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url 2021-04-22 19:16
Natasa Pantovic best books list of ancient history classics reviews
Language of Amarna - Language of Diplomacy: Perspectives on the Amarna Letters - Jana Mynarova
Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus - Ahmed Osman
The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation - Gábor Betegh
Metaphysics of Sound: In Search of the Name of God - Nataša Pantović Nuit

The Best Books On The Ancient Mediterranean Classics Beyond The Usual

Who am I?

 

Nataša Pantović holds an MSc in Economics and is a Maltese Serbian novelist, adoptive parent, and ancient worlds’ consciousness researcher. Using stories of ancient Greek and Egyptian philosophers and ancient artists she inspires researchers to reach beyond their self-imposed boundaries. In the last five years, she has published 3 historical fiction and 7 non-fiction books with the Ancient Worlds' focus. She speaks English, Serbian, all Balkan Slavic languages, Maltese and Italian. She has also helped build a school in a remote village of Ethiopia, and has since adopted two kids, as a single mum!

 


I wrote...

Metaphysics of Sound: In Search of The Name of God

By Nataša Pantović

Metaphysics of Sound: In Search of The Name of God

What is my book about?

 

Join Nataša Pantović on a mind-boggling tour of history and sounds - from the Ancient Sumerian Priestess Sin Liturgy right up to the development of Ancient Greek and Cyrillic alphabet. This new novel contains a dialogue between two European cultures, Roman and Greek from an Ancient Slavic perspective, an intimate encounter of Balkan, its history and culture, a glimpse into the evolution of Ancient Egyptian’s, Ancient Maltese, Ancient Greek - Yonic and Slavic sounds. A Brief History of the world Beyond the Usual (the subtitle of the book) contains the historical overview of the development of people, sounds, and symbols as frequencies.

 

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The Books I Picked & Why

Language of Amarna - Language of Diplomacy: Perspectives on the Amarna Letters

By J. Jana Mynarova

Language of Amarna - Language of Diplomacy: Perspectives on the Amarna Letters

Why this book?

Better known as Amarna Heresy, a philosophical discussion from Ancient Egypt's Babylon about Monotheism and Trinity written 3,000 years ago. “To the King, My Sun, My God, the Breath of My Life…” This remarkable collection contains requests for gold, offers of marriage, warning of a traitor, and promises of loyalty to the pharaoh – letters of correspondence, all written in Akkadian. The Amorite tribes from Babylonia, form part of this correspondence.

Akhenaten 1378 - 1361 BC, was the first Egyptian ruler in history, who has specifically written about Egyptian Gods, a practice usually kept behind the closed doors of the temples. The deity called Aten inspired such devotion in Pharaoh Akhenaten that he built a new capital city which he named ‘Horizon of the Aten’ (modern Amarna), dedicated to the AΘen. He spoke of a deity with no image, an omnipotent God/goddess that emanates aNX, holy spirits, served by all the other Ancient Egyptian Gods, as the ancient saints or angels, who all had their own role in the kingdom of God.

 


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Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus

By Ahmed Osman

Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus

Why this book?

 

A historian, lecturer, researcher, and author, Ahmed Osman is a British Egyptologist born in Cairo who published three books: Stranger in the Valley of the Kings (1987), Moses: Pharaoh of Egypt (1990) and The House of the Messiah (1992) says that Tut-Ankh-Amun had a very similar “story” to Jesus.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains the Ancient Egyptian Negative Confessions that were originally written on Temple walls and as the burial texts, and were "I have not stolen...", "I have not killed", etc., a letter written to Gods, engraved on Temples walls and prepared as Papyruses 2,000 BC and were equal to "Thou shalt not", the Ten Commandments of Jewish and Christian ethics, later perceived as divine revelation. The Negative Confession is accompanied by a list of protective sounds and symbols that kept souls safe from demons. Just for the history lovers, the timeline of these is the following:

3150 BC – First preserved hieroglyphs, in the tomb of a king at Abydos

2345 BC – First royal pyramid, of King Unas, to contain the Pyramid Texts, carved for the king

2100 BC – First Coffin Texts, painted on the coffins

1550 BC – Papyrus copies of the Book of the Dead are used instead of inscribing spells on the walls of the tombs

Ahmed Osman tells us about Tut-Ankh-Amun Trinity and Jesus:

“In the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun (*note the name TuT aNX aMN) there is a unique scene, representing the Trinity of Christ. As I stood alone, gazing at the painting of the burial chamber on the north wall, I realized for the first time that I was looking at the strongest pictorial evidence linking Tutankhamun and Christ.”

