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Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives still haunt us as examples of how the hunger for personal power can overwhelm collective politics, how the exaltation of the military can corrode civilian authority, and how the best intentions can lead to disastrous consequences. Plutarch renders these history-making lives as flesh-and-blood characters.

In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers the question of how Jewish missionaries ended up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life.

Starting AD 400 (around the time of their invasion of England) and running through to the 1100s (the 'Aftermath'), historian Geoffrey Hindley shows the Anglo-Saxons as formative in the history not only of England but also of Europe. The society inspired by the warrior world of the Old English poem Beowulf saw England become the world's first nation state and Europe's first country to conduct affairs in its own language, and Bede and Boniface of Wessex establish the dating convention we still use today.

No city on earth has preserved its past as has Rome. Visitors stand on bridges that were crossed by Julius Caesar and Cicero, walk around temples visited by Roman emperors, and step into churches that have hardly changed since popes celebrated mass in them 16 centuries ago. These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the violent disasters that have struck the city. Afflicted by earthquakes, floods, fires and plagues, it has most of all been repeatedly ravaged by roving armies.

Katherine Pangonis explores five forgotten cities of the Mediterranean: Syracuse, Antioch, Ravenna, Tyre and Carthage. Each of these of these ancient cities has a claim to have been the centre of the world in its own time. Their fascinating entwined history takes in Alexander the Great, the Byzantine general Maniakes, and the Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman conquests. All were once major power centres that have declined into relative obscurity - but their glory still lingers for those who seek it out.

The world will never see another peace conference like the one which took place in Paris in 1919. For six months, the world's major leaders - including Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France - met to discuss the peace settlements which were to end World War One.

Land Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. It is a big topic in another way. More than anywhere else, the famous Land Between the Rivers, where civilization was born, where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander, has led an existence that could be called, from a certain perspective, a history of the world.

A study of the substantial evidence for a former race of giants in North America and its 150-year suppression by the Smithsonian Institution.

Uncovering compelling new evidence, Egyptologist Robert Bauval and astrophysicist Thomas Brophy present the anthropological, climatological, archaeological, geological, and genetic research supporting a hugely debated theory of the Black African origin of Egyptian civilization. Building upon extensive studies from the past four decades and their own archaeoastronomical and hieroglyphic research, the authors show how the early Black culture known as the Cattle People not only domesticated cattle but were also an advanced civilization.

The final years of the Roman republic are usually recounted from the top, through the eyes of the big winners and losers: Brutus, Mark Antony, Emperor Augustus. But The Last Assassin, a thrilling narrative history, tells the well-known history from an exciting new perspective. For 14 years after 44 BC, Cassius of Parma (Cassius Parmensis), one of the lesser-known assassins of Julius Caesar, watched from the wings as all of his coconspirators were murdered.

The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. A leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, Heather relates the extraordinary story of how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled the empire apart.

Explore the dramatic interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and paganism in Rome from the 1st to the 6th centuries. Why did pagan Rome clash with the early Christians? What was it like to be a Jew or a Christian under Roman law? And how did Christianity ultimately achieve dominance in the Roman Empire?Over the course or 24 lectures, Professor Harl enables you to grasp the full historical sweep of this critically important era and its key figures.

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.

The rise and fall of the Roman Republic occupies a special place in the history of Western civilization. From humble beginnings on the seven hills beside the Tiber, the city of Rome grew to dominate the ancient Mediterranean. Led by her senatorial aristocracy, Republican armies defeated Carthage and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great, and brought the surrounding peoples to east and west into the Roman sphere. Yet the triumph of the Republic was also its tragedy.

Alexander the Great’s story often reads like fiction: son to a snake-loving mother and a battle-scarred father, tutored by Aristotle, a youth from the periphery of the Greek world who took part in his first campaign aged 16, becoming king of Macedon at 20 and king of Asia by 25, leading his armies into battle like a Homeric figure. Each generation has peered through the glass of history and come to their own conclusion about Alexander, be it enlightened ruler, military genius, megalomaniac, drunkard or despot. Yet the first two decades of his life have until now been a mystery.

From stories of resurrected mummies and thousand-year-old curses to powerful pharaohs and the coveted treasures of the Great Pyramids, ancient Egypt has had an unfaltering grip on the modern imagination. Now, in Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch offers a comprehensive introduction that untangles the mystery of Egyptian myth.

Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. What if it were true? And if so, what if there were clues left behind? Each week hundreds of thousands of viewers tune in to the wildly popular Ancient Aliens® television series to seek insight into those very questions - and to become part of a thrilling, probing exploration of the mysteries at the heart of world civilizations.

The Roman army was the greatest fighting machine the ancient world produced. The Roman Empire depended on soldiers not just to win its wars, defend its frontiers and control the seas but also to act as the engine of the state. Roman legionaries and auxiliaries came from across the Roman world and beyond. They served as tax collectors, policemen, surveyors, as civil engineers and, if they survived, in retirement, as civic worthies, craftsmen and politicians. Some even rose to become emperors.

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, king of Persia. Here are not only the great battles - Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis - but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of epic destiny at work.

Written in the tradition of historians like Stacy Schiff and Amanda Foreman who find modern lessons in ancient history, this provocative narrative explores the lives of five remarkable pharaohs who ruled Egypt with absolute power, shining a new light on the country's 3,000-year empire and its meaning today.