{"title":"Gw Bowersock","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"throne-of-adulis-book-gw-bowersock-9780199739325","title":"The Throne of Adulis","description":"Just prior to the rise of Islam, in the sixth century AD, southern Arabia was embroiled in a holy war between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs. The Jewish kingdom, composed of ethnic Arabs who had converted to Judaism more than a century before, had launched a bloody pogrom against Christians in the region. The ruler of Ethiopia, who claimed descent from the union of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and even was rumored to possess an object no less venerable than the Ark of the Covenant, aspired both to protect the persecuted Christians and to restore Ethiopian control in the Arabian Peninsula. Though little known today, this was an international war that involved both the Byzantine Empire, who had established Christian churches in Ethiopia beginning in the fourth century, and the Sasanian Empire in Persia, who supported the Jews in a proxy war with Byzantium.  Our knowledge of these events derives mostly from an inscribed throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis seen and meticulously described by a Christian merchant known as Cosmos in the sixth century. Trying to decipher and understand this monument takes us directly into religious conflicts that occupied the nations on both sides of the Red Sea in late antiquity. Using the writings of Cosmas and archaeological evidence from the period, historian G. W. Bowersock offers a narrative account of this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history. The extraordinary story told in Throne of Adulis provides an important and much neglected background for the rise of Islam as well as the collapse of the Persian Empire before the Byzantines.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49544723988753,"sku":"GOR009375120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000225431825,"sku":"NIN9780199739325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415573594385,"sku":"CIN0199739323VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51608831131921,"sku":"CIN0199739323G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52616174305553,"sku":"NLS9780199739325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199739323.jpg?v=1751133031"},{"product_id":"hellenism-in-late-antiquity-book-glen-w-bowersock-9780472064182","title":"Hellenism in Late Antiquity","description":"The extraordinary adaptability and durability of Greek culture in times of momentous change is revealed in this book, as G. W. Bowersock seeks to interpret Hellenism in a predominantly Christian world. In this effort he sheds new light on a late paganism that has often been seen as moribund and shows it to have been unexpectedly vigorous. Hellenism, comprising the language, thought, mythology, and images of the Greeks, contributed fundamentally to the evolution of early Christianity. It had spread across the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean for many centuries before Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the Byzantine government. But Hellenism served no less to disseminate and strengthen paganism--a role that has hitherto been little appreciated or studied. The local traditions of Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Near East survived in most cases by sharing common forms of expression with the Christians. Hellenism clearly allowed late pagans of widely differing traditions to communicate with each other. At the same time it gave to both Christianity and Islam a pagan context that enjoyed much greater public recognition then than now. And so the author shows that Hellenism illuminates the wholeness of the late antique world in the East, the interaction of its paganism and its Christianity. Dionysus and Christ flourished together. \". . . Bowersock has given us a new unifying perspective for the turbulent religious history of four centuries--the idea of a common cultural medium within (and against) which differing religious traditions evolved and inter-penetrated.\" --New York Times Book Review \". . . a formidable achievement . . . [an] elegant and powerfully original book.\" --Times Literary Supplement G. W. Bowersock is Professor of Ancient History in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50762226499857,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50762227876113,"sku":"CIN0472064185G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0472064185.jpg?v=1751103404"},{"product_id":"from-gibbon-to-auden-book-gw-bowersock-9780195376678","title":"From Gibbon to Auden","description":"For several decades G. W. Bowersock has been one of our leading historians of the classical world. This volume collects seventeen of his essays, each illustrating how the classical past has captured the imagination of some of the greatest figures in modern historiography and literature. The essays here range across three centuries, the eighteenth to the twentieth, and are divided chronologically.    The great Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon is in large part the unifying force of this collection as he appears prominently in the first four essays, beginning with Bowersock's engaging introduction to the methods and genius behind The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's profound influence is revealed in subsequent essays on Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century scholar famous for his history of the Italian Renaissance but whose work on late antiquity is only now being fully appreciated; the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose annotations on Gibbon's Decline and Fall tell us much about his own historical poems; and finally W. H. Auden, whose poem and little known essay \"The Fall of Rome\" were, in quirky ways, tributes to Gibbon. The collection reprints Auden's poem and essay in full.    The result is a rich survey of the early modern and modern uses of the classical past by one of its most important contemporary commentators.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50978963194129,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50978963456273,"sku":"GOR014157925","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52455381008657,"sku":"NLS9780195376678","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195376676.jpg?v=1750940730"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-gw-bowersock.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}