Covering a 3000-year period from 3100 BCE to 332, this book on a complex subject is written in a readable chronological style and looks at ancient diplomacy, travel, trade, warfare, domination and immigration. It covers military campaigns including the battle of Qadesh under Rameses II and Hatshepsut's trading mission to the mysterious land of Punt. The rich story behind Egypt's Foreign Relations includes the Nubian Kingdom of Kerma, Nile fortresses, the Sea Peoples and Persian satraps. An Egyptian priest named Manetho estimated that 30 dynasties had ruled Egypt during this time, and modern scholars have adopted Manetho's dynastic divisions largely unchanged, grouping them into longer periods such as the "Early" or "Middle" Kingdom. The book explores Egypt's foreign relations from the Predynastic period to the arrival of Alexander the Great. Egyptians saw their land as representing order, balance and justice, while the regions beyond represented disorder, and there was a further barrier between humans and gods. Peoples were roughly grouped as Egyptians, Nubians, Libyans and Asiatics. Egyptian iconography shows its rulers smiting and destroying their enemies, and a pharaoh's sandals had images of his enemies on the sole so that he was permanently represented as trampling them into the dust. The reality, though, was that Egyptian rulers also exchanged elaborate courtesies with neighbouring potentates, and in daily life foreigners in roles such as soldiers or diplomats were treated as equals. Egypt was a land of slaves, many of whom had been seized around the Mediterranean coast to work as household servants or navvies on building projects. In the political unrest at the end of the Old Kingdom, the royal court moved from Memphis to Herakleopolis, possibly driven by climate change and drought. Archaeological evidence shows that Nubians of different ethnicities continued to live in the unified territories, and that was still the case when Tuthmosis II and his wife Hatshepsut consolidated their control. His New Kingdom successor, Tuthmosis II, forged north into the Levant, marching through Gaza to confront a hostile coalition of city states at Megiddo. We know that the later Pharaoh Akhenaten received tributes from foreigners because they are pictured at Amarna, while a wrecked sea vessel of the same period provides evidence for trade with Mycenae. Amarna was also the site of diplomatic correspondence, strongly suggesting that the empire looked to Greece during its period of decline. 213 pages, many maps, photos.

The Seshat Global History Databank is a huge catalogue of historical statistics found online, and now in book form. From the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Iraq, China, Turkey, Mexico, Greece, India, Mali, Iran, Mongolia, Italy, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Japan, before we move on to the medieval era 500-1500CE and the early modern era 1500-1800CE. What was the tallest building of the ancient world? Or the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ritual human sacrifice ever? Join the radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer as they draw on their own Seshat project, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to log each piece of demographic and econometric information that can be reliably estimated for every society that has ever existed, to find the large-scale patterns. Join them for a dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past. Who were the first people to use calendars? What was history's largest empire? When was the most widely attended ritual? Covers the period from 3000BCE to 2000CE, a wonderfully interesting book to dip into reminiscent of the social, political and economic tables found in many atlases and information found in The Economist from which this publication comes. With lists of rankings like the ten largest societies by territory, regional adoption such as bureaucracy by world region, and nine maps showing the spread of agriculture, human sacrifice, bronze, writing, moralising religion, chariots, iron, cavalry, coinage and gunpowder. Eminently browesworthy paperback, 254pp.

Being the owners of a rather beautiful whippet, we very much approve of author Philip Womack leading his beloved lurcher Una and us on a fleet-footed odyssey through the classical world. From Aeneas to Cerberus to Polydorus, go on a quirky introduction to the Ancient Greeks and Romans and with a bit of luck we may be able to pass this knowledge on to our dogs. Engaging, funny and clever, he illuminates the pleasures and relevance of the Classics today and at any moment Donna Tartt, David Bowie, Stephen Fry or a reference to an obscure scholarly article might leap from the page. Plenty to catch the attention and arouse the interest of the curious, he writes with the verve of a novelist and the insight of a scholar as he has classical chats with his dog - before she runs off to chase another squirrel! He covers Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Catullus and Sappho and even sex and sewers before sharing some useful Latin phrases and grammar and the Greek alphabet. 322pp, paperback.

