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Three Cities After Hitler
Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders
Andrew Demshuk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Winner, 2023 SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award

Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

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Paper Memory
A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World
Matthew Lundin
Harvard University Press, 2012

Paper Memory tells the story of one man’s mission to preserve for posterity the memory of everyday life in sixteenth-century Germany. Matthew Lundin takes us inside the mind of an undistinguished German burgher named Hermann Weinsberg, whose personal writings allow us to witness firsthand the great transformations of early modernity: the crisis of the Reformation, the rise of an urban middle class, and the information explosion of the print revolution. This sensitive, faithful portrait reveals a man who sought to make sense of the changes that were unsettling the foundations of his world.

Weinsberg’s decision to undertake the monumental task of documenting his life was astonishing, since he was neither prince nor bishop, but a Catholic lawyer from Cologne with no special claim to fame or fortune. Although he knew that his contemporaries would consider his work vain and foolish, he dutifully recorded the details of his existence, from descriptions of favorite meals to catalogs of his sleeping habits, from the gossip of quarreling neighbors to confessions of his private hopes, fears, and beliefs. More than fifty years—and thousands of pages—later, Weinsberg conferred his Gedenkbuch, or Memory Book, to his descendants, charging them to ensure its safekeeping, for without his careful chronicle, “it would be as if we had never been.”

Desperate to save his past from oblivion, Weinsberg hoped to write himself into the historical record. Paper Memory rescues this not-so-ordinary man from obscurity, as Lundin’s perceptive and graceful prose recovers his extraordinary story.

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Becoming a Nazi Town
Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars
David Imhoof
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Becoming a Nazi Town reveals the ways in which ordinary Germans changed their cultural lives and their politics from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Casting the origins of Nazism in a new light, David Imhoof charts the process by which Weimar and Nazi culture flowed into each other. He analyzes this dramatic transition by looking closely at three examples of everyday cultural life in the mid-sized German city of Göttingen: sharpshooting, an opera festival, and cinema.

Imhoof draws on individual and community experiences over a series of interwar periods to highlight and connect shifts in culture, politics, and everyday life. He demonstrates how Nazi leaders crafted cultural policies based in part on homegrown cultural practices of the 1920s and argues that overdrawn distinctions between “Weimar” and “Nazi” culture did not always conform to most Germans’ daily lives. Further, Imhoof presents experiences in Göttingen as a reflection of the common reality of many German towns beyond the capital city of Berlin.

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Race in the Crucible of War
African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam
Gerald F. Goodwin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable.  

In Race in the Crucible of War, Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home.

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East & West
Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock
T. Corey Brennan
Harvard University Press, 2008

The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here a distinguished international group of ancient historians explores the classical antiquity that Bowersock has given us over a scholarly career of almost fifty years.

The topics offered in East and West range throughout the ancient world from the second century BCE to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla’s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

This collection of essays represents the first attempt to take in Glen Bowersock’s well-developed scholarly interests as a whole. The contributors open up new avenues that often run well beyond the conventional geographical and temporal boundaries of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, leading to a host of fresh insights into antique thought and life.

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Interpreting Late Antiquity
Essays on the Postclassical World
Edited by G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar
Harvard University Press, 2001
The era of late antiquity—from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth—was marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory. In these eleven in-depth essays, drawn from the award-winning reference work Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on this period's culture and history.
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Late Antiquity
A Guide to the Postclassical World
G. W. Bowersock
Harvard University Press, 1999

The first book of its kind, this richly informative and comprehensive guide to the world of late antiquity offers the latest scholarship to the researcher along with great reading pleasure to the browser. In eleven comprehensive essays and in over 500 encyclopedic entries, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on the history and culture of an era marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory.

By extending the commonly accepted chronological and territorial boundaries of the period--to encompass Roman, Byzantine, Sassanian, and early Islamic cultures, from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth--this guide makes new connections and permits revealing comparisons. Consult the article on "Angels" and discover their meaning in Islamic as well as classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. Refer to "Children," "Concubinage," and "Divorce" for a fascinating interweaving of information on the family. Read the essay on "Barbarians and Ethnicity" and see how a topic as current as the construction of identity played out in earlier times, from the Greeks and Romans to the Turks, Huns, and Saxons. Turn to "Empire Building" to learn how the empire of Constantine was supported by architecture and ceremony.

