Sublime

Itamar Singer, for instance, has suggested that Ugarit’s downfall may have been due to “the sudden collapse of the traditional structures of international trade, which were the lifeblood of Ugarit’s booming economy in the Bronze Age.” Christopher Monroe of Cornell University has put this into a larger context, pointing out that the wealthiest city-

To win a war, it helps to have three things: more troops than the enemy, intelligence about the enemy’s plans, and superior technology. Alliance-building and patron–client relations helped leaders amass more troops and often learn about the enemy’s plans—and this is true whether a society is preindustrial, industrial, or postindustrial.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

Their ideas are derived from the insights of Karl Jaspers and were developed most famously by S. M. Eisenstadt, Benjamin Schwartz and Robert Bellah. The Axial Age refers to the sixth century BCE when revolutionary developments in society, philosophy and religion occurred across the Eurasian axis of China, India, the Middle East and Greece. Philosop

but in the Near Eastern site of ’Ain Ghazal in modern Jordan, archaeologist Gary Rollefson found 32 extraordinary HUMAN FIGURES (FIG.

The fate of Israel (in the north) and Judah (in the south) would change with the rise of the Mesopotamian powers. Mesopotamia often had two competing empires: Babylon to the south, and Assyria to the north. Neither was particularly powerful from the thirteenth through the early ninth centuries. This changed with the rise of…

Some highlights have bee

The challenge of globalization from the earliest days of humanity has been the lack of consensus. Our species, exquisitely evolved for cooperation within our clan, is equally primed for conflict with the “other.” In a world that has the ability to “end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” as President John F. Kennedy eloquently