This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt. Both handbooks, dating to the Roman period, contain an assortment of recipes for magical rites in the Demotic and Greek language. The library which comprises these two handbooks is nowadays better known as the Theban Magical Library. The book traces the social and cultural milieu of the composers, compilers and users of the extant spells through a combination of philology, sociolinguistics and cultural analysis. To anybody working on Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient magic, and bilingualism this study is of significant importance.

The authors give a detailed summary about the fundamentals and the historical background of digital communication. This includes an overview of the encoding principles and algorithms of textual information, audio information, as well as images, graphics, and video in the Internet. Furthermore the fundamentals of computer networking, digital security and cryptography are covered. Thus, the book provides a well-founded access to communication technology of computer networks, the internet and the WWW. Numerous pictures and images, a subject-index and a detailed list of historical personalities including a glossary for each chapter increase the practical benefit of this book that is well suited as well as for undergraduate students as for working practitioners.

Before the arrival of the Indo-European Greeks in the area around the Aegean Sea, a non-Indo-European language was spoken there which was eventually replaced by Greek. Although no written texts exist in this Pre-Greek language, Robert Beekes shows that we can reconstruct elements of its phonology and morphology on the basis of the substantial amount of Pre-Greek vocabulary which was absorbed by Greek. In addition to the general characteristics of Pre-Greek, Beekes provides a complete overview of the evidence, comprising over 1100 Greek etyma which are certainly of Pre-Greek origin. The book thus opens a window on the first Pre-Indo-European language of prehistoric Europe to have left a trace in history.

More than 100 years ago Sir Arthur Evans' spade made the first cut into the earth above the now well-known Palace at Knossos. His research saw the birth of a new discipline: Minoan Archaeology. The present volume aim to outline current trends and prospects of this scientific field.