Books published by publisher Gorgias Press

This book is a classic in the history of the Oriental Churches, which are sometimes portrayed as heretical in general church history books, if mentioned at all. Written by a Copt, it portrays the history of the faith of these non-Chalcedonian Churches with first-hand knowledge of their traditions. The author covers Alexandrine Christianity (the Copts and the Ethiopians), the Church of Antioch (Syriac Orthodox), the Nestorian Church of the East, the Armenian Church, the St. Thomas Christians of South India, the Maronite Church, as well as the Vanished Churches of Carthage, Pentapolis, and Nubia.

This book discusses the alphabetic scribes (s piru) mentioned in Mesopotamian documents of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods specifically, of the 6th-5th centuries bce. The period in question saw a wide diffusion of writing in the Northwest Semitic alphabetic script mostly in Aramaic in Mesopotamia; yet, alphabetic texts were normally written in ink on perishable materials and did not survive to be discovered by modern archaeologists. In contrast, cuneiform tablets written on clay have been found in large numbers, and they document different aspects of the alphabetic scribes activities. This book presents evidence for understanding the Akkadian term s piru as a designation for an alphabetic scribe and discusses the functions of these professionals in different administrative and economic spheres. It further considers the question of the ethnic origins of the alphabetic scribes in Mesopotamia, with special attention to the participation of Judeans in Babylonia in this profession. Bloch also provides translations of over 100 cuneiform documents of economic, legal and administrative content.

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

W. Warde Fowler's The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic gives a detailed commentary on Roman religious festivals covering public and sometimes non-public worship. It constitutes an introduction to the religion of the Romans aimed at students and scholars of history, literature, anthropology and history of religion. The book begins with a thorough introduction on the Roman calendar system. In the course of twelve chapters, the author catalogues and presents the festivals of each month of the year.