Download or read book Ancient Alexandria between Egypt and Greece written by William V. Harris and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume approaches the history of the great city of Alexandria from a variety of directions: its demography, the interaction between Greek and Egyptian and between Jews and Greeks, the nature of its civil institutions and social relations, and its religious, and intellectual history.
Download or read book Ancient Alexandria Between Egypt and Greece written by William Vernon Harris and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume approaches the history of the great city of Alexandria from a variety of directions: its demography, the interaction between Greek and Egyptian and between Jews and Greeks, the nature of its civil institutions and social relations, and its religious, and intellectual history.
Download or read book The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt written by Alexander Kitroeff and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Magnificent."--Robert L. Tignor, Princeton University The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt is the first account of the modern Greek presence in Egypt from its beginnings during the era of Muhammad Ali to its final days under Nasser. It casts a critical eye on the reality and myths surrounding the complex and ubiquitous Greek community in Egypt by examining the Greeks' legal status, their relations with the country's rulers, their interactions with both elite and ordinary Egyptians, their economic activities, their contacts with foreign communities, their ties to their Greek homeland, and their community life, which included a rich and celebrated literary culture.
Download or read book The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt C 300 B C to A D 700 written by Judith McKenzie and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterful history of the monumental architecture of Alexandria, as well as of the rest of Egypt, encompasses an entire millennium—from the city’s founding by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. to the years just after the Islamic conquest of A.D. 642. Long considered lost beyond recall, the architecture of ancient Alexandria has until now remained mysterious. But here Judith McKenzie shows that it is indeed possible to reconstruct the city and many of its buildings by means of meticulous exploration of archaeological remains, written sources, and an array of other fragmentary evidence. The book approaches its subject at the macro- and the micro-level: from city-planning, building types, and designs to architectural style. It addresses the interaction between the imported Greek and native Egyptian traditions; the relations between the architecture of Alexandria and the other cities and towns of Egypt as well as the wider Mediterranean world; and Alexandria’s previously unrecognized role as a major source of architectural innovation and artistic influence. Lavishly illustrated with new plans of the city in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods; reconstruction drawings; and photographs, the book brings to life the ancient city and uncovers the true extent of its architectural legacy in the Mediterranean world.
Download or read book The Ancient Egyptian Economy written by Brian Muhs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first economic history of ancient Egypt employing a New Institutional Economics approach and covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE.
Download or read book Egypt Greece and Rome written by Charles Freeman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book The Library of Alexandria and the Lighthouse of Alexandria written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-05-07 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures depicting important people, places, and events. *Includes ancient accounts about the two sites and their destruction. *Includes a bibliography for further reading. In the modern world, libraries are taken for granted by most people, perhaps because their presence is ubiquitous. Every school has a library, large libraries can be found in every major city, and even most small towns have public libraries. However, the omnipresent nature of libraries is a fairly recent historical phenomenon, because libraries were still few and far between before the 19th century. For centuries in the Western world, during what is known as the Middle Ages, written knowledge was guarded closely and hidden away in private repositories, usually by the religious classes, and hidden away in private repositories. The lack of libraries in the West helped contribute to the popular imagination of the ancient Library at Alexandria, and all the myths and legends that have come to be associated with it, but the Library of Alexandria deserves its reputation. While the exact nature of the Library remains murky, it functioned for at least several centuries and is believed to have housed hundreds of thousands of books, most written as scrolls on papyrus, and it essentially became the culmination of two ancient literary and cultural traditions converging: the Greek and Egyptian. Of course, the most controversial aspect of the Library of Alexandria is its destruction, which is still a topic of debate today. Over 2,000 years ago, two ancient writers named Antipater of Sidon and Philo of Byzantium authored antiquity's most well known tour guides. After the two Greeks had traveled around the Mediterranean, they wrote of what they considered to be the classical world's greatest construction projects. While there is still some question as to who actually authored the text attributed to Philo and when it was authored, their lists ended up comprising the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, igniting interest in the ones they chose and inspiring subsequent generations to identify their own era's Seven Wonders. The youngest of the Wonders also turned out to be the most practical and one of the longest-lived, surviving into the late Middle Ages. It was a lighthouse built on the northern coast of Egypt in Africa, at the Greek city founded in Alexander's name. It was the Pharos, the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria. Among antiquity's wonders, the Lighthouse of Alexandria was fairly unique both in terms of its purpose and its secular nature. While pyramids and statues served religious purposes in Egypt and Greece, and others were impressive works of art, the origins of the Lighthouse were not even as a lighthouse at all. Instead, the large formation on the island of Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria was originally meant to help sailors identify the location of the city during the day, and some speculate it was not until later that Alexandrians decided to make it a true lighthouse that would serve sailors at night. While there is still debate over its height, the Lighthouse of Alexandria was unquestionably one of the tallest man-made structures in the world at the time, if not the tallest. While ancient accounts often exaggerated its height, medieval Arab sources often claimed it was somewhere around 300-350 feet tall, with an incredibly wide base, and those sources wrote at a time where it had already required repairs due to earthquake damage. Efforts to repair it kept going until the 14th century, when the damage was so extensive that it was mostly left in ruins, the last of which were taken for other building projects and/or slipped underneath the Mediterranean. Fortunately, due to descriptions of the lighthouse and archaeological remains, modern scholars are able to understand this wonder better than most, and there may even be future attempts to build a replica and bring it back to life.
