Here are 100 books that Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe fans have personally recommended if you like
Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe.
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I am an amateur historian, druid, and author of 11 books so far. I have a great passion for ancient history, particularly Ireland, Greece, Persia, and Egypt. I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of The Twelve Labours of Hercules when I was around 7 years old.
I read this book a long time ago and went back to it again as it is so revolutionary and quite startling for its time (1968). His theories were often laughed at, but he has been hugely vindicated by later discoveries. I think he was a very brave man to write this book, addressing one of the greatest mysteries of all—how we became civilized.
He must have known he would be vilified for producing such a book, but he did it anyway and in doing so unleashed a torrent of unconventional archaeologists and explorers of the past. So much has changed since this book came out, but it is still a seminal work that, IMO, should be read by anyone interested in the ancient past and the evolution from simple farmers into advanced societies.
The groundbreaking classic that introduced the theory that ancient Earth established contact with aliens.
Immediately recognized as a work of monumental importance, Chariots of the Gods endures as proof that Earth has been visited repeatedly by advanced aliens from other worlds. Here, Erich von Daniken examines ancient ruins, lost cities, spaceports, and a myriad of hard scientific facts that point to extraterrestrial intervention in human history. Most incredible of all, however, is von Daniken's theory that we are the descendants of these galactic pioneers-and he reveals the archeological discoveries that prove it...
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am an amateur historian, druid, and author of 11 books so far. I have a great passion for ancient history, particularly Ireland, Greece, Persia, and Egypt. I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of The Twelve Labours of Hercules when I was around 7 years old.
I am fascinated with this episode in Bronze Age history, and this book delves deep into this period of turmoil and chaos that affected the Mediterranean region in a dramatic way.
There are so many unknowns about this period, but the authors do a great job of trying to piece together a coherent story of the disaster that ended or set back civilizations across southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant.
This title features up-to-date historical and archaeological research into the mysterious and powerful confederations of raiders who troubled the Eastern Mediterranean in the last half of the Bronze Age.
Research into the origins of the so-called Shardana, Shekelesh, Danuna, Lukka, Peleset and other peoples is a detective 'work in progress'. However, it is known that they both provided the Egyptian pharaohs with mercenaries, and were listed among Egypt's enemies and invaders. They contributed to the collapse of several civilizations through their dreaded piracy and raids, and their waves of attacks were followed by major migrations that changed the face of…
I am an amateur historian, druid, and author of 11 books so far. I have a great passion for ancient history, particularly Ireland, Greece, Persia, and Egypt. I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of The Twelve Labours of Hercules when I was around 7 years old.
Akhenaten was a real outlier in Egyptian history, and I found this book very insightful and readable, even though it is an academic book. This Pharaoh was erased from history (by the following 19th dynasty), and this book goes a long way in explaining why this happened.
It’s an incredible story, and one must wonder how he died and why there were so many sudden deaths in the family. Perhaps not all the answers will come to light, but this is an amazing insight into his life and the short-lived religion he created.
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I am an amateur historian, druid, and author of 11 books so far. I have a great passion for ancient history, particularly Ireland, Greece, Persia, and Egypt. I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of The Twelve Labours of Hercules when I was around 7 years old.
This discovery really shook up the world of archaeology, and Vallianatos’ book tries to explain the whole mystery in an easy-to-understand way. I found it quite comprehensive, and it clearly shows that our preconceived ideas about the ancient world are often wrong.
The Greeks and other peoples were considerably more advanced than we generally give them credit for. This device is quite incredible, and such artistry and technical expertise were forgotten and not regained until only a few hundred years ago.
I love discovering new information about the past, and this item is earth-shattering, a unique window on an aspect of Bronze Age life that one would hardly imagine was possible!
In Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and Its Demise, Evaggelos Vallianatos, historian and ecopolitical theorist, shows that after the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, the Greeks, especially in Egypt, reached unprecedented heights of achievements in science, technology, and civilization. The Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical computer probably crafted in Rhodes in the second century BCE, was proof of that prowess. It's the grandfather of our computers.
Greek sponge divers discovered the Antikythera Mechanism in 1900 on a 2,100-year-old Roman-era shipwreck. The hand-powered device reveals a sophisticated Greek…
I read my first chapter book in Kindergarten, and have been fascinated by literature ever since. From writing a Halloween story in 3rd grade that made my classmates cry and the teacher call my mom, to graduating from DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, literature has always been a big factor in my life. As a new writer myself and paired with my long list of books stored on my shelves and in my mind, I simply would like to give my two cents on the stories that caused my inspiration to blossom.
While short book aimed at younger readers, there’s so much to learn for anyone regardless of age that wishes to exercise their terror-inducing writing muscles. I read this book so long ago that I would guess it was back in 2005. While the time frame is hazy, the details and lessons in the book are anything but. The way Zindel handles the horror parts is what gets this book on this list. The antagonist monster is horrendous of course, but it’s the mystery behind it that is what’s more chilling because it is vaguely hinted at but never outright explained.
