Books on the topic 'Civilizational features'

The monograph is devoted to the foreign policy of Ancient Rome during the period of the kings and the early Republic. The paper draws attention to the fact that at these stages of its development, Rome did not create a state in the modern sense, but rather a Federation, and with a developed self-government of its participants. Thanks to a system of mutually beneficial treaties, Rome became a political center among the peoples of Ancient Italy. At the same time, remnants of tribal relations were preserved in Ancient Rome for a long time. Attention is also paid to the development of military Affairs in Rome. It is noted that in Ancient Rome for a long time there were no defensive walls, which predisposed the Romans to an offensive type of warfare. The Romans created battle tactics that would be consistent with the characteristics of the soldiers ' weapons and would allow for rapid military training among recruits, which provided the Romans with high mobilization capabilities. However, classically represent the soldier in the Lorica of segmentata in the tsarist period was not. An important role in the development of Rome as the center of international politics of Ancient Italy, the center of the Federation was played by the high moral standards postulated by the ancient Roman society and invested in the concept of the Republic. All these diplomatic, ethical, and military features of Ancient Rome combined to determine the success of Roman civilization. However, it is worth noting that the disorganization of these principles caused the fall of Rome. For anyone interested in the historical processes of Ancient Italy and Ancient Rome.

This collective monograph validates the relevance of the complex concept of “Transformational Revolutions” introduced here for the first time in academic circulation, which essentially expands the perspective of revolutionary origins and outcomes in Central and South-Eastern Europe. The authors analyze the prerequisites, course, and results of transformational revolutions in the countries of the region during the thirty-year period of their modern history. The studies describe the features of post-socialist modernization and the domestic and foreign political crises inherent in each country, the pros and cons of their involvement in the processes of European integration, and the benefits of joining NATO. The previously used term, “Velvet” revolution, does not cover the entire set of fundamental transformations in these countries in domestic and foreign policy. The researchers underline the specifics of a democratic political structure combined with a market economy for the countries in the region, with particular emphasis on ideological and political confrontation between the forces of the left and right in the framework of a multiparty system, and characterize the mechanism of changes in power during elections. They portray the correlation of euro-optimism and euro-scepticism in different countries, and their opposition to the dictates of Brussels. The authors emphasize that not only the Soviet perestroika, but also the various versions of revolution in the countries of the region led to the reformatting of the European and even global civilizational space. They reveal that many events of 30 years ago still determine the course of current events in the countries of the region and these countries may have incomplete transformation processes. The authors for the first time conduct a comparative analysis of the inclusion of the former GDR as part of a single German state in the EU and the divergent processes in the former socialist federations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. They pay special attention to the relationship between European, regional, and national components in the course of the revolutions and also the resulting conflicts. The authors also examine the specifics of the entry of Central European countries and later the Balkan subregions into NATO and the EU, and the role played by religious-cultural factors in individual countries. This monograph examines the lessons of Greece's recovery from the financial and economic crisis, as well as on Turkey's special Balkan interest in a larger Euro-Asian context. These revolutions are investigated from a comparative historical point of view with the reasons, processes, and results of the deep changes in the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe during their 30-year modern history analyzed. In addition, their experiences of post-socialist modernization, which includes their search and elaboration of optimal models for interaction among themselves as well as with the countries of the East, particularly Russia, and West, is described, and hindering factors are identified.

This article discusses findings from excavations at Arslantepe–Malatya. Arslantepe is a tell about 4.5 hectares in extension and 30 meters high, at the heart of the fertile Malatya Plain, some 12 kilometers from the right bank of the Euphrates, and surrounded by mountains, which, in the past, were covered by forests. In the earliest phases of its history, in the Chalcolithic period, it had close links with the Syro-Mesopotamian world, with which it shared many cultural features, structural models, and development trajectories. But in the early centuries of the third millennium BCE, far-reaching changes took place in the site that halted the development of the Mesopotamian-type centralized system and reoriented Arslantepe's external relations toward eastern Anatolia and Transcaucasia. A further radical change occurred in the second millennium BCE, when the site interacted with the rising Hittite civilization, which exerted a strong influence on it. But it was with the Late Bronze I and, more evidently, Late Bronze II, that the expanding Hittite state, which expanded as far as the banks of the Euphrates, imposed its cultural and political domination over the populations in the Malatya region, heralding another important stage in the history of Arslantepe.