 


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Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

By Betty De Shong Meador

Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

Why this book?

 

Scholars have disagreed when written records become literature, yet the earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep (who wrote in Egyptian) and Enheduanna (who wrote in Sumerian), dating to around 2400 BC. Enheduanna is the earliest known Female Poet. She was the High Priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna (Sin). She lived in the Sumerian city-state of Ur in Syria. So this would be my 3rd recommendation for all the researchers of Ancient History.

Enheduanna's contributions to Sumerian literature, include the collection of hymns known as the "Sumerian Temple Hymns", 37 tablets to be exact, from 2,700 BC. The temple hymns were the first collection of their kind, the copying of the hymns indicates that they were used long after and held in very high esteem.

Sīn or Suen (Akkadian: EN.ZU or lord-ess of wisdom) or Nanna was the goddess of the moon in the Mesopotamian religions of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia. Nanna (the classical Sumerian spelling is DŠEŠ.KI = the technical term for the crescent moon, also refers to the deity, is a Sumerian deity worshiped in Ur (Syria you must have guessed). The book is a precious collection of the world's oldest rituals, and hymns that had influenced the development of all religious thoughts.

 


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The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation

By Gábor Betegh

The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation

Why this book?

 

The Derveni papyrus (500 BC), an ancient Macedonian papyrus that was found in 1962, and was finally published, just recently, in 2006. Derveni Papyrus, is now at Thessaloniki Museum, Greece. This version was published in 340 BC and it is an Orphic book of mystical initiations.

The scroll was carefully unrolled and the fragments joined together, thus forming 26 columns of text. which was used in the mystery cult of Dionysus by the 'Orphic initiators'. It is a philosophical treatise written as a commentary on an Orphic poem, a Theogony concerning the birth of the gods, compiled in the circle of the philosopher AnaXagoras.

The scroll contains a philosophical treatise on a lost poem describing the birth of the gods and other beliefs focusing on Orpheus, the mythical musician who visited the underworld to reclaim his dead love. The Orpheus cult tells us of a single creator god, of the trinity, of resurrection, of a virgin's child, back in the Macedonian region of Ancient Greece that was the Ancient Europe during 400 BC...

Both Orpheus and Heraclitus compose allegories about the secrets of nature and of God. In the Orphic cosmogony, he was writing only for the "pure in hearing".

 


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Φερεκύδης - Θεογονία | Pherecydes - Theogony

By Auth Vasileios Kaziltzis

Φερεκύδης - Θεογονία | Pherecydes - Theogony

Why this book?

 

The Ancient Greek manuscript tradition and writing of history usually starts with re-writing myths, mentioning the creation story, or using the collection of myths from the Greek work called the Theogony Θεογονία “Birth of the Gods” attributed to Hesiod 700 BC. It is a long narrative poem compiling Ancient Greek myths. Hesiod describes how the gods were created, their struggles with each other, and the nature of their divine rule. In the Theogony, the origin (arche / aRČe) is Chaos, a primordial condition, a gaping void (abyss), with the beginnings and the ends of the earth, sky, sea, gods, mankind. Symbolically associated with water, it is the source, origin, or root of things that exist. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the cave-like space under the earth), and Eros, who becomes the creator of the world

Source: shepherd.com/best-books/ancient-mediterranean-classics-beyond-usual
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text 2019-12-07 01:38
Reading progress update: I've read 91 out of 280 pages.
War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe - Reider Payne

Though Payne presents his book as being about Sir Charles Stewart and his brother, it’s proving to be more of a study of Stewart’s military and diplomatic career than anything else.

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text 2017-10-18 17:32
What we get wrong about the military history of the Civil War, and why it's relevant today
Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations - Howard Jones

Lately I've been groping toward one of those revelations that may be obvious to some but is incredibly illuminating of some of the problems in our country today, which is that we focus on the wrong things when it comes to the military history of the Civil War.

 

This is something that I've come to appreciate only gradually. When I was growing up what I knew about the Civil War was defined by the literature generated by the centenary of the conflict, during which authors such as Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote wrote highly readable (and still widely read) series about the conflict. These books generally concentrated on the war in the eastern theater, where the Armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia butted heads for four years before the Union forces finally ground down the Confederate Army. This is where most of the memorable battles (First Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg) were fought, and where some of the most recognizable names served. This conception stayed with me though high school (surviving even my largely uninformed reading of James McPherson's classic book on the era) and up through college, though more through lack of reexamination than anything else.

