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 hi…
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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 o…
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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 cha…
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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…
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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 pur…
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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 i…
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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 fai…
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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, …
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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 widel…
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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 amo…
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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 "fi…
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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…
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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 powe…
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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 …
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The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of kno…
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An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings. Stephen Harris’s Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)…
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In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features,…
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In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In th…
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The development of Christian scriptures did not terminate once, for example, following Irenaeus and other influential patristic figures, the four gospels that would later be located at the front of the church’s New Testament were accepted by most churches and transmitted together in the same codex. Instead, erudite Christian readers employed new an…
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