THE REIGN OF RAMESSES III has long intrigued scholars and laypersons alike, both because this pharaoh’s reign took place during a watershed period in history, and because of the remarkable preservation of his majestic “Mansion of a Million Years” at Medinet Habu. With Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero (University of Michigan Press, 2012), volume editors Eric H. Cline and David | Read More »
THE ISOLATIONIST MODEL of looking at ancient civilizations, from Pharaonic Egypt to Kassite Babylonia to Classical Greece, has increasingly fallen out of fashion in recent years as more and more scholars have begun to realize, and to study, the deep interconnections between ancient civilizations, particularly from the Late Bronze Age onward. In The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History, Nancy H. Demand, professor emerita of | Read More »
The voluminous Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia, which boasts five sections, 52 chapters, and 54 authors, truly covers every topic that can be dealt with in 1,174 typewritten pages. Unfortunately, the attempted geographic and temporal scope – the entirety of the Anatolian peninsula over the course of nearly 10,000 years – would require several volumes this length to cover in full. As a result, some | Read More »
WHAT ROLE DO culture myths – the stories civilizations tell about the beginning of law, medicine, arts and sciences, and civilization itself – have in defining a group’s legitimacy within society? In Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, Will McCants, a Middle East expert at CNA’s Center for Strategic Students and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, addresses this issue with | Read More »
During his incredibly successful [/snark] trip to Europe last week, President Obama rejected an invitation from French president Nicolas Sarkozy to visit Normandy, France — the site of the 1944 D-Day beach landing. The reason given by the Obama administration? They didn’t want to offend the Germans by having the U.S. president visit the site where over 4,400 allied soldiers died in the operation that | Read More »
Tomorrow, we will witness one of the great events in human history. Yes, an African-American will be inaugurated president for the first time since America’s founding — and I’ll get to that momentarily — but that’s not what I’m referring to here. What I’m talking about here is far more underrated, and far more consistently historic. You see, tomorrow we will witness that rarest of | Read More »
Below the fold is the entire text of General David Petraeus’s final letter to troops before departing his command of Multinational Force-Iraq and assuming leadership of United States Central Command. A scan of the original can be seen in .pdf form here.
Let’s take a look at a few images to see if we can figure out just what it is the DNC is going for with their pseudo-Classical facade on Obama’s stage tonight. Now, anybody who paid attention for more than five minutes in ancient history class can spot several defects in the facade if the intent was to make an architecturally correct Greek temple. The | Read More »
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