Or follow your own path through the broad range of entries on politics, manufacturing and commerce, the arts, philosophy, religion, geography, ethnicity, and domestic life. Each entry introduces readers to another facet of the postclassical world: historic figures and places, institutions, burial customs, food, money, public life, and amusements. A splendid selection of illustrations enhances the portrait.

The intriguing era of late antiquity emerges completely and clearly, viewed in a new light, in a guide that will be relished by scholars and general readers alike.

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Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Arnaldo Momigliano
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the foremost classical historiographers of the twentieth century. This collection of twenty-one carefully selected essays is remarkable both in the depth of its scholarship and the breadth of its subjects. Moving with ease across the centuries, Momigliano supplements powerful readings of writers in the Greek, Jewish, and Roman traditions, such as Tacitus and Polybius, with writings that focus on later historians, such as Vico and Croce. Charmingly written and concise, these pieces range from review essays reprinted from the New York Review of Books to treatises on the nature of historical scholarship. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography is a brilliant reminder of Momigliano’s profound knowledge of classical civilization and his gift for deftly handling prose.
            With a new Foreword by Anthony Grafton, this volume is essential reading for any student of classics or historiography.
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The Muse of History
The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century
Oswyn Murray
Harvard University Press, 2024

How the modern world understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today.

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism.

Oswyn Murray draws powerful conclusions from this historiography, using the ever-changing narrative of ancient Greece to illuminate grand theories of human society. Analyzing the influence of historians and philosophers including Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Braudel, Murray also considers how coming generations might perceive the Greeks. Along the way, The Muse of History offers rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of figures who shaped the study of ancient Greece, some devotedly cited to this day and others forgotten. We sit in on a class with Arnaldo Momigliano; meet Moses Finley after his arrival in England; eavesdrop on Paul Veyne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and rediscover Michel Foucault.

A thrilling work that rewrites established scholarly traditions and locates important ideas in unexpected places, The Muse of History reminds us that the meaning of the past is always made in and for the present.

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From Abortion to Pederasty
Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
This volume had its origins in a very specific situation: the teaching of ancient texts dealing with rape. Ensuing discussions among a group of scholars expanded outwards from this to other sensitive areas. Ancient sources raise a variety of issues—slavery, infanticide, abortion, rape, pederasty, domestic violence, death, sexuality—that may be difficult to discuss in a classroom where some students will have had experiences similar to those described in classical texts. They may therefore be reluctant to speak in class, and even the reading themselves may be painful.
 
From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy, is committed to the proposition that it is important to continue to teach texts that raise these issues, not to avoid them. In this volume, classicists and ancient historians from around the world address how to teach such topics as rape, pederasty, and slavery in the classics classroom. The contributors present the concrete ways in which they themselves have approached such issues in their course planning and in their responses to students’ needs.
 
A main objective of From Abortion to Pederasty is to combat arguments, from both the left and the right, that the classics are elitist and irrelevant. Indeed, they are so relevant, and so challenging, as to be painful at times. Another objective is to show how Greco-Roman culture and history can provide a way into a discussion that might have been difficult or even traumatic in other settings. Thus it will provide teaching tools for dealing with uncomfortable topics in the classroom, including homophobia and racism.
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Artifact and Artifice
Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian
Jonathan M. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Is it possible to trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in Athens? Was there really an individual named Romulus, and if so, when did he found Rome? Is the tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica home to the apostle Peter? To answer these questions, we need both dirt and words—that is, archaeology and history. Bringing the two fields into conversation, Artifact and Artifice offers an exciting excursion into the relationship between ancient history and archaeology and reveals the possibilities and limitations of using archaeological evidence in writing about the past.
 
Jonathan M. Hall employs a series of well-known cases to investigate how historians may ignore or minimize material evidence that contributes to our knowledge of antiquity unless it correlates with information gleaned from texts. Dismantling the myth that archaeological evidence cannot impart information on its own, he illuminates the methodological and political principles at stake in using such evidence and describes how the disciplines of history and classical archaeology may be enlisted to work together. He also provides a brief sketch of how the discipline of classical archaeology evolved and considers its present and future role in historical approaches to antiquity. Written in clear prose and packed with maps, photos, and drawings, Artifact and Artifice will be an essential book for undergraduates in the humanities.
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The Classical Tradition
Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis
Harvard University Press, 2010

“A vast cabinet of curiosities.”—Stephen Greenblatt

“Eclectic rather than exhaustive, less an encyclopedia than a buffet.”—Frederic Raphael, Literary Review

How do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus’s sirens to an ambulance’s? The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

Arranged alphabetically from Academy to Zoology, the essays—designed and written to serve scholars, students, and the general reader alike—show how the Classical tradition has shaped human endeavors from art to government, mathematics to medicine, drama to urban planning, legal theory to popular culture.

