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Book Review
Tigranes the Great: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Empire
Tigranes the Great: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Empire (A Comprehensive Historical Biography) by Serge Momjian is an instantly engaging work on the life and reign of the Armenian monarch Tigranes II (the Great, r. c. 95 - c. 56 BCE) written...
Book Review
Swallow's Dance
Author Wendy Orr (famous for Nim's Island, which has been turned into a motion picture) has created a captivating narrative aimed at young adults. The protagonist in Swallow's Dance is Leira, daughter of the high priestess on the Aegean island...
Book Review
Philip II of Macedonia
Philip II of Macedonia, by Ian Worthington, is a biography of Philip II, king of ancient Macedon from 360 to 336 BCE and father of Alexander the Great. Even though the figure of Philip is often obscured by the glory of his son, the book highlights...
Book Review
Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar
Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar is Gordon Doherty's richly detailed fictionalization of events and people who lived during the height of the Hittite Empire. Set in the 1300s BCE, the story follows King Mursili's third son, Hattusili III...
Book Review
Anaximander
Carlo Rovelli is first and foremost a scientist, an Italian theoretical physicist, who came to worldwide attention with his book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015 CE). Anaximander (first published in English in 2011 CE) is an earlier...
Book Review
The Roman Empire in 100 Haikus
The history of the Roman Empire is a complex story. At its height (c. 117 CE) it was the largest empire of the ancient world extending from Britain to Africa and from Syria to Spain. It takes a brave person to tell this story through poetry...
Book Review
Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia
Few English-language histories of the country and land of Georgia have been written. Donald Rayfield's Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia attempts to fill this gap. Rayfield is a scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, and while he...
Book Review
Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium
Those familiar with Byzantine history are aware that the Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans and lived in what they still considered the Roman Empire, or Romanía. But despite this well-known fact, Byzantinists have long avoided directly...
Book Review
Islam in China: : History, Spread and Culture, A Pictorial Book
Islam filtered into the Chinese consciousness and sphere of influence almost as soon as it arose from the desert sands of the Middle East in the 7th century CE. Islam in China: History, Spread and Culture is a general overview of the rich...
Book Review
The Emperors of Rome: The Story of Imperial Rome from Julius Caesar to the Last Emperor
The Emperors of Rome: The Story of Imperial Rome from Julius Caesar to the Last Emperor, by David Potter, tells the story of all the emperors of Rome from Augustus Caesar to Romulus Augustulus. Narrated with a general audience in mind, David...