 

It wasn't until I read Brian Holden Reid's short study of the major wars of the mid-19th century that I began to appreciate how misguided I have been. Reid pointed out something that seemed so obvious in retrospect, which is that, contrary to the narrative of a conflict that was decided only with the defeat of Robert E. Lee in Virginia, the war was really won by the Union much earlier, through the effective adoption of Winfield's Scott's proposal to economically strangle the South with a combination of blockade and control of the Mississippi River. Focusing the war on this aspect of it change the conceptualization of the war dramatically, from one in which Union generals are continually outmatched by the military genius of Robert E. Lee to one where the Union asserts a steadily growing dominance over the South over the course of the war, while the Confederacy increasingly finds itself in a struggle it cannot win.

 

Given this, I've come to appreciate just how skewed our focus of the war is in the popular imagination. This has its origins in the war itself, as the eastern theater was better covered in the press, which highlighted the clash of the two armies and their respective efforts to capture the other side's capitals. In the process, though, they understated three other aspects which were decisive to the war's outcome: the fighting in the "west" (i.e. the Ohio and Mississippi Review valleys), the U.S. Navy's blockade of the South, and the diplomatic aspects of the war. Perhaps it's understandable why these didn't get more attention at the time -- the naval blockade was grindingly dull for the most part, and the diplomatic developments were largely behind the scenes -- but it was those parts of it which determined the fate of our nation, and where we should be focusing our attention when we study it now.

 

That we have focused both then and afterward on the more narratively exciting aspects of the war is one of the reasons why our popular understanding of the war has been so mistaken. There's another factor that I think is at play, though, which makes my relatively esoteric point here relevant -- our misguided focus on the eastern theater has contributed to the romanticization of the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. By focusing so much attention upon the one theater where the Confederate forces performed the best, we have exaggerated the viability of the Confederacy and made its defeat seem more tragic as a result. That Southerners then and their descendants since have done this is perhaps understandable, but that we continue to do this more generally is inexcusable. It's hardly the only, or even primary reason why we have neo-Confederates running around today refusing to accept the outcome of what was largely a doomed effort from the start, but it certainly doesn't help.

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review 2016-11-19 00:00
A Foreign Affair: French Diplomacy Before the Iraq War
A Foreign Affair: French Diplomacy Before the Iraq War - Abel Lanzac,Christophe Blain Great art and a wonderfully told story.
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review SPOILER ALERT! 2016-09-20 19:43
And now the conclusion
Purgatory's Key: Star Trek: Legacies, Book 3 - Simon & Schuster Audio,Dayton Ward,Kevin Dilmore,Robert Petkoff

All good things must come to an end and so...I finished Purgatory's Key which is the final installment of the Legacies trilogy which you may recall me mentioning a few times (this post and this one just in case). Firstly, if you haven't read either Captain to Captain or Best Defense and you want to avoid spoilers then I'll say this: I very much enjoyed this trilogy and I think you should read it. If you want a bit of most likely spoiler-y info then stick around because I'm about to spill some beans. Okay, I hope all of those still reading are ready to be spoiled...

To catch you up a bit, there was a device called the Transfer Key which was found by the original crew of the Enterprise when captained by Robert April. This device was concealed on board the starship and the secret of its existence and power was passed down from captain to captain (and to their First Officers). One of these keepers of the secret wanted to use the Key to travel to another universe and find her lost comrades. (Three cheers for Una!) The Romulans wanted the Key because they saw it as the ultimate tool to tip the balance of power in this universe to their favor. Meanwhile, the Klingons were meeting with the Federation (with the help of Ambassador Sarek) to discuss terms to ensure peace between the two entities at the behest of the Organians (pesky people). Those on the other side of the veil in the other universe must contend with conditions that are much different to the ones that govern our universe in their bid to return home. As you might have guessed from the title, the Key is a powerful tool that for those on the wrong side of it means a kind of hellish instrument.

(spoiler show)

The conclusion to the trilogy was everything you'd want from a sci-fi adventure set in the Star Trek universe. If you're looking for a way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this amazing show then you can't go wrong with picking up the Legacies series. 9/10

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