From Moses' fateful journey in the basket to the wondrous parting of the Red Sea, this stunningly rendered storybook recaptures the magic and grandeur of The Prince of Egypt film. Full-color illustrations.

The classic struggle between Greece and Troy brought to life by a panoramic chorus of voices both humble and high, human and divine. The siege of Troy has lasted almost ten years. Inside the walled city, food is becoming scarce and the death toll is rising. From the heights of Mount Olympus, the Gods keep watch. But Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is bored with the endless, dreary war, and so she turns her attention to two sisters: Marpessa, who is gifted with God-sight and serves as handmaiden to Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world; and Xanthe, who is kind and loving and tends the wounded soldiers in the Blood Room. When Eros fits an arrow to his silver-lit bow and lets it fly, neither sister will escape its power. With vitality and grace, Adèle Geras breathes personality, heartbreak, and humor into this classic story. This is truly an inspired novel, in which the Gods move among mortals and an ancient city is brought to life.

A wild girl with a mysterious past When her adopted father is slain by a strange beast, Atalanta is determined to take care of herself. She is happy in the forest with only her friend Urso -- a giant bear -- for company. She wants nothing to do with the world of men. But the ferocious creature that killed her father is still out there, and Atalanta can't resist the opportunity to hunt it down, even if that means she has to join forces with a group of hunters to do so. Atalanta must prove that she is as strong and brave as any of the others, as they search together for the deadly Arcadian Beast.

"In the post-war era Jews have been incomparably less numerous than before and often deeply assimilated. Still, their presence's felt as big. The book is scholarly and also deeply personal. Most of the events and processes described here have a strong connection to the author's life, particularly the post-1968 mini-renaissance of Jewish life, especially in its religious variety, and advances in the realm of Jewish-Christian relations and particularly of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In addition to an account of the history of Jews in Poland after 1945, Jewish-Christian dialogue in that period, including meeting with the Polish pope, the chapters treat the concept of de-assimilation used as a key to understand the most recent phase of the story, analyze how Jewish were Jewish Communists, ponder what were the assumptions behind the post-war section of the core exhibition in POLIN, and offer an original proposal why the Holocaust is widely considered as unique"--

Many years have passed since the end of the Trojan War, and Penelope is still waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return home. The city of Ithaka is overrun with uncouth suitors from the surrounding islands who are vying to win Penelope's hand in marriage, thereby gaining control of the land. When a naked, half-drowned man washes up on the beach, everything changes. . . . Told through the eyes of Klymene, a young girl who is like a daughter to Penelope--and who longs for more than friendship from the young prince Telemachus-- Ithaka captures the quiet strength and patience of a woman's enduring love for her husband and the ensuing chaos that threatens all as Penelope is pressured to remarry.

Egypt's enduring civilization described in fourteen stages which progress from ancient beginnings to contemporary time.

Flavia, Jonathan, Lupus, and Nubia-friends and detectives-sail to the Bay of Naples to spend the summer with Flavia's uncle, who lives near Pompeii. There they uncover a riddle that may lead them to great treasure. Meanwhile, tremors shake the ground, animals behave strangely, and people dream of impending doom. One of the worst natural disasters of all time is about to happen: the eruption of Mount Vesuvius!

"In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten's capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun's immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt's pharaohs. A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today's." -- Provided by publisher.

In the fifth volume of the popular series of historical mysteries, a ragged stranger and the prospect of losing her family's fortune lead Flavia Gemina and her friends, Jonathan, Lupus, and Nubia to a seaside villa. There, they discover a shipwreck and sunken treasure--and that someone else is after the treasure, too. As they solve the riddle of the wreck, the four friends also stumble across the terrible mystery of Lupus's past.

