Raaflaub Kurt A. (ed.) The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society, and the Divine in Ancient World Cultures

Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. — 275 p.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 scholarKurt A. Raaflaub is the David Herlihy University Professor and Professor of Classics at Brown University, Emeritus. His numerous publications include authorship or editorship of 20 scholarly books, in addition to more than 120 articles in journals and essay collections. Raaflaub is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell's Ancient World: Comparative Histories series, and is the editor of War and Peace in the Ancient World (Blackwell, 2006).