New Books in Ancient History

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

English. French. Italian. Hindi. Greek. Russian. All these different languages can trace their roots to the same origin: Proto-Indo-European, spoken in 4000 BC in the steppe that crosses from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Whether by migration, diffusion or conquest, the Indo-European languages spread west across Europe, east across Central Asia, and southeast towards India. Laura Spinney writes about Proto-Indo-European—which never existed in a written form—and its many descendants in her latest book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (William Collins / Bloomsbury: 2025). Laura Spinney is the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (PublicAffairs: 2017), which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and two novels. Her science writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, Nature, The Economist, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings of rabbis in Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries CE, Dalton illuminates the significance of social relationships in the production of rabbinic expertise. She traces the social interactions—everyday instances of mutual exchange, from dinner parties to tithes and patronages—that fostered the perception of rabbis as experts. Dalton shows how the knowledge derived from the rabbis’ technical skills was validated and recognized by others. Rabbis socialized and noshed with neighbors and offered advice and legal favors to friends. In exchange for their expert judgments, they received invitations, donations, appointments, and recognition. She argues that their status as Torah experts did not arise by virtue of being scholars but from their ability to persuade others that their mobilization of Jewish cultural resources was beneficial. Dalton describes the relational processes that made rabbinic expertise possible as well as the accompanying tensions; social interactions shaped the rabbis’ domain of knowledge while also imposing expectations of reciprocity that had to be managed. Dalton’s authoritative analysis demonstrates that a focus on friendship and exchange provides a fuller understanding of how rabbis claimed and defended their distinct expertise. New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review Krista Dalton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College and an editor-in-chief at Ancient Jew Review Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Covering the whole of the ancient Greek experience from its beginnings late in the third millennium BCE to the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture (Princeton UP, 2024) is an accessible and lively introduction to the Greeks and their ways of living and thinking. In this fresh and witty exploration of the thought, culture, society, and history of the Greeks, Jennifer Roberts traces not only the common values that united them across the seas and the centuries, but also the enormous diversity in their ideas and beliefs.Examining the huge importance to the Greeks of religion, mythology, the Homeric epics, tragic and comic drama, philosophy, and the city-state, the book offers shifting perspectives on an extraordinary and astonishingly creative people. Century after century, in one medium after another, the Greeks addressed big questions, many of which are still very much with us, from whether gods exist and what happens after we die to what political system is best and how we can know what is real. Yet for all their virtues, Greek men set themselves apart from women and foreigners and profited from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers, and the book also looks at the mixed legacy of the ancient Greeks today.The result is a rich, wide-ranging, and compelling history of a fascinating and profoundly influential culture in all its complexity—and the myriad ways, good and bad, it continues to shape us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife. A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor Richard Oram takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to the depths of the war-torn and plague-ravaged fourteenth century. Departing from traditional frameworks that divide Scotland’s history into periods based on kings’ reigns or major political events, discussion instead follows the major shifts in climate that divide these fourteen centuries into epochs, each with its own distinct characteristics. Starting amidst the fields and forests shaped across the eight millennia of Scotland’s prehistory, where we encounter the imprint of past generations of hunters and gatherers, farmers and fishermen, as well as the legacies of climate impacts and pathogens, the book explores the depths of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the long climb back to the ‘Golden Age’ of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Medieval Climate Anomaly, to end with the slide through crop-failure, famine, war and disease of what is reputed to be the ‘worst century in human history’. Also listen to Dr. Oram’s previous New Books Network interview on the “sequel” to this book, covering the period 1400-1850: Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Papyri Copticae Magicae: Coptic Magical Texts, Volume 1: Formularies (de Gruyter, 2023) offers an accessible repository of edited Coptic magical texts. The book is a careful and thorough edition and philological study of thirty-seven distinct Coptic manuscripts, covering a wide range of magical applications—from love spells, to curses, to exorcisms, and healing invocations. The volume makes available a rich set of evidence of everyday concerns of love, justice, strife, and health in late ancient Egypt to readers outside of the niche community of scholars of Coptic language. You will discover ancient ritual texts including instructions for healing bowels, a formula for sleep, a spell request for a good singing voice, and a love spell for attracting the attention of a crush in a one-sided romance. You will also find a curious assemblage of divine names and a list of material objects necessary for offerings that suggest need for ingredients like sweat of a bee, foam from the mouth of a horse, frog blood, incense, or different types of plant matter. For scholars interested in history of late ancient Egypt, history of Christianities, Manichaeism, Coptic language, esoterica and magic in late antiquity, material culture, or manuscripts this monograph will provide an important resource for the study and expansion of the vocabularies, grammars, and material practices of ancient rituals.  Korshi Dosoo is is currently co-Principal Investigator of the “Corpus of Coptic Magical Formularies (CoMaF)” project based at the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg. Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum teaches Coptic at the University of Notre Dame and religious studies at Spelman College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the first Syriac reader for the New Testament. It guides the reader through the Syriac New Testament Peshitta, glossing the uncommon words and parsing difficult word forms. It is designed for two groups of people. First, for students learning Syriac after a years’ worth of study this series provides the material to grow in reading ability from the primary texts. Second, this series is designed for scholars, linguists, theologians, and curious lay people looking to refresh their Syriac, or use them in preparation for their work of study, and teaching. The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible: The New Testament (Gorgias Press, 2023) immerses the reader in the biblical texts in order to build confidence reading Classical Syriac as quickly as possible. To achieve this, all uncommon words that occur fewer than 25 times in the Syriac New Testament are glossed as footnotes. This enables the beginner or intermediate student to continue reading every passage unhindered. Therefore, this book complements traditional language grammars and is especially ideal for beginner and intermediate students learning to read Syriac. However, even advanced readers will appreciate the glossing of the occasional rare word. Other features include: Maps from the New Testament period with Syriac place names Paradigm charts of Syriac nouns and verbs A glossary of all the words not glossed below the text The base text is the Antioch Bible which includes the Peshitta for the canonical Syriac books, and later translations (probably Philoxenian) for the rest which makes this ideal for readers. For listeners who are interested in buying this tool for themselves, Gorgias has offered a 10% discount code for listeners of this podcast through the end of May 2025. If you order through the Gorgias website, simply enter the discount code NBNNTR10% at checkout. The book can be purchased from Gorgias here. A preview of the book can be found here. Timothy A. Lee is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on textual criticism of the Greek and Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical interpretation, ancient history, and theology. Some of his work is published in journals such as Revue de Qumran, Textus, the Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. He has three previous degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Durham. Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network.  Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Doubleday, 2025) she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus's followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus's life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn't illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus's body wasn't humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn't a failed messiah, his kingdom is a metaphor: he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers' numbers grow.In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity. Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science. New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review. Andrew Griebeler is assistant professor in the depart of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. With students and other faculty at Duke, he is also helping to document the legacy of the Duke Herbarium on Instagram (@bluedevil.herbarium) before its closure by the university. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices