100 books like The Derveni Papyrus

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… show more.

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:… show more.

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… show more.

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.

Greek Mysteries brings together a collection of essays on a variety of specialist topics related to the ancient mystery cults. Written by some of the world’s leading scholars, many of these essays were originally published in academic journals and are therefore appropriate for a more scholarly readership. That said, this important work provides the perfect entry into contemporary academic scholarship on the mysteries.  

I first encountered Otto’s book just before going to Oxford University in 1964, and there, I discovered a way of understanding ancient Greek devotion to their gods.

By Otto’s account, those gods were whole worlds of meaning, from sexual joy (Aphrodite) and homicidal fury (Ares) to more subtle visions of the world (Hermes, the traveler in Twilight) and (finally) Zeus as the guarantor of promises, and of hospitality.

He also introduced me to the idea that the Greeks saw “gods” in moments of sudden joy or inspiration: the lucky moment when–in the poet Pindar’s words–a god sheds a shining light on our usual dreamy life.

The last two books I suggest are of fresh press and testify to the modern approach to archaeoastronomy as a multi-disciplinary science. In this book, the aim is to approach Greek religion as a complex mix of rituals, cults, and architecture, identifying the connections with the sky and, more generally, with the “cosmos”. Relevant examples are discussed in detail. 

The ancient Greeks were not only good at making serious art such as epics and tragedies, they were also good at making fun of them in literature and art.

In the realm of art, the most abundant source of humor is painted vases, which were manufactured mostly for the use of men at symposia, or drinking parties.

Greek mythology was a favorite subject of the vase painters, and Mitchell’s richly-illustrated study of humorous vases provides a fun and unusual window into ancient burlesque treatments of Greek myths and legends.  

This is the daddy of travel books about Greece, penned by a Greek from western Turkey who toured the sights during the pax Romana (2nd century AD).

Catching ancient Greece before it fell into ruin, he enthusiastically wrote up the buildings and artworks and the local history of places both famous and obscure. My own copy, decidedly battered, has been a companion of my academic career since my twenties.

You can still follow Pausanias on certain archaeological sites, like Delphi or Olympia. On others it’s fascinating, after visiting them, to turn to this ancient guide to read how he described the same places when they were intact.

Peter Levi’s translation is highly readable and well equipped, but not overladen, with footnotes.  

In modern neuroscience there is a resurrection of a line of research on altered states of consciousness. We must not think that this fascination started with Woodstock or Timothy Leary… At all times mind-altering rituals and substances were used. Uptight professors of antiquity hardly spoke of what happened in ancient Greece where mind-altering rituals were part of society for spiritual insight, prophecy, and healing. Yulia Ustinova gives a fascinating account of how in ancient Greece sensory deprivation in caves, often in combination with the practices of fasting or use of psychedelics, induced altered states of consciousness in selected individuals.