New Books in Ancient History

The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'declined and fell', Andrew Wallace-Hadrill argues that memories of the past enabled cities to adapt and remain relevant in the changing post-Roman world. In the new kingdoms in Italy, France and Spain cities remained a key part of the structure of control, while to contemporary authors, such as Cassiodorus in Ostrogothic Italy, Gregory of Tours in Merovingian Gaul, and Isidore in Visigothic Spain, they remained as crucial as in antiquity. The archaeological evidence of New Cities founded in this period, from Constantinople to Reccopolis in Spain, also shows the deep influence of past models. The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity: A Study in Resilience (Cambridge UP, 2025) reveals the adaptability of cities and the endurance of the Greek and Roman world. Sheds fresh light on one of the most important social and cultural developments in the transition from classical antiquity to the world of the Middle Ages Explores developments through the eyes of contemporary writers and documents as well as the archaeological record Of interest to all those concerned with how cities can adapt in a radically changing world ANDREW WALLACE-HADRILL is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is a Roman cultural historian and his books include Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars (1983), Augustan Rome (1993), Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994), Rome's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008) and Herculaneum: Past and Future (2011). Former Director of the British School at Rome, he has directed archaeological projects at Pompeii and Herculaneum. This book is the result of his project on the Impact of the Ancient City, which received funding from the European Research Council.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias Press, 2024) publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac lexicology and lexicography held at the 13th Symposium Syriacum (Paris, 2022). An international group of scholars approaches this field from several new angles and shows how much remains to be done, from the creation of new lexical databases to the update of previously existing ones and the study of new lexica that have been recently discovered.The multifocal approach adopted by the contributions to this volume testifies to the richness of this field, which offers several avenues for further inquiry. The volume is designed for scholars in Syriac, as well as for those interested in the contacts between Syriac and its neighboring languages from the past and the present, such as Greek, Arabic, Iranian languages and Neo-Aramaic varieties.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.Mara Nicosia is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University (UK). Trained as a Semitic philologist, she earned her PhD from the University of Naples "L'Orientale" (2020). Her primary research focus is the development of rhetoric as an academic subject in Syriac schools, but she also works on the contacts between Greek and various types of Aramaic and on technical vocabularies in comparison.Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who are you, how are you supposed to live, and what about happiness? Answers to age-old questions are offered in classic myths about heroes, gods, and monsters, and at the ballgame.In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball (Greenleaf, 2025), author Christian Sheppard interweaves Homer’s epics with glorious stories from the green fields of America’s pastime, celebrating Achilles’ courage and Odysseus’ cunning along with the virtues of Hall of Fame players such as Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth and of great teams such as the 2004 Red Sox and the 2016 Cubs. Along the way, Sheppard humorously recollects trying to raise his baby daughter true to the teachings of ancient myth and his beloved game. The result is an endearing, insightful, and inspiring guide to cultivating virtue and becoming the hero of your own life’s odyssey.Christian Sheppard holds a PhD in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago where he taught the “Great Books” for over a decade. He is presently a professor of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.In The Golden Road (Bloomsbury. 2025), William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The beguiling ruins of Rome have a long history of allure. They first engaged the attention of later mediaeval tourists, just as they do today. The interest of travellers was captured in the Renaissance by artists, architects, topographers, antiquarians, archaeologists and writers. Once the ruins were seen to appeal to visitors, and to matter for their aesthetic quality, their protection and attractive presentation became imperative. Rome's ruins were the first to be the object of preservation orders, and novel measures were devised for their conservation in innovative archaeological parks. The city's remains provided models for souvenirs; paintings of them decorated the walls of eighteenth-century English country houses; and picturesque sham Roman ruins sprang up in landscape gardens across Europe. Writers responded in various ways to their emotional appeal. Roland Mayer's The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History (Cambridge UP, 2025) will delight all those interested in the remarkable survival and preservation of a unique urban environment.ROLAND MAYER is Emeritus Professor of Classics at King's College London.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew ReviewSarah Bassett is Associate Professor Emerita, Art History at Indiana UniversityMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Dr. Rune Nyord shows in Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025), even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Dr. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Dr. Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium, Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues this book places between them. In order to prove their authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows how each prepares the student to move beyond self-interest to gallantry, and thus from the doctrinal intellectualism Aristotle found in Protagoras to the emergence of philosophy as intermediate between wisdom and ignorance in Symposium, en route to Diotima’s ascent to the transcendent Beautiful. Based on the hypothesis that it was his own eminently teachable dialogues that Plato taught—and bequeathed to posterity as his Academy’s eternal curriculum—Ascent to the Beautiful helps the reader to imagine the Academy as a school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2023) chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.Sureshkumar Muthukumaran is a lecturer in History at the National University of Singapore. Sureshkumar received his BA in history at University College London, a Masters in Greek and Roman History at the University of Oxford and a DPhil in History at University College London. He won the American History Association's 2024 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History for The Tropical Turn.Jessie Cohen is an editor for the New Books Network. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Second Temple Judaism is one of the more exciting burgeoning fields in biblical studies. Now, with T&T Clark's two-volume Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism, anyone can have a wealth of knowledge literally at their fingertips. Tune in as we speak with Daniel Gurtner, an editor and contributor to the encyclopedia, as we speak about this outstanding resource!Daniel M. Gurtner is Professor of New Testament Studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices