The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East

John G. Gammie, Leo G. Perdue

Eisenbrauns, 1990 - 545 pages

Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period 

Oded Lipschitz, Manfred Oeming

Eisenbrauns, 2006 - 721 pages

"In July 2003, a conference was held at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), focusing on the people and land of Judah during the 5th and early 4th centuries B.C.E. - the period when the Persian Empire held sway over the entire ancient Near East. This volume publishes the papers of the participants in the working group that attended the Heidelberg conference." "Participants whose contributions appear here include: Y. Amit, B. Becking, J. Berquist, J. Blenkinsopp, M. Dandamayev, D. Edelman, T. Eskenazi, A. Fantalkin and O. Tal, L. Fried, L. Grabbe, S. Japhet, J. Kessler, E. A. Knauf, G. Knoppers, R. Kratz, A. Lemaire, O. Lipschits, H. Liss, M. Oeming, L. Pearce, F. Polak, B. Porten and A. Yardeni, E. Stern, D. Ussishkin, D. Vanderhooft, and I. Wright." "The conference was the second of three meetings: the first, held at Tel Aviv in May 2001, was published as Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period by Eisenbrauns in 2003. A third conference focusing on Judah and the Judeans in the Hellenistic era was held in the summer of 2005, at Munster, Germany, and will also be published by Eisenbrauns.

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Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin literature

Albert de Jong

BRILL, 1997 - 496 pages

This is the first full treatment of the Greek and Latin references to Zoroastrianism since the pioneering works of Benveniste, Bidez & Cumont, and Clemen. It focuses on the possibilities offered by the classical reports on Zoroastrianism to reconstruct the history of that faith.The book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with introductory problems concerning ancient religious ethnography and current views of the history of Zoroastrianism. The second section consists of commentaries on five selected passages. The third section offers a thematical overview of the materials and their relevance for the history of Iranian religions.Apart from offering introductions to a wide range of debates and topics in Classics and Iranian studies, the book aims to illustrate the diversity of beliefs and practices in ancient Zoroastrianism.

 

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Diodorus Siculus The Persian Wars to the Fall of Athens: Books 11-14.34 (480-401 BCE)

Diodorus (Siculus.), Peter Green

University of Texas Press, 2010-02-15 - 332 pages

Only one surviving source provides a continuous narrative of Greek history from Xerxes' invasion to the Wars of the Successors following the death of Alexander the Great--the Bibliotheke, or "Library," produced by Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 90-30 BCE). Yet generations of scholars have disdained Diodorus as a spectacularly unintelligent copyist who only reproduced, and often mangled, the works of earlier historians. Arguing for a thorough critical reappraisal of Diodorus as a minor but far from idiotic historian himself, Peter Green published Diodorus Siculus, Books 11-12.37.1, a fresh translation, with extensive commentary, of the portion of Diodorus's history dealing with the period 480-431 BCE, the so-called "Golden Age" of Athens.
This is the only recent modern English translation of the Bibliotheke in existence. In the present volume--the first of two covering Diodorus's text up to the death of Alexander--Green expands his translation of Diodorus up to Athens' defeat after the Peloponnesian War. In contrast to the full scholarly apparatus in his earlier volume (the translation of which is incorporated) the present volume's purpose is to give students, teachers, and general readers an accessible version of Diodorus's history. Its introduction and notes are especially designed for this audience and provide an up-to-date overview of fifth-century Greece during the years that saw the unparalleled flowering of drama, architecture, philosophy, historiography, and the visual arts for which Greece still remains famous.

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Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium 

Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, Peter John Rhodes

Oxford University Press, 2007-04-12 - 453 pages

Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early fifth century BC. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaisssance world. Extensively illustrated and accessibly written, with a detailed Introduction and bibliographies, this book will interest historians, classicists, and students of both comparative and modern literatures.

 

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Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars

Jon D. Mikalson

Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003-09-15 - 269 pages

The two great Persian invasions of Greece, in 490 and 480-79 B.C., both repulsed by the Greeks, provide our best opportunity for understanding the interplay of religion and history in ancient Greece on a large scale. Using the Historiesof Herodotus as well as other historical and archaeological sources, Jon Mikalson shows how the Greeks practiced their religion at this pivotal moment in their history. In the period of the invasions and the years immediately afterward, the Greeks--internationally, state by state, and sometimes individually--turned to their deities, using religious practices to influence, understand, and commemorate events that were threatening their very existence. Greeks prayed and sacrificed; made and fulfilled vows to the gods; consulted oracles; interpreted omens and dreams; created cults, sanctuaries, and festivals; and offered dozens of dedications to their gods and heroes--all in relation to known historical events. By portraying the human situations and historical circumstances in which Greeks practiced their religion, Mikalson advances our knowledge of the role of religion in fifth-century Greece and reveals a religious dimension of the Persian Wars that has been heretofore overlooked.

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The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East

 

John G. Gammie, Leo G. Perdue

Eisenbrauns, 1990 - 545 pages

Prophets and prophecy in the ancient Near East

Martti Nissinen, Robert Kriech Ritner, Choon Leong Seow, Peter Machinist

Society of Biblical Lit, 2003 - 273 pages

The first book to gather ancient Near Eastern, extrabiblical sources containing prophetic words or references to prophetic activities. Among the 140 texts included are oracles of prophets, personal letters, formal inscriptions, and administrative documents from ancient Mesopotamia and Levant from the second and first millennia B.C.E. Most of the texts come from Mari (eighteenth century B.C.E.) and Assyria (seventh century B.C.E.). In addition, the volume provides new translations of the Egyptian "Report of Wenamon and of various texts from Syria-Palestine containing allusions to prophets and prophetic activities. The volume illumines the cultural background of biblical prophecy and its parallels. It provides scholars with important information about different types and forms of transmission of divine words, and makes these valuable primary source materials accessible to students and general readers in contemporary English along with transcriptions of the original languages, indexes, and an extensive bibliography.

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