Even on the final page, when you learn that this creature isn’t anything new nor anything going away, there are still so many mysteries that will not (and maybe should not) be solved. That is why this book is recommended. When things are over-explained, they tend to lose their magic.…
A deadly predator is stalking Salisbury Plain, leaving a blood-curdling legacy of terror, murder and destruction in its wake. Dr Sarah Cawley, an eminent anthropologist, together with her spunky 15-year-old nephew and a local girl, set out to track down and eliminate the terrifying beast.
When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
I read this book at a time when I was feeling dissatisfied with archaeological writing’s ability to capture the feeling of being at an archaeological site—all of the sensory experiences and historical enigma.
I loved that much of this book was written as a series of dialogues that actually took place while walking around Stonehenge. I also love that this text looks directly at different people’s thoughts and experience of the site, and allowed those contestations and disagreements to remain unresolved.
To me, this book felt like the uncertain social experience of finding so much, and yet never enough, through the archaeological process.
This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present. Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
Over the course of my so-called career as a travel writer, the ‘I’ve-Got-A Big-One’ school favoured by the male of the species has ceded ground. Women, less interested in ‘conquering,’ have pioneered a kind of creative non-fiction that suits the travel genre. I prefer it to the blokeish business of seeing how dead you can get. It notices more. As the decades unfurled – Pole to Pole, via Poland – I realised, more and more, the debt I owe to the other women who not only set sail but also unsparingly observed the world that turns within each self.
In many books, Freya Stark (1893 to 1993) covered mostly what we used to call the Middle and Near East – Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan.
In The Lycian Shore she sails in a small yacht along the coast of south-west Turkey. I love this book – it shows what women travel writers can do when they blend history and personal observation. I used to take her chapters apart when I started out to learn how she did it.
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
This is a book about deep listening. It follows two childhood friends – a journalist and a former American soldier – on a kind of road trip through Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the close aftermath of the U.S. war there.
We watch them wrestle over the meaning of the conflict and their places in it. It’s reportage – the author is a third friend, following along, chronicling their conversation and laying out their arguments, blind spots and occasionally questionable reasoning as they try and deal with something almost too big and complicated to get a handle on.
The characters are not generals, or presidents, or militia leaders, they are just two old friends, trying to reckon with a war on a very human scale. Also the watercolored art is gorgeous.
Cartoonist Sarah Glidden follows up her acclaimed debut, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, with Rolling Black- outs, which details her two-month long journey through Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Glidden accompanies her two friends reporters and founders of the journalistic non-profit the Seattle Globalist as they research stories on the Iraq War s effect on the Middle East and, specifically, the war s refugees. Joining them is a former Marine and childhood friend of one of the journalists whose deployment to Iraq in 2007 adds an unexpected and sometimes unwelcome viewpoint, both to the people they come…
I have always been interested in political and social events around me, and being from Turkey, it was inevitable not to be surrounded by the news of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK that has been going on for decades. However, perhaps due to being a member of the non-Muslim minority community of Turkey myself, I have always been interested in the ‘non-mainstream’ explanations of a state-ethnic group conflict. This interest in alternative explanations led me to study an MSc in Nationalism Studies and to a PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, with the focus of my thesis being Kurdishness in Turkey.
Another chronological resume of events in the more recent history of Turkey (since the end of the Cold War), this book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in Turkey.
What made me first interested in this book was its title, Angry Nation, which I thought was very apt to describe the Turkish nation.
Even though this book is about the contemporary history of Turkey in general, its sections on the Kurdish war in the 1990s and war and peace in Kurdistan discuss the state’s actions towards Kurds.
After all, the history of contemporary Turkey would not be complete without talking about its Kurdish and other non-Turkish citizens.
Since its re-emergence as nation-state in 1923, Turkey has often looked like an odd appendix to the West situated in the borderlands of Europe and the Middle East, economically backward, inward looking, marred by political violence, yet a staunch NATO ally, it has been eyed with suspicion by both 'East' and 'West'. The momentous changes in the regional and world order after 1989 have catapulted the country back to the world stage. Ever since, Turkey has turned into a major power broker and has developed into one the largest economies in the world. In the process, however, the country has…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Living in Istanbul, I fell in love with glimpses of Ottoman life still visible there, not only the mosques and palaces but neighborhoods of old wooden houses, like the one where I lived on the upper slopes of the Bosphorus, the small villas and hidden gardens, and quaint customs that have disappeared in modern society. Beginning in my twenties, I spent many years as a social anthropologist in Turkey studying contemporary Turkish society, but I also read about the Ottomans, whose diversity, rich customs, and colorful lifestyles were tragically erased by nationalism and war. The books on my list will let you experience it all.
Reading this novel is like opening a secret back door into history. I was propelled into an intimate atmosphere in the kitchens, boudoirs, living rooms, and offices of those involved in the slow-motion collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
I was privy to the political and personal intrigues of an unforgettable cast of characters, both men and women, as well as to their erotic and emotional lives in a rapidly changing society.
A “magical, marvellous” epic of an empire in collapse: Book one in the acclaimed Ottoman Quartet by the award-winning Turkish author and political dissident (La Stampa, Italy).
Tracking the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire, Ahmet Altan’s Ottoman Quartet spans fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-WWI rise of Atatu¨rk as leader of the new Turkey. In Like a Sword Wound, a modern-day resident of Istanbul is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, finally free to tell their stories “under the broad, dark wings of death.” Among the characters who come to life…
