Georgian literary sources for Late Antiquity are commonly held to be later productions devoid of historical value. As a result, scholarship outside the Republic of Georgia has privileged Graeco-Roman and even Armenian narratives. However, when investigated within the dual contexts of a regional literary canon and the active participation of Caucasia’s diverse peoples in the Iranian Commonwealth, early Georgian texts emerge as a rich repository of late antique attitudes and outlooks. Georgi...

"This timely volume examines how law can respond to contemporary threats and shape a just, durable post-conflict order. Its particular strength lies in the attention it gives to law's practical role in strengthening institutions of peace. Addressing the challenges of conflict's aftermath, it yields valuable insights for scholars and practitioners alike, while making a broader case for law—not war—as the foundation of international relations."- Dr. Olufemi EliasMember of the...

This Element re-evaluates the genesis and early development of Georgian literature. Sparked by the Christian invention of a Georgian script ca. 400 AD, this literature was a product of the Christianization of the Caucasus region. But to what extent was early Georgian literature a Christian one? What were the ecclesiastical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of Georgian literature? And how did Georgia's, and Caucasia's, existing ties to Iranian cultural world affect the evolution of a disti...

This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. Taking readers on a jo...

It’s been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis’s most important contributions to the debate about how media influence the development of consciousness and societies. In this seminal text, he traces humanity’s movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bi...

Just prior to the rise of Islam in the sixth century AD, southern Arabia was embroiled in a violent conflict between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs. Though little known today, this was an international war that involved both the Byzantine Empire, which had established Christian churches in Ethiopia, and the Sasanian Empire in Persia, which supported the Jews in what became a proxy war against its longtime foe Byzantium. Our knowledge of these events derives largely from an inscribed...

This fascinating book explores the evolution of religious dualism, the doctrine that man and cosmos are constant battlegrounds between forces of good and evil. It traces this evolution from late Egyptian religion and the revelations of Zoroaster and the Orphics in antiquity through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mithraic Mysteries, and the great Gnostic teachers to its revival in medieval Europe with the suppression of the Bogomils and the Cathars, heirs to the age-long teachings of dual...

This book introduces the Age of Justinian, the last Roman century and the first flowering of Byzantine culture. Dominated by the policies and personality of emperor Justinian I (527–565), this period of grand achievements and far-reaching failures witnessed the transformation of the Mediterranean world. In this volume, twenty specialists explore the most important aspects of the age including the mechanics and theory of empire, warfare, urbanism, and economy. It also discusses the impact o...

An examination of the unique, baroque-era, German Jesuit scholar, Egyptologist, polymath, and prolific author and his studies.A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2–80), was one of Europe's most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. But Kircher is most famous—or infamous—for his quixotic attem...

A new historical framework integrating Islam into European and Asian historyIslam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century.

Taking in the bulk of Alexander the Great's Asian conquests, the Seleucid Empire encompassed remarkable ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity; yet it did not include Macedonia, the dynasty's ancestral homeland. Paul Kosmin shows how rulers over lands to which they had no historic claim transformed the territory into a coherent space.

The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity offers an innovative overview of a period (c. 300-700 CE) that has become increasingly central to scholarly debates over the history of western and Middle Eastern civilizations. This volume covers such pivotal events as the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the origins of Islam, and the early formation of Byzantium and the European Middle Ages. These events are set in the context of widespread literary, artistic, cultural, and religious ...