Across the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Nile Delta, awe-inspiring, monstrous ruins are scattered across the landscape - vast palaces, temples, fortresses, shattered statues of ancient gods, carvings praising the eternal power of long-forgotten dynasties. These ruins - the remainder of thousands of years of human civilization - are both inspirational in their grandeur, and terrible in that their once teeming centres of population were all ultimately destroyed and abandoned. In this major book, Richard Miles recreates these extraordinary cities, ranging from the Euphrates to the Roman Empire, to understand the roots of human civilization. His challenge is to make us understand that the cities which define culture, religion and economic success and which are humanity's greatest invention, have always had a cruel edge to them, building systems that have provided both amazing opportunities and back-breaking hardship. This exhilarating book is both a pleasure to read and a challenge to us all to think about our past - and about the present.

With fresh insight into what the great works meant when they were created and why they appeal to us now, here is a vivid tour of painting, sculpture, and architecture, past and present. "Illuminating . . . a notable accomplishment".--The New York Times. Illustrated.

Publisher description

Presented in a landscape format and with captions explaining the story behind each entry, Greece is a stunning collection of images celebrating one of the world's most popular destinations. From antiquity to modernity, from the tallest mountains to the tiniest islands, from the Romans to the Venetians to the Ottomans, Greece is a beautiful photographic exploration of this fascinating country. Arranged by region, the book celebrates such classical highlights as Athens's Acropolis, the ruins at Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the Byzantine churches of Thessaloniki, and the ancient Temple at Delphi. It also explores the beauty of the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Sea, the Zagori mountains in the northwest of the country, and the hydrothermal craters on Nisyros.

Western civilization has long sought its cultural roots in the classical civilizations of the Aegean. During the twentieth century, however, it has been made increasingly clear that it owes a great debt to the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. In the thick of the debate as to how much classical civilizations were influenced by the Levant has been the question of the date of the transmission of the alphabet. In this monograph, Bernal takes up the question anew and marshals persuasive arguments that the date of transmission of the alphabet should be moved considerably earlier than generally has been thought, to the middle of the second millennium B.C. Growing out of his work on Black Athena, the intricate matters of alphabetic history and transmission are dealt with, both in terms of the history of the investigation of the topic and also with regard to the specific working out of his own new proposal.

This book acquaints us with the discovery and excavation of the first Greek establishment in the West, Euboean Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.