Spanning the period from Alexander the Great′s accession to the throne in 336 bc to the defeat by Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 bc, this vivid narrative explores the innovative civilization of the Hellenistic world. He shows how, when the Hellenistic world became subject to Rome, its culture left a lasting imprint on the way of life and thought of its conquerors.
In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came to have a meaning in the minds of animals and how in humans this meaning eventually came to be expressed as language. He reviews a mass of evidence to show how close some animals, especially primates and more especially apes, are to the brink of human language. Apes may not talk to us but they construct rich cognitive representations of the world around them, and here, he shows, are the evolutionary seeds of abstract thought - the means of referring to objects, the memory of events, even elements of the propositional thinking philosophers have hitherto reserved for humans.
Students will find everything they need to conduct thorough research on 50 cities from all over the world, including information in 22 rubrics on each city's history, neighborhoods, lmuseums, parks, transportation, geography, holidays and feastivals, population profiles and much more. Entries include a selection of maps, charts, tables and photos (over 240 in total) that illustrate landmarks and points of interest. This set contains a geographical and cultural balance of 50 cities representing a cross-section of world regional and cultural urban life.
Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life. But when we look at them--really look at them--what do we see? In the tradition of John Berger's bestselling Ways of Seeing, James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. A butterfly's wing pattern encodes its identity. A cloudless sky yields a precise sequence of colors at sunset. A bridge reveals the relationship of a population with its landscape. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins also explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.
Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World is a much-needed teaching anthology that rethinks and broadens the scope of the stale and limiting classifications used for Early Christian-Byzantine visual arts.
