"The Life/Death Rhythms of Ancient Empires" outlines the flow of history from 3000BC to 1400AD to identify the factors that make up dominant, just, prosperous civilisations that can be described as golden cultures. These factors were found to have common features and the cultures themselves could be described in cyclical terms. This meant that the rise and fall of future dominant cultures could be roughly forecast to some degree in terms of hundreds of years. The evolution of capitalism was made possible, during and after actual warfare, by ancient priests and bankers, assisted by the invention of coinage. Capitalism was practised in the ancient world, supported at times by warfare and religion. It was vanquished for centuries by powerful weapons called irresponsible debt, and debasement of currency. The global capitalism of the twenty-first century is dependent on debt and a debased US dollar. A review of ancient history provides the basis for a glimpse into the future. This century's global temperature increase, which so excites environmentalists, can be shown to be part of a thousand year climate cycle. There well might be a human element to global warming but this just exacerbates the centuries' long cyclical pattern. Research has shown that periods of hot-dry and cold-dry climate have effects on human behaviour. Extrapolation of cycles enables forecasts of human behaviour to be made well into the new millennium. Dominant prosperous societies have occurred at roughly 200 year intervals which can suggest time-lines for societies in the present and the future A relatively irreverent history of ancient cultures, war, religion, money and debt produces cyclical analysis enabling a forecast that the USA might lose world dominance in 2040. The next volume "Life/Death Rhythms from the Capitalist Renaissance" will include economic data that will allow refined cyclical forecasts.

Pre-modern critical interactions of nature and society can best be studied during the so-called "Crisis of the 14th Century". While historiography has long ignored the environmental framing of historcial processes and scientists have over-emphasized nature's impact on the course of human history, this volume tries to describe the at times complex modes of the late-medieval relationship of man and nature. The idea of 'teleconnection', borrowed from the geosciences, describes the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns often over long distances. It seems that there were 'teleconnections' in society, too. So this volumes aims to examine man-environment interactions mainly in the 14th century from all over Europe and beyond. It integrates contributions from different disciplines on impact, perception and reaction of environmental change and natural extreme events on late Medieval societies. For humanists from all historical disciplines it offers an approach how to integrate written and even scientific evidence on environmental change in established and new fields of historical research. For scientists it demonstrates the contributions scholars from the humanities can provide for discussion on past environmental changes.

Explores empires of medieval west Africa.

Out of a lifetime of study of the ancient Near East, Professor Olmstead has gathered previously unknown material into the story of the life, times, and thought of the Persians, told for the first time from the Persian rather than the traditional Greek point of view. "The fullest and most reliable presentation of the history of the Persian Empire in existence."—M. Rostovtzeff

The great civilization that grew up around the Nile River had sophisticated irrigation systems that held back the desert, writing and record keeping that kept track of every event in the region, and some of the greatest architects and engineers the world

"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining the fundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia BCE and CE. A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstone, Peter Bedford, Josef Wiesehöfer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just before his death in 2004.

“A readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture” from a world-renowned Sumerian scholar (American Journal of Archaeology). The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. “An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity.” —Library Journal