Thousands of documentary and literary texts written on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Persian, have transformed our knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Here experts provide a comprehensive guide to understanding this ancient documentary evidence.

This is part of a ten volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. This work explores the business end of politics, where theory meets practice in the pursuit of public good.

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Arguably the most impressive collection of international relations scholars ever brought together within one volume, the Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. The Handbook takes as its central themes the interaction between empirical and normative inquiry that permeates all theorizing in the field and the way in which contending approaches have shaped one another. In doing so, the Handbook provides an authoritative and critical introduction to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations will be essential reading for all of those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.

Writing is one of humankind's greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers pick up meaning from markings on a page so quickly, and how do children learn to do so? The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Reading synthesize research on these topics from fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology and education, focusing on how studies using a cognitive approach can shed light on how the reading process works. To set the stage, the opening chapters present information about writing systems and methods of studying reading, including those that examine speeded responses to individual words as well as those that use eye movement technology to determine how sentences and short passages of text are processed. The following section discusses the identification of single words by skilled readers, as well as insights from studies of adults with reading disabilities due to brain damage. Another section considers how skilled readers read a text silently, addressing such issues as the role of sound in silent reading and how readers' eyes move through texts. Detailed quantitative models of the reading process are proposed throughout. The final sections deal with how children learn to read and spell, and how they should be taught to do so. These chapters review research with learners of different languages and those who speak different dialects of a language; discuss children who develop typically as well as those who exhibit specific disabilities in reading; and address questions about how reading should be taught with populations ranging from preschoolers to adolescents, and how research findings have influenced education. The Oxford Handbook of Reading will benefit researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, education, and related fields (e.g., speech and language pathology) who are interested in reading, reading instruction, or reading disorders.

This volume presents an introduction to Aquinas and a guide to his thinking on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and the historical context of his thought. The subsequent sections address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. The final sections of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence.

In twenty-five chapters by leading scholars, this volume propagates a nuanced understanding of Byzantine "literature", highlighting key problems, and presenting basic research tools for an audience of specialists and non-specialists.

This handbook reviews existing theoretical perspectives and research findings on retirement, explores current and future challenges in retirement research and practice, and provides corresponding recommendations and suggestions.

Oxford Handbooks of Political Science are the essential guide to the state of political science today. With engaging contributions from 51 major international scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides the key point of reference for anyone working in political theory and beyond.

The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.

The study of political institutions is among the founding pillars of political science. With the rise of the 'new institutionalism', the study of institutions has returned to its place in the sun. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of where we are in the study of political institutions, covering both the traditional concerns of political science with constitutions, federalism and bureaucracy and more recent interest in theory and the constructed nature of institutions. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions draws together a galaxy of distinguished contributors drawn from leading universities across the world. Authoritative reviews of the literature and assessments of future research directions will help to set the research agenda for the next decade.