I was hooked by this book. It
shows a dimension of the Roman world that I had not really thought about.
The
book is also beautiful with fantastic illustrations. It takes the reader
literally into the world of travel and the buying of objects to remind people
of that journey 2000 years ago. The book brings out a new dimension to
understanding objects and the way in which objects could move across the Roman
world, whether made on Hadrian’s Wall or on the Bay of Naples.
There is a sense
that this book is a foil to the Roman Art with a capital A, souvenirs were more
accessible to a much wider public and that is worth reading about in my view.
In this book, Maggie Popkin offers an in-depth investigation of souvenirs, a type of ancient Roman object that has been understudied and that is unfamiliar to many people. Souvenirs commemorated places, people, and spectacles in the Roman Empire. Straddling the spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics, they serve as a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of a broad range of people - beyond elite, metropolitan men - who lived in the Roman world. Popkin shows how souvenirs generated and shaped memory and knowledge, as well as constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire's heterogeneous…
Donkeys
quite literally made the ancient world. When we think of the pyramids of Egypt,
we tend today to think in the same thought – camels, but the camel was not
domesticated more than a millennium later than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Thus,
when we see the monuments of the ancient world – we are looking at the product
of human-animal relations and the humble donkey was at the very heart of these
civilizations so revered by the west today. Peter Mitchell does a fantastic job
at being the voice for the donkey and setting out the archaeolgical evidence
for donkeys so clearly and concisely.
The book as a whole alters the way we
think about the ancient world and to some extent the domestication and adoption
of the donkey coincides with the development of many an ancient civilization.
Perhaps, this is why this book and the donkey in antiquity deserve your attention.
Donkeys carried Christ into Jerusalem while in Greek myth they transported Hephaistos up to Mount Olympos and Dionysos into battle against the Giants. They were probably the first animals that people ever rode, as well as the first used on a large-scale as beasts of burden. Associated with kingship and the gods in the ancient Near East, they have been (and in many places still are) a core technology for moving people and goods over both short and long distances, as well as a supplier of muscle power for threshing and grinding grain, pressing olives, raising water, ploughing fields, and…
When I was very young at school and struggling as a
dyslexic student, I owned and cherished the first edition of this book which was
in black and white.
I adored the mixture of maps and history – indeed I spent
hours staring at the maps and would be lured by curiosity into reading the
text. I was thrilled to discover that a new edition had been published and, for
full disclosure, Richard Talbert had offered to send me a copy. When I opened
the book on arrival, I felt the same sense of excitement from years ago –
looking at maps of cities, of battles, and of sea routes.
This is a book of
discovery, readers can open it up and find knowledge of battles they may not
have heard of or visualizations of cities and geography. It is a book that you
guide yourself through, that contrasts so strongly with the popular books on
antiquity in which the maps tend to be less than useful and the words of the
author more powerful. In this book, the reader will move from the maps to the
words and that is just so different.
It is also a book from which to plan your
next holiday and will arm you with enough history to understand the places and
their ancient geography.
Featuring over 130 colour maps of ancient physical and human landscapes spanning Britain to India and deep into the Sahara, this atlas is a compact kaleidoscope of peoples, migrations, empires, strife, cultures, cities and travels from Greece's Bronze Age to Rome's fall in the West.
This revised edition of the Atlas of Classical History equips readers with a clear visual grasp of the spatial dimension, a vital aspect for understanding history. Users gain insight into the formative roles of physical landscape - seas, rivers, mountains, deserts - in Mediterranean peoples' development. The maps in all their variety of scope, scale…
I’m quite proud that I managed to write this
book. I should say I'm dyslexic at this point. Unlike my other books that were
based on qualitative research, this one was fundamentally quantitative.
Underlying the book are c. 23,000 epitaphs from the Roman empire that mention
the number of years a person had lived. From there, I took the step to discuss
why measuring age in years was such a Roman thing, it doesn't have the same
prominence in Greek culture. I journeyed as an author through the
idea of birthdays (not all societies have them) and just why some societies in
the Roman Empire commemorated the very old and why some focused on the very
young. I hope it helps people understand how people
thought about age 2,000 years ago.
