New Books in Ancient History

The practice of history in premodern Java was profoundly influenced by precarious conditions of textual production and preservation: fragile manuscripts perished in the tropical environment, archival records were scattered far afield, and historical memories faded over many generations. InThe Precarious Past in Premodern Java, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan examines how Javanese societies between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE responded with distinctive strategies to record and transmit knowledge of the past.

Drawing on sources in Javanese, Sanskrit, Malay, and related languages from the Indonesian archipelago, Sastrawan provides a detailed account of diverse forms of history making in premodern Java, reconstructing a dynamic culture in which written and nonwritten modes of transmission coexisted and intersected. By situating these practices within broader discussions of global historiography, this book challenges modern assumptions about what counts as “history” and illuminates how societies have developed different ways of preserving and remembering the past.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.

Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a historian, lecturer and DECRA research fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating their victims!

Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.
While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today.

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How did the state become Christian in late antiquity? Many scholars
have traced the Christianization of the Roman world in the centuries
following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 CE. Robin
Whelan, however, turns his attention away from the usual suspects in
such accounts-emperors, empresses, bishops, ascetics, and other holy
people-to consider a surprisingly understudied set of late ancient
Christians: those who served the state as courtiers, bureaucrats, and
governors. By tracing the requirements of regimes, the expectations of
subjects, and patterns of engagement with churches and churchmen, he
argues that that those who served the state in late antiquity could be
seen-and indeed, could see themselves-as distinctly Christian authority
figures-just as much as the emperors and kings whom they served, and the
bishops and ascetics whom they governed. Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Robin Whelan is Reader in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

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Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman.

Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia.
Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome’s violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire.

Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university’s Games and Gaming Lab.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene is a distinguished international scholar closely associated with the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ), an international double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal.

Dr. Greene serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. In addition to contributing to the supervision of the scholarly quality of submitted articles, the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, the journal’s publisher, has released an official academic interview with him as part of its series of scholarly conversations.

His publication and interview, entitled “Scribes, Scripts, and State Formation in Ancient Israel,” were produced in collaboration with Željko Stanojević, the journal’s Managing Editor.

About Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene

Dr. Greene is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the prestigious University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States.

His principal areas of scholarly expertise and the fields he represents within the journal include:

Biblical Hebrew and Philology: The study of the historical development and linguistic structure of ancient Hebrew.

Northwest Semitic Languages and Epigraphy: The analysis of ancient inscriptions on stone, clay, and other materials from the Levant.

Palaeography: The historical development of ancient scripts and manuscript traditions.

The Formation of the Ancient Israelite State: Anthropological and sociological approaches to the emergence of institutions during the Iron Age, with particular attention to the role of scribes in the formation of biblical texts, including the Deuteronomistic History.

In his research, Dr. Greene also employs modern digital technologies, including advanced Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to analyse damaged ancient inscriptions and reconstruct patterns of literacy in the Iron Age Near East.

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