Jeffrey L. Rubenstein continues his grand exploration of the ancient rabbinic tradition of the Talmudic sages, offering deep and complex analysis of eight stories from the Babylonian Talmud to reconstruct the cultural and religious world of the Babylonian rabbinic academy. Rubenstein combines a close textual and literary examination of each story with a careful comparison to earlier versions from other rabbinic compilations. This unique approach provides insight not only into the meaning and content of the current forms of the stories but also into how redactors reworked those earlier versions to address contemporary moral and religious issues. Rubenstein's analysis uncovers the literary methods used to compose the Talmud and sheds light on the cultural and theological perspectives of the Stammaim — the anonymous editor-redactors of the Babylonian Talmud. Rubenstein also uses these stories as a window into understanding more broadly the culture of the late Babylonian rabbinic academy, a hierarchically organized and competitive institution where sages studied the Torah. Several of the stories Rubenstein studies here describe the dynamics of life in the academy: master-disciple relationships, collegiality and rivalry, and the struggle for leadership positions. Others elucidate the worldview of the Stammaim, including their perspectives on astrology, theodicy, and revelation.

"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 has studied these tablets for more than thirty years, has used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. He outlines Babylonian and Assyrian history; discusses the social structure and psychology of the Mesopotamian people; describes their daily life, religion, literature, technology, and scientific tradition. This precise and unbiased presentation focuses on those unique cultural features of the ancient land that enabled the Mesopotamian civilization to last for more than three millennia. The result is a deft "portrait," a candid appraisal of the very essence of ancient Mesopotamia." --

The dual purpose of this book is to describe the greatest period of Greek history in all its aspects, political and military as well as economic and cultural, and to take into account the uncertainties of modern scholarship.

Now in paperback - Phoebe Gilman and Joanne Fitzgerald's beautiful story about the transformative power of love. When a little hippo falls in love with an Egyptian princess, he hopes that a great magician can turn him into a human boy. Alas, even the magician can't perform such a feat! Instead, the magician turns him into a toy that the princess can playwith - a beautiful blue hippo on wheels. The princess adores her toy and takes him everywhere with her. But little girls don't play with toys forever. The princess grows up and yearns for a true love. Can the hippo make her wish come true? Based on a story by Joan Grant, The Blue Hippopotamus was Phoebe Gilman's final book. The illustrations by Joanne Fitzgerald were inspired by sketches Phoebe drew before her death in 2002. *A Governor General's Award nominee!

The Description for this book, Cairo, will be forthcoming.

Imperial Rome by Hadas, Moses

"It was one of history's great vanishing acts. As early as 3500 BCE, scribes in the mud-walled city-state of Sumer used a reed stylus to press tiny wedge-shaped symbols into clay. For three thousand years, the script chronicled the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the grand kingdoms of Mesopotamia - Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Achaemenid Empire - along with precious minutia about everyday life so long ago. But as the palaces of these once great kingdoms sank beneath the desert sands, the meaning of these characters was lost. London, 1857. Colossal sculptures of winged bulls and alabaster bas-reliefs depicting cities under siege and vassals bearing tributes to Biblical kings lined the halls of the British Museum. In the Victorian era's obsession with the triumph of human progress, the mysterious kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia - the very cradle of civilization - had captured the public imagination. Yet Europe's best philologists struggled to decipher the strange characters. Cuneiform seemed to have thousands of symbols - with some scholars claiming each could be pronounced in up to eight, nine, even ten different ways. Others insisted they'd cracked the code and deciphered inscriptions that corresponded precisely to the Old Testament - proving the veracity of the Word of God. Was it all a hoax? A delusion? A rollicking adventure through the golden age of archaeology, The Writing on the Wall tracks the decades-long race to decipher the oldest script in the world. It's the story of a swashbuckling young archeologist, a suave British military officer, and a curmudgeonly Irish rector, all vying for glory - from the ruins of Persepolis to the opulence of Ottoman-era Baghdad - in a quest to unearth the relics of lost civilizations and unlock the secrets of humanity's past"--

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights. In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Araweté swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of “economics” and “politics” emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.

"The Whole Megilla tracks tractate Megilla of the Babylonia Talmud page by page, offering an close reading and exegesis of the text. It makes this difficult work comprehensible"--

Egyptian Religion

"This fascinating book is a union of physics and Egyptology. It is constructed like a mystery story, and it would be unfair to give away too much of the plot. ..." The New Yorker.