Possibly some innate realism prevented the Mesopotamians from seeing death other than objectively. But the Epic of Gilgamesh remains an eloquent witness to the poignancy of their interrogation of the meaning of human life and destiny. S.G.F. Brandon.
In this article, a British military commentator attempts to sum up the force of events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
By occupying Syria and the Holy Places of the Hijaz, Ali Bey sought to make Egypt the dominant power in the 18th-century Arab world. P.M. Holt suggests that his policy of expansion, which included an alliance with Russia, has some interesting modern parallels.
S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.
E. Badian writes that the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes to Hellenize his dominions led to a revolt in Judaea under the leadership of the Hasmonaean house, known as the Maccabees, who succeeded in re-asserting Jewish law and the Jewish religion in traditional form.
S.G.F. Brandon describes how the Roman conquest of Jerusalem marked a crisis in the early development of Christianity, and paved the way for a general acceptance of the Pauline message.
C.H. Brown studies French imperial achievement in Morocco during the first half of the 20th century, as well as the nationalism with which it eventually came into conflict.
As the Syrian crisis intensifies, John McHugo looks at the country’s troubled relationship with the West during the Cold War and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict.
Charles Chenevix Trench finds that, as Governor of Equatoria and then Governor-General of the Sudan from 1874-1880, one of C. G. Gordon’s chief concerns was suppressing the slave-trade.
Sherman Johnson unravels the legends surrounding the author of the shortest and, possibly, earliest of the Gospels in the New Testament.