Henry Marten, soldier, member of Parliament, organiser of the trial of Charles I and signatory of the King's Death Warrant, is today a neglected figure of the 17th century. Yet his life was both extraordinary and emblematic. He was at the fulcrum of English history during the turbulent years of the Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried at the Old Bailey, Marten was found guilty of High Treason, only to be held captive for years on the equivalent of death row. It was while he was in prison that his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. Witty, clever, loving, sardonic and never despairing, the letters offer a rare and extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a man in the Tower of London awaiting a sentence of death. The attempt to expose him as immoral revealed him instead as a tender and brave man. In this revelatory biography, he emerges as a clever, lively-minded man, free of the fundamentalist zeal so common in many of his republican contemporaries. Marten never abandoned his beliefs in equality, in a representative Parliament under a Constitution (which he had helped to write) without a monarch or a House of Lords, and in that way can be seen as a very modern man. 'A deeply researched and convincing portrait of the later years of one of the most remarkable radical politicians in British history.' - Ronald Hutton. It also reminds us that not all regicides were soldier puritans, and that some men believed in a republic before the Civil War started. Illustrated, 214pp.

When Marcus Sidonius Falx insults the Emperor Caligula there is only one possible outcome. He has to leave Rome in a great hurry. With the help of his amanuensis Jerry Toner he decides to write an eyewitness travel guide to the whole Roman Empire, the first of its kind. Toner helpfully provides a commentary on each chapter, explaining where the facts for this fictional travelogue originated in the literature of the Roman world. Falx first heads to his villa on the bay of Naples at Baiae, playground for the Roman elite. He travels light with only twenty slaves, his head chef and team of apprentices, a barber and a cobbler, carrying his map on a long scroll which is a guide to the road network without being a realistic representation of the topography. Greece is the first port of call, the first destination Olympia, home to the eponymous Games, with respects paid to Phidias's gigantic statue of Zeus on the way. Sparta and Athens follow, where Falx is tricked into staying in a low-life inn, setting up his travelling commode in a corner and desperate to avoid the attentions of bedbugs. On Rhodes he experiences an earthquake and in Troy relives highlights from Homer's great epic. Judea is mounting determined resistance against the Roman occupation, but Egypt has a more laid back atmosphere, popular with Roman travellers ever since first Caesar and then Mark Antony became lovers of Cleopatra, while Alexandria with its numerous population of Jews and Greeks is one of the empire's most cosmopolitan cities. The writings of Hadrian, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny provide local colour. From Africa Falx sails to Hispania, then through the bleakness of Gaul to the outpost of Britannia and Hadrian's Wall, where he surprisingly notes that the Britons cheerfully bear the taxes and conscription imposed by the Roman occupiers. A highly entertaining window on the ancient world. 287pp, sources, line drawings.

1215, the year of Magna Carta, was one of the most momentous in British history, ranking with 1066 as a watershed when everything changed. King John owned vast territories in France when he ascended the throne following the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart, but by 1215 they had all vanished. The loss of Normandy was a particular blow because many nobles owned territories and titles on both sides of the Channel and now they had to choose whether to be English or French. The ruling élite consisted of about 100 barons and their lives were seriously disrupted by John's extortionate tax demands in the spirit of his father Henry II, who had levied punitive charges on the nobility for services such as marriage. Meanwhile Pope Innocent III placed the English church under an interdict forbidding clergy to conduct church services. John's quarrel with the Pope began when they disagreed on the choice of Archbishop of Canterbury, with Innocent insisting on the appointment of Stephen Langton, a scholar in the tradition of the martyr Thomas Becket who had been murdered for his temerity in criticising John's father. John himself was excommunicated, but the inconvenience caused by the suspension of rites such as marriage finally led him to make peace with the Vatican. In 1213 John accepted the Pope as his feudal overlord, promising to stop pillaging the church and vowing to go on a crusade. This was the last straw for the barons, who went on the offensive beginning with the siege of Northampton and concluding with the Magna Carta, signed at Runnymede. The agreement only had two months' currency before Innocent intervened to nullify its conditions, and John died the following year. A highly readable history. 312pp, paperback, colour photos, feature boxes on 13th century life.