At once authoritative and accessible, learned and entertaining, comprehensive and surprising, and accompanied by an extensive selection of illustrations, this guide illuminates the vitality of the Classical tradition that still surrounds us today.

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Classical and Modern Interactions
Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturalism, Decline, and Other Issues
By Karl Galinsky
University of Texas Press, 1992

Postmodernism, multiculturalism, the alleged decline of the United States, deconstruction, leadership, and values—these topics have been at the forefront of contemporary intellectual and cultural debate and are likely to remain so for the near future. Participants in the debate can usefully enlarge the perspective to a comparison between the Greco-Roman world and contemporary society. In this thought-provoking work, a noted classics scholar tests the ancient-modern comparison, showing what it can add to the contemporary debates and what its limitations are.

Writing for intellectually adventurous readers, Galinsky explores Greece and Rome as multicultural societies, debates the merits of classicism in postmodern architecture, discusses the reign of Augustus in terms of modern leadership theories, and investigates the modern obsession with finding parallels between the supposed "decline and fall" of Rome and the "decay" of U.S. society.

Within these discussions, Galinsky shows the continuing vitality of the classical tradition in the contemporary world. The Greek and Roman civilizations have provided us not only with models for conscious adaptation but also points for radical departures. This ability to change and innovate from classical models is crucial, Galinsky maintains. It creates a reciprocal process whereby contemporary issues are projected into the past while aspects of the ancient world are redefined in terms of current approaches.

These essays result in a balanced assessment and stimulating restatement of some major issues in both contemporary U.S. society and the Greco-Roman world. The book, which speaks to a wide interdisciplinary audience, is based on a series of lectures that Galinsky gave as a national visiting scholar for Phi Beta Kappa. It concludes with a discussion of the role of classical studies in the United States today.

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Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder
Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean
Nassos Papalexandrou
University of Texas Press, 2021

The eighth and seventh centuries BCE were a time of flourishing exchange between the Mediterranean and the Near East. One of the period’s key imports to the Hellenic and Italic worlds was the image of the griffin, a mythical monster that usually possesses the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. In particular, bronze cauldrons bore griffin protomes—figurative attachments showing the neck and head of the beast. Crafted in fine detail, the protomes were made to appear full of vigor, transfixing viewers.

Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder takes griffin cauldrons as case studies in the shifting material and visual universes of preclassical antiquity, arguing that they were perceived as lifelike monsters that introduced the illusion of verisimilitude to Mediterranean arts. The objects were placed in the tombs of the wealthy (Italy, Cyprus) and in sanctuaries (Greece), creating fantastical environments akin to later cabinets of curiosities. Yet griffin cauldrons were accessible only to elites, ensuring that the new experience of visuality they fostered was itself a symbol of status. Focusing on the sensory encounter of this new visuality, Nassos Papalexandrou shows how spaces made wondrous fostered novel subjectivities and social distinctions.

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The Shotgun Method
The Demography of the Ancient Greek City-State Culture
Mogens Herman Hansen
University of Missouri Press, 2006

Although the polis, or city-state, defined the essence of classical Greek civilization, evidence of its most basic characteristics is woefully inadequate. Now a leading scholar in the evaluation of data from the ancient world sheds new light on how those units were constituted.

