The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society, and the Divine in Ancient World Cultures

The Adventure of the Human Intellect presents the latest scholarship on the beginnings of intellectual history on a broad scope, encompassing ten eminent ancient or early civilizations from both the Old and New Worlds.

• Borrows themes from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946), updating an old topic with a new approach and up-to-date theoretical underpinning, evidence, and scholarship
• Provides a broad scope of studies, including discussion of highly developed ancient or early civilizations in China, India, West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas
• Examines the world view of ten ancient or early societies, reconstructed from their own texts, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine
• Considers a diversity of sources representing a wide array of particular responses to differing environments, circumstances, and intellectual challenges
• Reflects a more inclusive and nuanced historiographical attitude with respect to non-elites, gender, and local variations
• Brings together leading specialists in the field, and is edited by an internationally renowned scholar

Keywords: Ancient Egypt; Mesopotamia; Israel; Greece; and Rome; Early China; Vedic India; Maya; Aztecs; and native North Americans; chronosophy; sacrifice; divination; cosmology; archaeology; intellectual history; speculative thought; rational and abstract thinking; beginnings of philosophy; social relations and values; spiritual experiences; human and divine worlds, Ancient & Classical Studies, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient & Classical Studies, Ancient Philosophy