Henry Carter Hull

A technological, strategic, and tactical history of ancient naval ships from Alexander to the battle of Actium. The period covered in this book is well known for its epic battles and grand campaigns of territorial conquest, but Hellenistic monarchies, Carthaginians, and the rapacious Roman Republic were scarcely less active at sea. Huge resources were poured into maintaining fleets not only as symbols of prestige but as means of projecting real military...

Syria (which in its historical wider sense includes modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Jordan) has always been at the centre of events of world importance. It was in this region that pastoral-stock rearing, settled agriculture and alphabetic writing were invented (and the dog domesticated). From Syria, Phoenician explorers set out to explore the whole Mediterranean region and sailed round Africa 2,000 years before Vasco de Gama. These are...

Pamphylia, in modern Turkey, was a Greek country from the early Iron Age until the Middle Ages. In that land there were nine cities which can be described more or less as Greek, and this book is an investigation of their history. This was a land at the margins of other great empires - Hellenistic, Roman, Arab and Byzantine - and is still off the beaten track, though Aspendos, Perge and Phaselis are all visited for their archaeology. Only one ancient...

A historian of the ancient world examines the epic rise and fall of the Celtic tribes, who invaded the Mediterranean and lands further east. The eastern Celtic tribes, known to the Greeks as Galatians, exploited the waning of Macedonian power after Alexander the Great's death to launch increasingly ambitious raids and expeditions into the Balkans. In 279 BC, they launched a major invasion, defeating and beheading the Macedonian king, Ptolemy Keraunos,...

“Thoroughly ‘reader friendly’ in organization and presentation . . . an ideal introduction to the creation and rise of the Ptolemaic era of Egypt.” -- Midwest Book Review In this first volume of his trilogy on the Ptolemies, John Grainger explains how Ptolemy I established the dynasty’s power in Egypt in the wake of Alexander the Great’s death. Egypt had been independent for most of the fourth century BC, but was reconquered by the Persian...