Drawing on one of the earliest literary travel accounts known to man, travel writer Rolf Potts and illustrator Cedar Van Tassel recreate the comic tale of Wenamun, an ancient Egyptian priest whose overseas voyage in search of Lebanese timber resulted in an ongoing series of fiascos. Based on a source papyrus that was lost to history until the late 19th century, the protagonist's misadventure is delightfully entertaining, and has a confessional, self-deprecating feel that makes it stand out from other ancient narratives. Unlike the characters in more mythic tales of adventure, Wenamun is not on a hero's journey. He is, in his hapless progression of mistakes and misdirections, an anti-hero of sorts, as clueless and arrogant as any culturally oblivious tourist.

In A History of Egypt, Jason Thompson has written the first one-volume work to encompass all 5,000 years of Egyptian history, highlighting the surprisingly strong connections between the ancient land of the Pharaohs and the modern-day Arab nation. No country's past can match Egypt's in antiquity, richness, and variety. However, it is rarely presented as a comprehensive panorama because scholars tend to divide it into distinct eras—prehistoric, pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic, medieval Islamic, Ottoman, and modern—that are not often studied in relation to one another. In this daringly ambitious project, drawing on the most current scholarship as well as his own research, Thompson makes the case that few if any other countries have as many threads of continuity running through their entire historical experience. With its unprecedented scope and lively and readable style, A History of Egypt offers students, travelers, and general readers alike an engaging narrative of the extraordinarily long course of human history by the Nile.

The history of the Phoenicians, explorers and merchants, is little known. What a paradox for this ingenious people, who invented the alphabet, to have left so few written traces of their existence. Their literature, recorded on papyrus, has disappeared. And yet this civilization fired the imagination of its contemporaries--the Jews in particular--inspiring terror among the Romans and Greeks, who depicted them as a cruel people who practiced human sacrifice. Their clients were the pharaohs and the Assyrians, their ships criss-crossed the Mediterranean, laden with the luxuries of the day such as wine, oil, grain, and mineral ore. Buried beneath the modern cities of Lebanon, and a few of Syria and Israel, ancient Phoenicia has resuscitated in this volume.

APOCALYPSE It has been predicted countless times over thousands of years. In the generation following 1200 BC it actually happened, and no one saw it coming. The great civilizations of the age fell. The magnificent cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or simply abandoned. We have glimpses of the events from Homer's epic tales of the Trojan War, and from hieroglyphics that tell of desperate battles fought by Egypt's Pharaohs to hold back invading hordes, but the complete story of how and why the Eastern Mediterranean collapse came about has yet to be told. The End of Civilization takes a fresh look at the evidence and develops a narrative that traces the collapse step by step and exposes the reasons behind it.

Scholars who actually shape the fields they work in remain few and far between. University of Notre Dame professor James VanderKam, renowned for his writings on the Dead Sea Scrolls, is one of them. This volume represents the best of Professor VanderKam’s non-Qumran articles covering Second Temple Judaism, Hebrew Bible, apocalypticism, and key essays on 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Researchers and students will welcome having all of these readily available. Anyone working in these areas will appreciate VanderKam’s contributions to discussions concerning calendars and festivals, the high priesthood, and prophecy and apocalyptic in the ancient Near East. A new essay on the development of Scripture’s canon rounds out this essential collection. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

From Revelation to Canon is a collection of essays that offers studies of texts, traditions, and themes from the Hebrew Bible and from the extra-biblical literature of the second-temple period. Included in it are studies of apocalypticism, the high priesthood, calendars and festivals, and a series of essays on aspects of 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. There is also a previously unpublished essay on the development of a canon of scripture in Judaism. The volume gathers in one place, papers that were originally published in several journals, volumes of essays, and Festschriften. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Syria has long been one of the most trouble-prone and politically volatile regions of the Near and Middle Eastern world. This book looks back beyond the troubles of the present to tell the 3000-year story of what happened many centuries before. Trevor Bryce reveals the peoples, cities, and kingdoms that arose, flourished, declined, and disappeared in the lands that now constitute Syria, from the time of it's earliest written records in the third millennium BC until the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian at the turn of the 3-4th century AD. Across the centuries, from the Bronze Age to the Rome Era, we encounter a vast array of characters and civilizations, enlivening, enriching, and besmirching the annals of Syrian history: Hittite and Assyrian Great Kings; Egyptian pharaohs; Amorite robber-barons; the biblically notorious Nebuchadnezzar; Persia's Cyrus the Great and Macedon's Alexander the Great; the rulers of the Seleucid empire; and an assortment of Rome's most distinguished and most infamous emperors. All swept across the plains of Syria at some point in her long history. All contributed, in one way or another, to Syria's special, distinctive character, as they imposed themselves upon it, fought one another within it, or pillaged their way through it. But this is not just a history of invasion and oppression. Syria had great rulers of her own, native-born Syrian luminaries, sometimes appearing as local champions who sought to liberate their lands from foreign despots, sometimes as cunning, self-seeking manipulators of squabbles between their overlords. They culminate with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, whose life provides a fitting grand finale to the first three millennia of Syria's recorded history. The conclusion looks forward to the Muslim conquest in the 7th century AD: in many ways the opening chapter in the equally complex and often troubled history of modern Syria.