In 1250 B.C. the teenaged son of the Egyptian high priest sets off a series of harrowing events when he accidentally kills the sacred cat of Bubastes and, accompanied by his sister and two foreign slaves, embarks on a dangerous journey to find safe haven beyond the borders of Egypt.

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Now, Karen Armstrong reveals...

Witness the "works and wonders" of the ancient world through the eyes of its first great historian in this sparkling series of 24 lectures from a much-honored teacher and classical scholar. Herodotus (c. 484-420 B.C.E.) was a Greek who was born in what is now the modern Turkish resort town of Bodrum and who died, so tradition says, in the south of Italy. In between, his tirelessly inquiring mind took him from one corner of the known world to another....

Spanning the years from c.5000 B.C. to the early centuries A.D., the Nile Valley civilization was one of the earliest created by humankind. It remains one of the most fascinating and influential. This book offers a comprehensive overview of ancient Egyptian history, from Predynastic times to the Old and New Kingdoms to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It examines a culture whose art, architecture, religion, and medicine came to form the basis of Western...

Widely referred to as the "Father of History", Greek Historian Herodotus lived during the 5th century BC and "The Histories" is generally accepted as the first work of historical literature in Western Civilization. Departing from the ancient Homeric tradition of treating historical subjects as epically romantic figures, Herodotus instead approached his subjects with a systematic method of investigation. "The Histories" of Herodotus describe the important...

Reflecting five decades of teaching and research, and drawing on the most recent scholarship, the fourth edition of this widely-read history provides the same broad coverage, chronological framework, and absorbing literary style that distinguished previous editions. For the new edition, the chapters on early humankind, the section on the revolt of Bar Kochba, and the chapter describing the end of the Roman Empire in the west have been rewritten to...

The first volume in a new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Historian Bauer provides both sweeping scope and attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. Dozens of maps provide a geography of great events, while timelines give the reader...