The final installment in the exciting, fast-moving, and passionate space opera. Searching for ancient technology to help her friends find answers to the mystery of their own past, Boss ventures into a place filled with evidence of an ancient space battle, one the Dignity Vessels lost.Meanwhile, the Enterran Empire keeps accidentally killing its scientists in a quest for ancient stealth tech. Boss’s most difficult friend, Squishy, has had enough. She sneaks into the Empire and destroys its primary stealth-tech research base. But an old lover thwarts her escape, and now Squishy needs Boss’s help. Boss, who is a fugitive from the Empire. Boss, who knows how to make a Dignity Vessel work. Boss, who knows that Dignity Vessels house the very technology that the Empire is searching for. Should Boss take a Dignity Vessel to rescue Squishy and risk losing everything to the Empire? Or should she continue on her mission for her other friends and let Squishy suffer her own fate? Filled with battles old and new, scientific dilemmas, and questions about the ethics of friendship, Boneyards is space opera the way it was meant to be: exciting, fast-moving, and filled with passion.

Purity is a cultural construct that had a central role in the forming and the development of religious traditions in the ancient Mediterranean. This volume analyzes concepts, practices and images associated with purity in the main cultures of Antiquity, and discusses from a comparative perspective their parallel developments and transformations. The perspective adopted is both synchronic and diachronic; the comparative approach takes into account points of contact and mutual influences, but also includes major transcultural trends. A number of renowned specialists contribute a large variety of perspectives and approaches, combining archaeology, epigraphy and social history; in addition, particular attention is given to concepts of purity in ancient Israel and early Judaism as a ‘test-case’ of sorts. Through its extensive coverage, the volume contributes decisively to the present discussion about the forming of religious traditions in the ancient Mediterranean world. Contributors include: Philippe Borgeaud, Beate Ego, Christian Frevel, Linda-Marie Günther, Michaël Guichard, Gudrun Holtz, Manfred Hutter, Albert de Jong, Michael Konkel, Bernhard Linke, Lionel Marti, Hans-Peter Mathys, Christophe Nihan, Joachim Friedrich Quack, Benedikt Rausche, Noel Robertson, Udo Rüterswörden, Ian Werrett, and Jürgen K. Zangenberg.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1856.

This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.

A thousand-year history of how China’s obsession with silver influenced the country’s financial well-being, global standing, and political stability This revelatory account of the ways silver shaped Chinese history shows how an obsession with “white metal” held China back from financial modernization. First used as currency during the Song dynasty in around 900 CE, silver gradually became central to China’s economic framework and was officially monetized in the middle of the Ming dynasty during the sixteenth century. However, due to the early adoption of paper money in China, silver was not formed into coins but became a cumbersome “weighing currency,” for which ingots had to be constantly examined for weight and purity—an unwieldy practice that lasted for centuries. While China’s interest in silver spurred new avenues of trade and helped increase the country’s global economic footprint, Jin Xu argues that, in the long run, silver played a key role in the struggles and entanglements that led to the decline of the Chinese empire.