The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (Dodo Press)

The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (Dodo Press) PDF Author: Benjamin of Tudela
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781406547764
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
Benjamin of Tudela (fl. 12th century) was a medieval Navarrese Jewish rabbi and explorer. In his journey he passed through large swathes of Europe, Asia, and Africa. His vivid descriptions of western Asia preceded those of Marco Polo by a hundred years. With his broad education and vast knowledge of languages, Benjamin of Tudela is a major figure in the history of geography and Judaism. He described his years abroad in a book, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (1543). This book describes the countries he visited, with an emphasis on the Jewish communities, including their total populations and the names of notable community leaders. The book is also a reliable source about the geography and ethnography of the Middle Ages. Benjamin is noted for not only telling facts, but citing his sources; historians regard him as highly trustworthy. Originally written in Hebrew, it was translated Latin and later translated into most major European languages, receiving considerable attention in the sixteenth century.

The Sea in World History [2 volumes]

The Sea in World History [2 volumes] PDF Author: Stephen K. Stein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440835519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 957

Book Description
This two-volume set documents the essential role of the sea and maritime activity across history, from travel and food production to commerce and conquest. In all eras, water transport has served as the cheapest and most efficient means of moving cargo and people over any significant distance. Only relatively recently have railroads and aircraft provided an alternative. Most of the world's bulk goods continue to travel primarily by ship over water. Even today, 95 percent of the cargo that enters and leaves the United States does so by ship. Similarly, people around the world rely on the sea for food, and in recent years, the sea has become an important source of oil and other resources, with the longterm effects of our continuing efforts to extract resources from the sea further highlighting environmental concerns that range from pollution to the exhaustion of fish stocks. This chronologically organized two-volume reference addresses the history of the sea, beginning with ancient civilizations (4000 to 1000 BCE) and ending with the modern era (1945 to the present day). Each of the eight chapters is further broken down into sections that focus on specific nations or regions, offering detailed descriptions of that area of the world and shorter entries on specific topics, individuals, and events. The book spans maritime history, covering major seafaring peoples and nations; famous explorers, travelers, and commanders; events, battles, and wars; key technologies, including famous ships; important processes and ongoing events, such as piracy and the slave trade; and more. Readers will benefit from dozens of primary source documents—ranging from ancient Egyptian tales of seafaring to texts by renowned travelers like Marco Polo, Zheng He, and Ibn Battuta—that provide firsthand accounts from the age of discovery as well as accounts of battle from World War I and II and more modern accounts of the sea.

John Greaves, Pyramidographia and Other Writings, with Birch's Life of John Greaves

John Greaves, Pyramidographia and Other Writings, with Birch's Life of John Greaves PDF Author: John Anthony Butler
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527526682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
This is a modern-spelling edition of John Greaves’s Pyramidographia (1646), together with some miscellaneous travel-writings, letters and a biography of Greaves by Thomas Birch. It includes a full scholarly introduction and detailed notes. This book is the first of its kind in English, and undertakes a scientific evaluation of the pyramids through metrics, using state-of-the-art instruments and drawing on both ancient and modern authorities, amongst which is included Arab and Persian writers as well as Western sources. Greaves’s work is distinguished from others by his refusal to be drawn into mystical or theological speculation, and is an excellent example of how seventeenth-century scientists may be said to have pioneered modern methods of scientific inquiry. Greaves discusses the age of the pyramids, their purpose, the nature of their builders and the methods he believes were used to erect them. It may be said that he is probably the earliest genuine English “Egyptologist”, and that Pyramidographia is indeed the earliest scientific treatise on the subject. Greaves’s travel-writings, which also contain a great deal of measurement, show readers how he approached his sojourn in foreign lands, and his letters give some measure of the man and his relationships with fellow-scientists and patrons. The biography by Thomas Birch further fills out Greaves’s life and career.

The Spanish Disquiet

The Spanish Disquiet PDF Author: María M. Portuondo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659226X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
In this book, historian María M. Portuondo takes us to sixteenth-century Spain, where she identifies a community of natural philosophers and biblical scholars. They shared what she calls the “Spanish Disquiet”—a preoccupation with the perceived shortcomings of prevailing natural philosophies and empirical approaches when it came to explaining the natural world. Foremost among them was Benito Arias Montano—Spain’s most prominent biblical scholar and exegete of the sixteenth century. He was also a widely read member of the European intellectual community, and his motivation to reform natural philosophy shows that the Spanish Disquiet was a local manifestation of greater concerns about Aristotelian natural philosophy that were overtaking Europe on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. His approach to the study of nature framed the natural world as unfolding from a series of events described in the Book of Genesis, ultimately resulting in a new metaphysics, cosmology, physics, and even a natural history of the world. By bringing Arias Montano’s intellectual and personal biography into conversation with broader themes that inform histories of science of the era, The Spanish Disquiet ensures an appreciation of the variety and richness of Arias Montano’s thought and his influence on early modern science.

The Jewish Encyclopedia

The Jewish Encyclopedia PDF Author: Isidore Singer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 726

Book Description
V.I:Aach-Apocalyptic lit.--V.2: Apocrypha-Benash--V.3:Bencemero-Chazanuth--V.4:Chazars-Dreyfus--V.5: Dreyfus-Brisac-Goat--V.6: God-Istria--V.7:Italy-Leon--V.8:Leon-Moravia--V.9:Morawczyk-Philippson--V.10:Philippson-Samoscz--V.11:Samson-Talmid--V.12: Talmud-Zweifel.

The Publisher

The Publisher PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

Book Description

The Nation

The Nation PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Current events
Languages : en
Pages : 716

Book Description

Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula

Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula PDF Author: Benjamin Reilly
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil. This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East—an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.
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