An Introduction to the Ancient World offers a thorough survey of the history of the ancient Near East, Greece and Rome. Covering the social, political, economic and cultural processes that have influenced later western and Near Eastern civilisations, this volume considers subjects such as the administrative structures, economies and religions of the ancient Near East, Athenian democracy, the development of classical Greek literature, the interaction of cultures in the Hellenistic world, the p...

This book explains, by following the mainstream of the history of the computus paschalis, i.e. the science developed from the beginning of the third century on behalf of the determination of the date of Paschal Sunday, which rised around AD 250 in Alexandria (Egypt), how of old the date of Easter depends on the phases of the moon, and provides, on the basis of NASA’s Six Millennium Catalog of Phases of the Moon, the reconstruction of the two strongly different lost Metonic 19-year lunar cyc...

The European Beta-tradition is the second in the series of five Homeric oral traditions that Ward Blondé discovered in the Iliad. In contrast to the Mykenaian Alpha-tradition, the Beta-tradition has its origins in the proto-Celtic Europe of the Tumulus and Urnfield cultures; it describes a society of clans who fought each other to death on the battlefield. The European Beta-tradition is so realistic and varied in its descriptions that it must have originated in a warrior culture.

Blondé’s...