            In a work of cutting-edge research, Mogens Herman Hansen develops a novel method for estimating the overall size and local distribution of the Greek population throughout the ancient world—in both the Greek homeland and its colonies—and explains his reconstruction step by step.  Reflecting the innovative work of the Copenhagen Polis Centre in its 2004 inventory of archaic and classical Greek city-states, Hansen’s book makes it possible for the first time to assess the total population of the ancient Greek world.
            For 232 out of circa 1,000 city-states, the size of the urban center can be estimated, and for 636 city-states, we have an idea about the size of the territory. Employing a “shotgun method” Hansen derives approximate population figures and argues that, in the age of Alexander the Great, the population of all the Greek city-states must have totaled some 8-10 million people. His new estimates take into account not only adult male citizens, but all inhabitants—citizens, foreigners, and slaves of both sexes and all ages. In addressing often-conflicting views on estimating populations, their distribution in various regions, and their settlement patterns within individual states, Hansen particularly challenges the long-standing opinion that the majority of ancient Greeks lived a rural life outside of poleis, and he calls for a reconsideration of long-held assumptions about the prevalence of a subsistence economy with little long-distance trade. 
            Although quantifications of ancient history are never precise, they can provide us with valuable information about ancient societies.  The Shotgun Method is a rigorous evaluation of data that puts antiquity in a new light and provides a new context for understanding many aspects of Greek history.
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Use and Appreciation of Mycenaean Pottery
In the Levant, Cyprus and Italy (ca. 1600-1200 BC)
Gert Jan vana Wijngaarden
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Pottery made in the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age has been found in many parts of the Mediterranean—Mycenaean dinner and storage vessels, for example, have been discovered at some four hundred sites outside Greece. These artifacts provide one of the main sources of information on Mycenaean trade and interregional contact, but the role of pottery in international exchange during this period is still not properly understood. Gert Jan van Wijngaarden brings us closer with this study, which investigates patterns of consumption for the three biggest importers of Mycenaean pottery: the Levant, Cyprus, and Italy.
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Herodotus in the Anthropocene
Joel Alden Schlosser
University of Chicago Press, 2020
We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activities are recognized for effecting potentially catastrophic environmental change. In this book, Joel Alden Schlosser argues that our current state of affairs calls for a creative political response, and he finds inspiration in an unexpected source: the ancient writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. Focusing on the Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Schlosser identifies a cluster of concepts that allow us to better grasp the dynamic complexity of a world in flux.

            Schlosser shows that the Histories, which chronicle the interactions among the Greek city-states and their neighbors that culminated in the Persian Wars, illuminate a telling paradox: at those times when humans appear capable of exerting more influence than ever before, they must also assert collective agency to avoid their own downfall. Here, success depends on nomoi, or the culture, customs, and laws that organize human communities and make them adaptable through cooperation. Nomoi arise through sustained contact between humans and their surroundings and function best when practiced willingly and with the support of strong commitments to the equality of all participants. Thus, nomoi are the very substance of political agency and, ultimately, the key to freedom and ecological survival because they guide communities to work together to respond to challenges. An ingenious contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and ecology, Herodotus in the Anthropocene reminds us that the best perspective on the present can often be gained through the lens of the past.
 
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Peiresc’s Mediterranean World
Peter N. Miller
Harvard University Press, 2015

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships’ captains at the center of Europe’s sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond.

“Peter Miller’s reanimation of Peiresc, the master of the Mediterranean, is the best kind of case study. It not only makes us appreciate the range and richness of one man’s experience and the originality of his thought, but also suggests that he had many colleagues in his deepest and most imaginative inquiries. Most important, it gives us hope that their archives too will be opened up by scholars skillful and imaginative enough to make them speak to us.”
—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

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The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914
Paul G. Halpern
Harvard University Press, 1971

During the early part of the twentieth century all the Mediterranean powers were transforming or at least expanding their navies from mere coastal defense forces to modern war machines, thus adding to a highly unstable political situation. The naval challenge of the Triple Alliance to Britain and especially to France was a serious one. Indeed, this study demonstrates that the Mediterranean situation had great influence on the plans and estimates of the British Admiralty.

Paul G. Halpern has uncovered new material in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna that helps to explain the plans and dispositions of Entente and Triple Alliance forces at the outbreak of the war.

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Mediterranean in Dis/order
Space, Power, and Identity
Rosita Di Peri and Daniel Meier, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Mediterranean in Dis/order reveals the connection between space and politics by examining the role that space has played in insurgencies, conflicts, uprisings, and mobilities in the Mediterranean region. With this approach, the authors are able to challenge well-established beliefs about the power structure of the state across different disciplines (including political science, history, sociology, geography, and anthropology), and its impact on the conception, production, and imagination of space in the broader Mediterranean. Further, they contribute to particular areas of studies, such as migration, political Islam, mobilization, and transition to democracy, among others. The book, infusing critical theory, unveils original and revelatory case studies in Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Morocco, and the EU Mediterranean policy, through a various set of actors and practices—from refugees and migrations policies, to Islamist or students’ movements, architectural sites, or movies. This multidisciplinary perspective on space and power provides a valuable resource for practitioners interested in how space, context, and time interact to produce institutions, political subjectivities, and asymmetries of power, particularly since the turning point of the Arab uprisings. The book also helps readers understand the conditions under which the uprisings develop, giving a clearer picture about various national, regional, and international dynamics.

