Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas of governance and a new kind of morality, his afterlife is a jumble of stories and representations within various Buddhist imaginings. By remembering Ashoka selectively, Lahiri argues, ancient kings and chroniclers created an artifice, constantly appropriating and then remolding history to suit their own social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes.

Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Her previous books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered; Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories; and Ashoka in Ancient India, which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2016.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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The story of the lands between the Forth and Humber from the end of the Roman period to the Viking kingdom of York is one of the most richly fascinating in British history. This the age of Lindisfarne and of Bede; of the dramatic hills, valleys and ancient routeways that link the Irish Sea and the North Sea; of names that resonate even now: Edwin, Oswald, Hild, Cuthbert, Wilfrid; of conquest, conversion and the legacies of intellectual giants.

Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field (Birlinn, 2025) by Max Adams and Colm O’Brien is a history of Early Medieval Northumbria that explores themes of landscape, power, creativity and intellect. Fresh archaeological evidence and research in historical geography shed light on the fascinating story of how land was managed, exploited and deployed as an expression of power by both secular and ecclesiastical forces, and aspects such as the role of élite women in shaping politics and religion is given new focus. Dr. Adams and Dr. O’ Brien show conclusively how Northumbria’s political, cultural and religious elements coalesced to forge a creative powerhouse which shaped the world we have inherited.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs. A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s.

Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision of a new colony in the territory: a French Levant. But what transpired for the French state in the Levant after World War I, and why does that ill-conceived venture still matter today?

Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire—a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon—and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects—Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats.

As Dr. Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant."

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton UP, 2025) by Professor John Blair provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, Dr. Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future (University of Arizona Press, 2025), archaeologist Joe E. Watkins provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition.

Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy.

Watkins's insightful analysis highlights the Ainu's enduring spirit and their resurgence as part of the global Indigenous movement. Key events such as the 1997 Nibutani Dam case and the 2007 recognition of the Ainu as Japan's Indigenous people are explored in depth, showcasing the Ainu's ongoing fight for cultural preservation and self-determination. By situating the Ainu's experiences within broader global colonial histories, Indigenizing Japan underscores the shared struggles and resilience of Indigenous communities worldwide.

Joe E. Watkins is a senior consultant for Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants (ACE Consultants), based in Tucson, Arizona. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology's relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Michael Cosmopoulos, in The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Epic Greek Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2025), reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems.

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The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one.

During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries.

Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

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In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum.

Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton / Hodder, 2025) which dives into the many different aspects of life and society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia.

Moudhy Al-Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Between Two Rivers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are?

Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2023), explores this question through images painted on bronze, wood, and silk that were buried in tombs between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Wang encourages readers to look at these images as terrestrial diagrams — pictures that didn’t just represent the world, but made worlds. These tools helped the living connect with the dead, linked earthly and cosmic orders, and imagined what the afterlife might look like.

Each of the four chapters brings the reader into a different tomb site with different diagrams, including the plan for the grand tomb of King Cuo (who died circa 313 BCE), diagrams in the tomb of a low-level government functionary, and silk drawings from the Mawangdui tombs. Some helped guide descendants through ritual spaces, others recreated bureaucratic systems, and still others laid out auspicious spaces for eternal protection.

Throughout, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams asks questions that reach beyond early China: What makes something a map, or a work of art? When does a picture move from showing the world to shaping it?

This book will appeal to readers interested in art history, archaeology, and early Chinese thought, as well as anyone curious about how images can shape our understanding of the world

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