In the words of the Sunday Times: 'A winning portrait of seven centuries of empire, teeming with life and colour, human interest and oddity, cruelty and oppression mixed with pleasure, benevolence and great artistic beauty.' Baer has written a brilliantly panoramic account of the history of the Ottoman Empire from its genesis to its dissolution and challenges and transforms how we think of the East and the West, Enlightenment and modernity, and directly confronts the horrors as well as the achievements of Ottoman rule. Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2022, this is a major new history of the diverse empire that straddled East and West. The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West when, in reality, the Ottomans' multi-ethnic, multilingual and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. Recounting their remarkable rise to a world empire, Baer traces their debts to the Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage and upends Western accounts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration and the Reformation. He describes how they used both religious tolerance and conversion to integrate conquered peoples and how in the 19th century the Ottomans embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide and the dynasty's demise after the first world war. The account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide in this radical retelling of a remarkable story, and a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power. 543pp, paperback with many photos including colour.

'From whom did you steal that beauty? The rose laughs softly out of shame, but how should she tell?' - Rumi. Acclaimed horticultural historian Jennifer Potter shows that this most fragrant flower, the rose, has potency in societies around the world. She begins her story in the Greek and Roman empires and travels across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas to unravel its evolution from a simple briar of the northern hemisphere to the height of cultivated perfection found in rose gardens today. She lays bare the flower's long association with sexuality and secret societies, questioning the Crusaders' role in bringing roses back from the Holy Land, or hunting for its elusive blooms in the gardens of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison. An exquisitely beautiful heavyweight tome printed on quality paper and with hundreds of full page colour plates not only of roses but of archive paintings and historical artifacts and illuminated manuscripts, the book challenges many cherished beliefs about the rose and this thick tome looks to establish itself as the definitive history of the Queen of Flowers. Celebrated as a sacred symbol and as a token of womanhood, the rose unites Venus with the Virgin Mary, the blood of Christ with the sweat of Muhammad, the sacred and the profane, life and death, the white rose of chastity and the red rose of consummation. Not forgetting the delicate petals in different hues in the exquisite perfumes, we learn about roses which came to Europe from Turkey and Bulgaria and the Balkan mountains, rosemania and Redouté's exquisite portraits of their best creations which further inflamed passions. We have a 21st century view of cultivated roses be they old garden roses from Alba to tea and climbing tea, or modern roses like Floribunda to Polyantha. Chinese Whispers, American Beauties, the Housewife's Friend and its uses, here is trade and travel and sex and sorcery. 521 magnificent pages with approximately 100 colour illus. 16.5 x 24.1cm.
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How did 13 isolated colonies who in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than 21 navies fighting on five oceans to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea, and of course off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theatres. Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American Independence from a naval perspective and also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. He offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian history and the result is a more profound understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, the path to American Independence and the rise and fall of the British Empire. Using original logs, reports, diaries and archaeological discoveries it is the gripping tale of the birth of the New World. Colour plates, 572 page paperback.

Ten years since the death of the world renowned and controversial intellectual, this stylish edition is one of 12 commemorating Christopher Hitchens' most wry and provocative works. Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defence of man's inalienable rights. It has been celebrated, criticised, maligned, suppressed and co-opted, and forms the philosophical cornerstone of the first democratic republic whose revolution is the only example that still speaks to us - the United States of America. Hitchens marvels at the book's forethought and revels in its contentiousness and this brilliant portrait is an attractive introduction to Paine's life and work as a whole. 158pp, paperback.