The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put ...

The Lord's Resistance Army is Africa's most persistent and notorious 'terrorist' group. Led by the mysterious Joseph Kony, it has committed a series of horrific human rights abuses, including massacres and mutilations. Since the mid 1980s, it has abducted tens of thousands of people, including large numbers of children forced to train as fighters. The IC in 2005 issued warrants for Kony and his top commanders, and the United States is backing a military campaign against the group. But the ...

This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world...

A "monumental" account of the rise and fall of languages, with "many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes, and charming linguistic oddities" ( Chicago Tribune).Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that bind communities together and make possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese throu...

Assyria was one of the most influential kingdoms of the Ancient Near East. In this Very Short Introduction, Karen Radner sketches the history of Assyria from city state to empire, from the early 2nd millennium BC to the end of the 7th century BC. Since the archaeological rediscovery of Assyria in the mid-19th century, its cities have been excavated extensively in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Israel, with further sites in Iran, Lebanon, and Jordan providing important information. The As...

This remarkable and daringly original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their ...

Greater Ethiopia combines history, anthropology, and sociology to answer two major questions. Why did Ethiopia remain independent under the onslaught of European expansionism while other African political entities were colonized? And why must Ethiopia be considered a single cultural region despite its political, religious, and linguistic diversity?Donald Levine's interdisciplinary study makes a substantial contribution both to Ethiopian interpretive history and to sociologi...

The Sumerian World explores the archaeology, history and art of southern Mesopotamia and its relationships with its neighbours from c.3,000 - 2,000BC. Including material hitherto unpublished from recent excavations, the articles are organised thematically using evidence from archaeology, texts and the natural sciences. This broad treatment will also make the volume of interest to students looking for comparative data in allied subjects such as ancient literature and early religion...

Thoroughly researched, Rodney Castleden's Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete here sues the results of recent research to produce a comprehensive new vision of the peoples of Minoan Crete.Since Sir Arthur Evans rediscovered the Minoans in the early 1900s, we have defined a series of cultural traits that make the ‘Minoan personality’: elegant, graceful and sophisticated, these nature lovers lived in harmony with their neighbours, while their fleets ruled the seas around Crete...

For three thousand years a dominant force, Ancient Egypt is arguably the most successful and longest lasting human civilization yet. In this pacy guide, world renowned Egyptologist Professor Barry Kemp seeks to explain why Ancient Egypt was able to thrive with such stability for such a long time. The answers may be surprising - Kemp shows that human rights and career progression played an important role, as well as the traditional forces of slave labour and religion. Taking a thematic appr...

Authoritative and up-to-date, this key single-volume work is a thematic exploration of ancient Egyptian civilization and culture as it was expressed down the centuries.Including topics rarely covered elsewhere as well as new perspectives, this work comprises thirty-two original chapters written by international experts. Each chapter gives an overvi

An ideal city to be rebuilt from scratch where two rivers flow into one another to give birth to the great Nile. An elite team of designers. The progressive utopia of urban planners and doctors between the 19th and 20th centuries, coming to grips with the demographic explosion and with the white man’s civilizing mission. These are a few of the elements that come into play in the British reconstruction of Khartoum in the late 19th-century, after a series of bloody defeats and difficult vict...