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Early Greece
Second Edition
Oswyn Murray
Harvard University Press, 1993

Within the space of three centuries leading up to the great Persian invasion of 480 BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilization that dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt—a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy, and politics were to establish the canons of the the Western world.

Oswyn Murray places this remarkable development in the context of Mediterranean civilization. He shows how contact with the East catalyzed the transformation of art and religion, analyzes the invention of the alphabet and the conceptual changes it brought, describes the expansions of Greece in trade and colonization, and investigates the relationship between military technology and political progress in the overthrow of aristocratic governments.

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Nomodeiktes
Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald
Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Fifth-century Athens has inspired generations of students and scholars. Its citizens’ profound discoveries in literature, philosophy, and politics – to name but a few areas – have shaped the thinking of much of Western thought and have provided many of the joys and the tribulations that touch our daily lives.
 
Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald offers fascinating discussions of many of these areas, and it helps illuminate ways in which modern perceptions of this complex period are right and are wrong. Important observations are made on Greek historians and historiography, on politics and society, and on Greek philosophy and literature. The analyses of these major areas of investigation will be very useful for all interested in this centrally important period and for those who know the lure of that vivid and compelling city, Athens.
 
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The Hellenistic World
Revised Edition
F. W. Walbank
Harvard University Press, 1993
The vast empire that Alexander the Great left at his death in 323 BC has few parallels. For the next three hundred years the Greeks controlled a complex of monarchies and city-states that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to India. F. W. Walbank’s lucid and authoritative history of that Hellenistic world examines political events, describes the different social systems and mores of the people under Greek rule, traces important developments in literature and science, and discusses the new religious movements.
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Archaeology of the Olympics
The Olympics and Other Festivals in Antiquity
Wendy J. Raschke
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

The Archaeology of the Olympics presents a stirring reevaluation of the Olympic Games (and related festivals) as they actually were, not as the ancient Greeks wished—and we still wish—they might have been. Historians, archaeologists, and classicists examine the evidence to ask such questions as, How did the athletes train? What did they eat? Can we trace the roots of the games as far back as the Bronze Age of Crete and Mycenae? Or even to Anatolia, where similar athletic activities occurred? Were the ancient games really so free of political overtones as modern Olympic rhetoric urges us to believe?

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Black Athena
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985
Edited by Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 1987

Winner of the American Book Award, 1990.

Could Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian thought? Is it possible that the Pythagorean theory was conceived on the shores of the Nile and the Euphrates rather than in ancient Greece? Could it be that Western civilization was born on the so-called Dark Continent? For almost two centuries, Western scholars have given little credence to the possibility of such scenarios.

In Black Athena, an audacious three-volume series that strikes at the heart of today's most heated culture wars, Martin Bernal challenges Eurocentric attitudes by calling into question two of the longest-established explanations for the origins of classical civilization. The Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers, or "Aryans," of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.

This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages-Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, confirms the fact that in Greece an Indo-European people was culturally dominated by speakers of Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic.

Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.

"A work which has much to offer the lay reader, and its multi-disciplinary sweep is refreshing: it is an important contribution to his to historiography and the sociology of knowledge, written with elegance, wit, and self-awareness... a thrilling journey... his account is as gripping a tale of scholarly detection and discovery as one could hope to find." -- Margaret Drabble, The Observer

"An astonishing work, breathtaking bold in conception and passionately written... salutary, exciting, and in its historiographical aspects, convincing." -- G. W. Bowersock, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

"The next far in book.... A formidable work of intellectual history." -- Christian Science Monitor

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Black Athena
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence
Bernal, Martin
Rutgers University Press, 1991

Winner of the American Book Award, 1990.

This volume is the second in a projected four-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. The model current today is the Aryan Model, according to which Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers or "Aryans" of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was the model maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that more Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. In these and later volumes, Martin Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model. According to this, the Indo-European aspects of Greek language and culture should be recognized as fundamental and the considerable non-Indo-European elements should be seen largely as Egyptian and Levantine additions to this basis.

Volume II is concerned with the archaeological and documentary evidence for contacts between Egypt and the Levant on the one hand and the Aegean on the other, during the Bronze Age from c. 3400 B.C. to c. 1100 B.C. These approaches are supplemented by information from later Greek myths, legends, religious cults, and language. The author concludes that contact between the two regions was far more extensive and influential than is generally believed. In the introduction to this volume, Bernal also responds to some reviews and criticisms of Volume I of Black Athena.

