The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science—the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual. In On the Ruins of Babel, Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its wellspring. He surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum. Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.

The Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors reveals our shared ancestry as never before! Many are familiar with the Biblical account of Babel, but after the dispersal, there was a void beyond Biblical history until empires like Rome and Greece arose. Now, discover the truth of these people groups and their civilizations that spread across the earth and trace their roots back to Babel as well as to the sons and grandsons of Noah. Many of today's scholars write off what occurred at the Tower of Babel as mythology and deny that it was a historical event. Beginning with the Biblical accounts, author Bodie Hodge researched ancient texts, critical clues, and rare historic records to help solve the mystery of what became of the failed builders of Babel. For the purpose of defending the Bible, Hodge presents these and other vital historical facts surrounding this much-debated event. Teens and older can use this layman's reference for Biblical classes, ancient history, apologetics training, and to realize their own cultural connection to the Bible.

For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Large format 8.5x11, full colour high glossy pages with over 60 custom high-resolution maps, graphics and photos.When you get the chronology right, the cartography right and the archaeology right, you will get the Bible text right. What you read in the book you find in the ground! This is the Bible story of the origin of civilization after the global Noahic flood. Christian Archaeological Dating (CAD) requires that no archaeology predates the flood. Scripture dates creation to 5554 BC and the Flood to 3298 BC using the Septuagint. Eight Bible markers in Genesis 10-11 decode the date of the Tower of Babel to around 2850 BC. Archaeology informs us that the Tower of Babel was a Temple to Enki, the freshwater god and was similar in design to the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser in Egypt. In Sumerian flood stories, Enki was the rebel god who warned "Noah" to build the ark over the wishes of the supreme god Enlil who had decreed the destruction of mankind. Ancient Jewish, Christian and secular literary sources unanimous record that Nimrod built the Tower of Babel. Josephus tells us that Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to survive a possible second global flood. Archaeological excavations at Eridu (Babel) demonstrate how over 350 years, Nimrod built 17 pagan mudbrick temples, one upon the other, all dedicated to Enki, the "savior of mankind". In Sumerian myths, Enki also caused the division of languages at Babel (Gen 11). During this earliest period of post-flood civilization, "rebel" Nimrod plays a key and central role in almost every area. The identity of Nimrod is unknown, but he is best represented by the character of Enmerkar in Sumerian literary sources. Although excavations at biblical Babel (Tel Eridu) in the 1940's did not find any evidence of the Tower itself, evidence of the 300-meter square elevated platform upon which the Tower of Babel was going to be built has been documented. The city of Eridu (Babel) and the platform were abandoned for 750 years until the Assyrian King Ur-Nammu built a Ziggurat Temple to Enki upon it in 2100 BC. Abraham leaves Ur the very year that Ur-Nammu begins construction of the Ziggurat in 2100 BC. To the Christian Nimrod is antitypical of Satan, Absalom and Judas as the epitome of rebellion, treason and betrayal against the One True God. The Tower of Babel represents false world religions and false Christian doctrines.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

"In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--