Even Their Barbarism Was Civilized
We think of ancient life as cruel and backward compared with our own times, but often it wasn’t.
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ancient egypt
Jewish Chicken, Egyptian Egg
Our understanding of the tangled relationship between ancient Egypt and the culture that produced the Hebrew Bible has deepened thanks to archaeology. It’s pure gold for historical novelists like me.
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The Spice of Ancient Life
The biblical world was wider than one might imagine.
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A Tale of Two Scales
A metaphor for the ultimate judgment in two ancient cultures - despite their differing interpretations - still has meaning today.
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Israel’s first mention
A new analysis of granite fragments, probably from an ancient Egyptian throne, may push back the first time the place-name “Israel” is mentioned outside of the Bible by centuries.
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Calendars and Culture
Three thousand years ago, Semitic tribes shifted from an agricultural calendar based on the flood and ebb of the Nile in Egypt to periods of rain and intense heat in the Land of Israel. How did they all manage to get on the same page of the calendar? And did the change help them stick together over the millennia?
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