Until late in the nineteenth century, the otherwise fractious universe of Dissent united in affirming Scripture as the supreme religious authority and in exalting the individual conscience as the final interpreter of the Bible’s message. Because of this scriptural fixation, Dissenters contributed disproportionately to the manifestly biblical character of nineteenth-century Anglo-American civilization. It is for that very reason often hard to differentiate a specifically Dissenting history of the Bible from much shared with other Protestants. General cultural influences such as an emphasis on human subjectivity had a lot to do with how Dissenters read their Bibles. The ‘Bible civilization’ to which they contributed was permeated with scriptural phrases and assumptions. Disputes about biblical authority became important because most people were privately committed to the intensive reading of Scripture with the aid of family Bibles. Scripture also lived in public through hymnody and preaching. The Bible featured heavily in political controversy, notably due to disagreements about its place in systems of public education. The tendency to found claims to religious authority on a purified reading of Scripture and to contrast this with the practice of Roman Catholicism was characteristic of Dissent, as was the tendency for those claims to clash. Dissenters divided, for instance, on prophetic interpretation or on whether biblical interpretation needed to be guided by creeds. Conflict over how to interpret the Bible deepened and widened to encompass questions about the character of Scripture itself. Representative early nineteenth-century Dissenters such as Moses Stuart and Josiah Conder held on to unsophisticated if potentially liberal assumptions about the nature of its inspiration but disputes about higher criticism would mount in the wake of Anglican controversies in the 1850s and 1860s. It was striking, however, that these disputes were not as acrimonious in the British Empire as in the United Kingdom or the United States, perhaps because Canadian or Australian Dissenters were more interested in confessional identity and national service. By the end of the century, the expanding terrain of intra-Protestant conflict made it increasingly difficult to discern a unified Dissenting voice. By 1900, it was not as clear as it had once been that ‘the Holy Scriptures are the sole authority and sufficient rule in matters of religion’.

The roots of modern culture lie in ancient soil. On this fertile ground grew a two-sided tradition, a dialectical relation between the legacies of ancient Greek civilization on the one hand and theological perspectives based on the Jewish and Christian scriptures on the other. Later periods—the late antique, medieval, and early modern—attest to the fact that, despite essential differences, Greek philosophy and biblical interpretation formed a lasting cultural synthesis. Part of what made this synthesis possible was a shared outlook, a common aspiration toward wholeness of understanding that refused to separate knowledge from goodness, virtue from happiness, cosmos from polis, divine authority from human responsibility. As that which names this wholeness, wisdom features prominently in both classical and biblical literatures as an ultimate good. In its traditional form, wisdom was understood to govern a variety of endeavors. It was a program for human flourishing that accorded with a holistic understanding of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic, political, and personal dimensions. This book explores wisdom and the way it was presented in seminal works: in Greek texts, such as the epics of Homer and the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and in biblical books as well, including Genesis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Wisdom of Solomon, the Gospels, and the letters of Paul. In doing so, it aims to illuminate the modern legacy of classical and biblical tradition and its distinctive pursuit of wisdom.

The authors analyse the reasons underlying the resurgence of communalism in the 2000s in Uttar Pradesh (UP) leading to riots in Mau in 2005, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013, but more importantly move beyond riots to analyse the new ways and means whereby communalism in the present phase is being manufactured by the Hindu right. They argue that UP is experiencing a post-Ayodhya phase of communalism markedly different from the late 1980s/early 1990s. The book employs a model of institutionalized everyday communalism whose defining feature is that rather than initiating major, state-wide riots, the strategy of the BJP–RSS currently is to create and sustain constant, low-key communal tension together with frequent, small, low-intensity incidents out of petty everyday issues that institutionalize communalism at the grassroots. The use of this strategy is examined based on extensive fieldwork in the districts of eastern and western UP that experienced major riots. A fusion of rising cultural aspirations and deep economic anxieties in UP, which remains an economically backward state, and where a deepening agrarian crisis, unemployment, poverty, and inequalities are widespread, has created fertile ground for the new kind of communal mobilization. The agenda of the BJP–RSS is political to establish majoritarian rule, but equally important cultural, because India is viewed as fundamentally ‘Hindu’ in a civilizational sense in which Muslims will remain alien. It is through this lens of the new ‘avatar’ of the BJP, its ideology and strategies, and its impact on society and polity that an attempt is made to understand the current round of communalism in UP.