Download or read book Alexandria written by Apostolos J Polyzoides and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herewith an historical journey from the third century to the multiethnic metropolis of the twentieth century, bringing together two diverse histories of the city. Ancient Alexandria was built by the Greek Ptolemies who in thirty years completed the first lighthouse and the grand library and museum which functioned as a university with the emphasis on science, known as 'The Alexandrian School', attracting scholars from all over the ancient world. Two of the most eminent were Euclid, the father of geometry, and Claudios Ptolemy, writer of The Almagest, a book on astronomy. These are the oldest surviving science textbooks and the city was known as "the birthplace of science". Herein there are stories about scientists, poets and religious philosophers, responsible for influencing the western mind with their writings. Modern Alexandria was rebuilt in 1805 by multiethnic communities who created a successful commercial city and port with an enviable life-style for its inhabitants for 150 years. In 1952 the Free Officers of the Egyptian Army masterminded a coup to free the country from the monarchy and British domination. In 1956 the socialist regime under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Suez Canal, resulting in the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion. This outburst of Egyptian nationalism and military revolution by this understandably anti-Western regime included the confiscation of property belonging to foreigners and the subsequent mass exodus of business and artisan classes that hitherto had made the city so successful. The author was an eye-witness to these events and he sets out the political errors and failures of both Egyptian and Western leaders. The legacy of the resulting political and social confusions is deeply apparent in the continuing unrest in the Middle East, and in particular in Egypt.
Download or read book Seeing Double written by Susan A. Stephens and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-01-27 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context—within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands"—no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Alexandria written by Justin Pollard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short history of nearly everything classical. The foundations of the modern world were laid in Alexandria of Egypt at the turn of the first millennium. In this compulsively readable narrative, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid bring one of history's most fascinating and prolific cities to life, creating a treasure trove of our intellectual and cultural origins. Famous for its lighthouse, its library-the greatest in antiquity-and its fertile intellectual and spiritual life--it was here that Christianity and Islam came to prominence as world religions--Alexandria now takes its rightful place alongside Greece and Rome as a titan of the ancient world. Sparkling with fresh insights on science, philosophy, culture, and invention, this is an irresistible, eye- opening delight.
Download or read book Alexandria and Alexandrianism written by J. Paul Getty Museum and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great seats of learning and repositories of knowledge in the ancient world, Alexandria, and the great school of thought to which it gave its name, made a vital contribution to the development of intellectual and cultural heritage in the Occidental world. This book brings together twenty papers delivered at a symposium held at the J. Paul Getty Museum on the subject of Alexandria and Alexandrianism. Subjects range from “The Library of Alexandria and Ancient Egyptian Learning” and “Alexander’s Alexandria” to “Alexandria and the Origins of Baroque Architecture.” With nearly two hundred illustrations, this handsome volume presents some of the world’s leading scholars on the continuing influence and fascination of this great city. The distinguished contributors include Peter Green, R. R. R. Smith, and the late Bernard Bothmer.
Download or read book Visualizing the Afterlife in the Tombs of Graeco Roman Egypt written by Marjorie Susan Venit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the visual narratives of a group of decorated tombs from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (c.300 BCE-250 CE). The author contextualizes the tombs within their social, political, and religious context and considers how the multicultural population of Graeco-Roman Egypt chose to negotiate death and the afterlife.
Download or read book Greek Gold from Hellenistic Egypt written by Michael Pfrommer and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2001 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although much is left to the imagination, the basic facts do come to light, and the facets and surfaces of the Getty's golden treasure enrich us with new understanding."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Egyptian Mythology A Traveler s Guide from Aswan to Alexandria written by Garry J. Shaw and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique approach to Egyptian mythology takes readers on a tour up the Nile, stopping at the most famous monuments and vividly retelling the myths connected to each site. Join Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw on an entertaining tour up the Nile, through a beautiful and fascinating landscape populated with a rich mythology: the stories of Horus, Isis, Osiris, and their enemies and allies in tales of vengeance, tragedy, and fantastic metamorphoses. Shaw retells these stories with his characteristic wit, and reconnects them to the temples and monuments that still stand today, offering a fresh look at the most visited sites of Egypt. The myths of ancient Egypt have survived in fragments of ancient hymns and paintings on the walls of tombs and temples, spells inked across coffins, and stories scrawled upon scrolls. Illustrations throughout bring to life the creation of the world and the nebulous netherworld; the complicated relationships between fickle gods, powerful magicians, and pharaohs; and eternal battles on a cosmic scale. Shaw’s evocative descriptions of the ancient ruins will transport readers to another landscape—including the magnificent sites of Dendera, Tell el-Amarna, Edfu, and Thebes. At each site, they will discover which gods or goddesses were worshipped there, as well as the myths and stories that formed the backdrop to the rituals and customs of everyday life. Each chapter ends with a potted history of the site, as well as tips for visiting the ruins today. Egyptian Mythology is the perfect companion to the myths of Egypt and the gods and goddesses that shaped its ancient landscape.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Alexandria written by Justin Pollard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short history of nearly everything classical. The foundations of the modern world were laid in Alexandria of Egypt at the turn of the first millennium. In this compulsively readable narrative, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid bring one of history's most fascinating and prolific cities to life, creating a treasure trove of our intellectual and cultural origins. Famous for its lighthouse, its library-the greatest in antiquity-and its fertile intellectual and spiritual life--it was here that Christianity and Islam came to prominence as world religions--Alexandria now takes its rightful place alongside Greece and Rome as a titan of the ancient world. Sparkling with fresh insights on science, philosophy, culture, and invention, this is an irresistible, eye- opening delight.
Download or read book Ancient Libraries written by Jason König and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.
Download or read book Stolen Legacy written by George G. M. James and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries the world has been misled about the original source of the Arts and Sciences; for centuries Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been falsely idolized as models of intellectual greatness; and for centuries the African continent has been called the Dark Continent, because Europe coveted the honor of transmitting to the world, the Arts and Sciences. It is indeed surprising how, for centuries, the Greeks have been praised by the Western World for intellectual accomplishments which belong without a doubt to the Egyptians or the peoples of North Africa.