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Black Athena
The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985
Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”
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Black Athena
The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilation Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence
Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages – Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers.

Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.
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Black Athena
The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence
Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”

This volume is the second in a three-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. Volume II is concerned with the archaeological and documentary evidence for contacts between Egypt and the Levant on the one hand, and the Aegean on the other, during the Bronze Age from c. 34000 BC to c. 1100 BC. These approaches are supplemented by information from later Greek myths, legends, religious cults, and language. The author concludes that contact between the two regions was far more extensive and influential than is generally believed. In the introduction to this volume, Bernal also responds to some reviews and criticism of Volume I of Black Athena.
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Heresy in the University
The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals
Jacques Berlinerblau
Rutgers University Press, 1999
One of the most controversial books to come out of the academy in the last fifteen years is Martin Bernal's Black Athena. It has been a true cause celebre. Afrocentrists have both praised the book and claimed that Bernal stole from the work of black scholars to create his study of the Afroasiastic roots of classical civilization. Classicists feel passionately about what they perceive as an attack from an outsider on the origins not only of ancient Greece but of their own discipline. It seems that everyone has something to say about the book; the question is how many really understand it. In Heresy in the University, Jacques Berlinerblau provides an exegesis of the contents of Black Athena, making it accessible to a wider audience. As he clarifies and restates Bernal's opus, Berlinerblau identifies Bernal's flaws in reasoning and gaps in evidence. He cuts to the heart of Bernal's prose, singling out the key points of Bernal's argument, explaining and arranging them in a cogent manner. Berlinerblau addresses the critics' really important objections, including his own, and links each of them to the appropriate substantive argument in Black Athena. He goes beyond simple summary and exposition to present the underlying --stated and unstated--agendas of Bernal and his critics. Ultimately, he exposes both sides and asks what the flawed reasoning from all concerned reveals about the stakes in this key academic dispute and what that, in turn, says about the modern academy. Jacques Berlinerblau is an assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Hofstra University.
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Black Athena Writes Back
Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics
Martin Bernal
Duke University Press, 2001
In Black Athena Writes Back Martin Bernal responds to the passionate debates set off by the 1987 publication of his book Black Athena. Producing a shock wave of reaction from scholars, Black Athena argued that the development of Greek civilization was heavily influenced by Afroasiatic civilizations. Moreover, Bernal asserted that this knowledge had been deliberately obscured by the rampant racism of nineteenth-century Europeans who could not abide the notion that Greek society—for centuries recognized as the originating culture of Europe—had its origins in Africa and Southwest Asia.
The subsequent rancor among classicists over Bernal’s theory and accusations was picked up in the popular media, and his suggestion that Greek culture had its origin in Africa was widely derided. In a report on 60 Minutes, for example, it was suggested that Bernal’s hypothesis was essentially an attempt to provide blacks with self-esteem so that they would feel included in the march of progress.
In Black Athena Writes Back Bernal provides additional documentation to back up his thesis, as well as offering persuasive explanations of why traditional scholarship on the subject remains inaccurate and why specific arguments lobbed against his theories are themselves faulty.
Black Athena Writes Back requires no prior familiarity with either the Black Athena hypothesis or with the arguments advanced against it. It will be essential reading for those who have been following this long-running debate, as well as for those just discovering this fascinating subject.
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The Orientalizing Revolution
Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age
Walter Burkert
Harvard University Press, 1992
The splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, pointing toward a balanced picture of the archaic period “in which, under the influence of the Semitic East—from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers—Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean.”
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Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece
Marcel Detienne
Harvard University Press, 2009
Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Historians and ethnologists can pool a wealth of knowledge about different cultures across space and time. Their joint task is to analyze human societies and to understand cultural products. Comparative analysis involves working together in an experimental and constructive enterprise. Marcel Detienne, alerted by dissonances, tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but also to the questions and concepts that arise from the reaction. What does it mean to found something, or rather to establish a territory, or to have or not have roots? What is a site or a place?
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Treasure Map
A Guide to the Delian Inventories
Richard Hamilton
University of Michigan Press, 2015
In the fourth century BC, the Athenians introduced to the sacred isle of Delos the habit of making marble inscriptions that noted inventories of goods in religious precincts. These inscriptions are now quite damaged and badly preserved, but they offer a trove of information about religious practice on this most unusual island. Richard Hamilton has tackled the difficult task of examining and analyzing these inscriptions and provides a wealth of information about the inventories and the island of Delos.

