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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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review 2020-06-15 11:24
The Secret History by Procopius
The Secret History - Procopius

TITLE:  The Secret History

 

AUTHOR:  Procopius

 

DATE PUBLISHED:  1982 (originally 550 AD)

 

EDITION:  Penguin Classics

 

FORMAT:  Paperback

 

ISBN-13:  9780140441826

_____________________________

DESCRIPTION:

"Having dutifully written the official war history of Justinian's reign, Procopius turned round and revealed in The Secret History the other faces of the leading men and women of Byzantium in the sixth century. Justinian, the great law-giver, appears as a hateful tyrant, wedded to an ex-prostitute, Theodora; and Belisarius, the brilliant general whose secretary Procopius had been, is seen as the pliable dupe of his wife Antonina, a woman as corrupt and scheming as Theodora herself."

______________________________

REVIEW:

 

To all dictators/generals/despots/rulers:  don't piss off the official historian you've employed, he might just write a nasty book about you - to be published after his death (of course)... just in case.

 

Procopius of Caesarea was a Byzantine Greek scholar who accompanied the Byzantine general Belisarius on a variety of Emperor Justinian's wars.  Procopius became the principal Byzantine historian of the 6th century, writing the History of the Wars, the Buildings, and the Secret History. The Secret History is supposed to be a supplement to the Wars, containing explanations and additions that Procopius could not insert into the latter work for fear of Justinian and Theodora.  In his Secret History, Procopius claims to expose the private lives and motivations for their public actions of Emperor Justinian, Empress Theodora, general Belisarius and his wife Antonina. 

 

There is some debate as to the accuracy of Procopius's Secret History and his motivation for writing it, but the book does provide some rather eyebrow raising shenanigans of the going-on in Byzantine at this time.  The book also comes across as a manual on how to rob your citizens and completely ruin an empire.

 

The whale, Porphyrion, was mentioned as terrorizing Byzantine shipping and sailors.  So I had to go look that up.

https://lateantiquefolklore.wordpress.com/2017/08/19/procopius-porphyrius-the-whale-and-magnetic-islands/

 

 

If anyone wants to read a free copy of Procopius's Secret History:

https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/proc/shp/index.htm

 

 

 

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text 2019-07-18 15:37
Reading progress update: I've read 18%
The Secret History - Donna Tartt

Even though I have a ton of books that would directly fit the prompt I am on:

 

22. Read a book with a word that refers to women's roles, such as wife, daughter, mother, mistress or title, such as "Mrs., Miss or Duchess, in the title, or a book that has a strong female lead character.

 

My library hold just came in for this book, so I decided last night to play my race car, and race around the board to space #3: 

 

3. Read a book set in a school or college, or that is considered a "classic," (using any criteria that you want) or that is frequently banned.

 

And read this one, which is set in fictional Hampden College, in New Hampshire. I also passed Go, and therefore collect $5.00!

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review 2019-07-13 00:53
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore

This was very fascinating. I enjoyed reading about earlier feminism. WMM was definitely ahead of his time (but also had his issues). This was really, really well researched, so it came off as a bit dry for me so I read small portions at a time. 
One thing I found fascinating were the relationships Elizabeth, Olive, Marjorie, and William all had with each other. After Marston died, the women continued their relationship/friendship. I thought it was interesting the amount of secrecy. The author made a point of pointing out that each child had a different POV. 
This is most definitely a story of how Wonder Woman began and all the amazing women that inspired her creation. But it's also a story of family.

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review 2019-02-01 18:17
not my sort of story
A Secret History of Witches - Louisa Mo... A Secret History of Witches - Louisa Morgan

Told as a series of stories about different generations of women who were witches. With power that they use in different ways and always having a girl child, often outside of wedlock and the different ways they chose to survive.

It sounds all my catnip but because there are the stories of several women I didn't feel like I really got to know any of them. It finished with a witch who works against the Nazis during World War II and I understand that there's a sequel, but I really don't care. It was readable but I didn't really feel that I really cared or that I understood the why of a lot of their dealings.

Honestly it felt like someone writing a literary novel with paranormal leanings.

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