The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In the Legion XXII books (Capsarius and Bellatrix) our intrepid Romans come up against the warrior queen of Kush, but who was she, who were her people, and why did this conflict occur? Well, without wanting to drop a plethora of spoilers for the books, here’s a...
Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Marcus Antonius (known as Mark Antony), Roman consul and triumvir, was born in 40 BCE. This made her around ten years old when the civil war between her father and his fellow triumvir Gaius Julius...
Khaled al–Asaad “In spite of my advanced age,” wrote the French historian Paul Veyne in 2015, “it is my duty as a former professor and as a human being to voice my stupefaction before this incomprehensible destruction, and to sketch a portrait of the past splendour of...
Mark Healy’s The Ancient Assyrians is a wonderful exploration of the ancient Assyrian Empire and its intimidating army during the crucial period between 883-612 BC. It is a must-read for those seeking an in-depth study into one of history’s most enigmatic and powerful...
Shortly after Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, he dedicated inscriptions commemorating his achievements, to wit: “The great gods have delivered into my hands all the lands, and I caused the land to live in peace.” With much of the known world...
The Assyrian Homeland To the Assyrians, the ‘Land of Ashur’, the mat Ashur – a term first employed in the Middle Assyrian kingdom – embraced not just the Assyrian triangle but also the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that had been conquered in the 13th...
Mark Healy, many congratulations on your new title, The Ancient Assyrians: Empire and Army. Who were the Assyrians? We would locate Assyria in the northern half of modern Iraq. The name Assyria derives from that of its chief god, Ashur. Assyria = ’the land of Ashur’....
In his new book, The Story of the World in 100 Moments, Neil Oliver has chosen events covering a million years to understand how human history is linked. Justin Doherty met up with Neil recently, and they discussed the new book, what inspired it, and the subject of...
There are two stories that Jeremy Paxman tells in his new book, Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain. The first is the national story, how coal was the driver behind the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. The country’s hunger for this black rock...
The Princess of Thebes was wheeled on a gurney into the laboratory. Peta Raven observed the porters’ careful progression through the doorway and up to the table. No corpse should be, or ever was, treated negligently in this place but custody of the princess invoked an...