Hamilton offers detailed insight into the workings of one of the most important Greek sanctuaries, bringing together information that is otherwise widely scattered in a number of modern and ancient languages. He offers English translations of the inventories and presents extensive notes on objects recorded, on how the inventories were listed and weighed, and on aspects of Delian life and politics.

Treasure Map is a major resource for scholars and students of Greek religion and history, epigraphy, ancient economics, and politics.
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Greek and Roman Life
Ian Jenkins
Harvard University Press, 1986
Archaeologists have recovered from the Greek and Roman world a wealth of objects that were once in daily use—toilet articles, writing implements, toys, and kitchen utensils—some of which are strikingly similar to those still used today. Other objects were decorated with scenes of everyday life. In vase paintings, for example, we meet the Greeks at home: we see men enjoying a drinking party, women spinning and weaving, a mother nursing an infant, even a baby sitting on a potty. By concentrating on domestic life, Jenkins shows us a different side of classical antiquity from that presented through the more traditional forms of political and military history. Although this book places particular emphasis upon home and family, Ian Jenkins also describes some of the more public aspects of Greek and Roman times, such as the theater, chariot racing, and gladiators. This colorful volume is fully illustrated, chiefly from the collections of the British Museum.
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Greek Thought
A Guide to Classical Knowledge
Edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. LloydTranslated under the direction of Catherine Porter
Harvard University Press, 2000

Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought--investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this book reminds us of what our own reflections owe to theirs.

In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pursuit of knowledge, major thinkers, and schools of thought, this work shows us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and philosophical ideas, such as those on Utopia and the Critique of Politics, Observation and Research, and Ethics; others on specific fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea; studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek civilization--and that Aristotle considered a natural and universal trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations, this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek intellectual adventure.

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A Guide to Greek Thought
Major Figures and Trends
Jacques Brunschwig
Harvard University Press, 2003
The philosophers, historians, and scientists of ancient Greece inaugurated and nourished the tradition of Western thought. This volume, drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, gives fresh insight into the originality of major figures and the legacy of important currents of thought.
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The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge
Jacques Brunschwig
Harvard University Press, 2003
Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In this volume drawn from the reference work Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, major scholars take up basic topics in philosophy and science, offering an account of the extraordinary explosion of desire for knowledge in the classical Greek world.
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The Greeks
Edited by Jean-Pierre Vernant
University of Chicago Press, 1995
What do we mean when we speak of ancient Greeks? A person from the Archaic period? The war hero celebrated by Homer? Or the fourth century "political animal" described by Aristotle? In this book, leading scholars show what it meant to be Greek during the classical period of Greek civilization.

The Greeks offers the most complete portraits available of typical Greek personages from Athens to Sparta, Arcadia, Thessaly and Epirus to the city-states of Asia Minor, to the colonies of the Black Sea, southern Italy, and Sicily. Looking at the citizen, the religious believer, the soldier, the servant, the peasant, and others, they show what—in the Greek relationships with the divine, with nature, with others, and with the self—made him "different" in his ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

The contributors to this volume are Jean-Pierre Vernant, Claude Mosse, Yvon Garlan, Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, James Redfield, Charles Segal, Oswyn Murray, Mario Vegetti, and Philippe Borgeaud.
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Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece
Manipulating Material Culture
Lisa C. Nevett, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2017
In the modern world, objects and buildings speak eloquently about their creators. Status, gender identity, and cultural affiliations are just a few characteristics we can often infer about such material culture. But can we make similar deductions about the inhabitants of the first millennium BCE Greek world? Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece offers a series of case studies exploring how a theoretical approach to the archaeology of this area provides insight into aspects of ancient society.

An introductory section exploring the emergence and growth of theoretical approaches is followed by examinations of the potential insights these approaches provide. The authors probe some of the meanings attached to ancient objects, townscapes, and cemeteries, for those who created, and used, or inhabited them.

The range of contexts stretches from the early Greek communities during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, through Athens between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, and on into present day Turkey and the Levant during the third and second centuries BCE. The authors examine a range of practices, from the creation of individual items such as ceramic vessels and figurines, through to the construction of civic buildings, monuments, and cemeteries. At the same time they interrogate a range of spheres, from craft production, through civic and religious practices, to funerary ritual.

 

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