Ancient Legends

Amazons - fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world - were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles displayed their valor in duels with Amazon queens, and the Athenians reveled in their victory over a powerful Amazon army. In historical times, Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman general Pompey tangled with Amazons.

Kateri, an arrogant warrior princess, has to fight in the arena against her suitors to win her right to rule, and she is desperate to prove to her father that she is strong enough to take over his throne and rule the kingdom. But when she finds out her final opponent, she knows she cannot win. Kateri flees to the desert to train under the enemy she hates the most and the only one who might be able to give her a shot at winning. But what Kateri discovers in the desert twists her world - and her heart - upside-down.

It would be hard if not outright impossible to overstate the impact Roman Emperor Constantine I had on the history of Christianity, Ancient Rome, and Europe as a whole. Best known as Constantine the Great, the kind of moniker only earned by rulers who have distinguished themselves in battle and conquest, Constantine remains an influential and controversial figure to this day. He achieved enduring fame by being the first Roman emperor to personally convert to Christianity.

Legends of the Ancient World: The Life and Legacy of Hannibal looks at the life of the Carthaginian hero, explores some of the mysteries and myths surrounding his life and campaigns, and analyzes his legacy, which has remained strong over 2,000 years after his death and promises to last many more. You will learn about Hannibal like you never have before, in no time at all.

Spartacus is the world’s most famous slave, and one of the most notorious figures of Ancient Rome. A slave enamored of freedom and willing to fight and die for it, he became especially popular in the years following the Enlightenment, after which he was widely viewed as a poignant champion of liberty in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a result, he became a symbol during struggles like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the struggle for emancipation.

The Babylonians were one of the earliest of history's great ancient civilizations, and the most famous Babylonian of them all was Hammurabi, who came to the throne as the first king of the Babylonian empire around the beginning of the 18th century BC. Hammurabi had a long and fruitful reign that saw him consolidate most of Mesopotamia under his control, but he's best known today for Hammurabi's Code, one of the earliest known code of laws in human history. Inscribed on stone tablets, Hammurabi's Code was found over 3,500 years later, in the early 20th century.

The importance of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (or as he was known from birth, Gaius Octavius "Octavian" Thurinus) to the course of Western history is hard to overstate. His life, his rise to power, his political, social and military achievements, all laid the foundations for the creation of an Empire which would endure for almost five centuries, and whose traditions, laws, architecture and art continue to influence much of Europe and the world today.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was one of the most famous Romans in his day, and posterity has been even kinder to him. Cicero was a legend in his own time for his oratory abilities, which he used to persuade fellow senators and denounce enemies like Catiline and Mark Antony, but he was also one of Rome's most prodigious writers and political philosophers. Alongside Pericles, Cicero was one of antiquity's greatest politicians, and he has remained one of the most influential statesmen in history.

In the early 20th century, over 3,000 years after her death, Nefertiti became a household name and one of the most famous women of the ancient world. Egyptologists were aware that she was a queen of the New Kingdom Egypt during the later portion of the 18th dynasty, but she was little-known until the presentation of a reconstructed bust depicting her at the Berlin Museum in 1924. Nefertiti means "the beautiful one has come", and if the presented bust is anything to judge by she, was indeed a beautiful woman.

The life story of Ramesses II is voluminously recorded and illustrated through documents and inscriptions, and it is even represented physically through his funerary goods and the well-preserved mummified remains of the man himself. But despite the resources available with which to reason about who Ramesses II was and what his impact might have been, there is also a necessary disconnection between him and those who chronicled his story.

Attila, Emperor of the Hunnic Empire and thus most commonly known as Attila the Hun, is an idiosyncratic figure who has become more myth than man, not least because much of his life is shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the most famous "barbarian" in history, Attila was the lord of a vast empire spanning two continents, but he is best remembered for what he did not conquer.

Leading Athens for upwards of 40 years between the Second Persian War and the Peloponnesian War, Pericles has become an idealized figure over the last millennia, but he was a polarizing figure among his contemporaries. According to some, he was an honest and upstanding politician, while for others he was the lowest kind of demagogue. They thought he was a political opportunist whose ability to wriggle free of criticism was best summed up by the typically pithy comment of his rival Thucydides.

Osiris was one of the most important gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and he could well be the most famous of the Egyptian gods today. Aside from the ubiquity of the sun-god Ra in much of modern popular culture, it is Osiris who captivates the minds of modern readers most. His story is both familiar and strangely alien. He is the god of the dead, but he became so by the very fact of his mortality. All the gods of ancient Egypt were capable of dying, but Osiris was also a symbol of resurrection.

The book contains myths of the Trojan cycle outlined by the poem of Homer's "Iliad," the tragedies of Sophocles, poems of Virgil, Ovid's "Heroines", and fragments of other works.

Explore the four cities of Irish legend to which druid Abaris the sky-rider traveled in his flying machine, and from which the Tuatha dé Danann gods of Ireland came prior to their arrival in the British Isles - an arrival from the sky by a race of humanoids whose description matches that of the Nordic extraterrestrials visiting Earth today. Clues link diverse regions of the world under one pantheon of related gods and not the unrelated gods as we perceive them today, while greedy humans line their pockets and destroy the evidence in a grand power play.

Mythen der Geschichte – Die größten Legenden der Menschheit. Genieße die geheimnisvollen Welten der Vergangenheit und entdecke Mythen und Legenden, die die Menschheit seit Jahrtausenden bewegen. Von Atlantis bis Stonehenge, von den Irrfahrten des Odysseus bis zur sagenumwobenen Stadt Troja – dieses Buch führt dich zu den faszinierendsten Schauplätzen alter Erzählungen und enthüllt die spannenden Hintergründe der größten Mythen. Mythen der Geschichte ist eine packende Sammlung von Geschichten über Helden, Götter und geheimnisvolle Orte, geschrieben in einem fesselnden und unterhaltsamen Stil.

Fictional? Authoritative? Fantastic? Deadpan? Investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true....

Do you know that the one-eyed Odin was alcoholic? Or that Loki gave birth to an eight-legged horse? Norse Mythology is complicated, unpredictable, and wonderful. All the stories tell of bravery and strength, loyalty amongst friends and family, and the pursuit of wisdom over power.

Nero ranks among the very worst of the caesars. He is a figure so hated that in many ancient Christian traditions, he is literally - without hyperbole - considered the Antichrist. He was the man who famously "fiddled while Rome burned" and his economic policies, according to many historians, virtually bankrupted Rome. Nero was an inveterate lecher, a murderous tyrant who showed little compunction in murdering his mother, and he liked to use Christian martyrs as sources of illumination by burning them alive at night.

Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity's first great conqueror. Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) managed to stretch an empire from Greece to Asia's Himalayas at just 30 years old. It took less than 15 years for Alexander to conquer much of the known world.