Ancient History

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Internet Ancient History Sourcebook:
Studying Ancient History

See Main Page for a guide to all contents of all sections.

• Introduction: Using Primary Sources
• Nature of Historiography
• Other Sources of Information on Ancient History
  • General Guides to Net Texts [link to texts at other sites.]
  • General Etext Projects [sites with texts online.]
  • Egypt/ANE
  • Greece
  • Rome
  • Religion
  • Philosophy
• Adding More Texts
• Other Ancient World Resource Projects

• 2ND How to Read A Primary Source [at Bowdoin College]
• 2ND 2ND James H. Robinson: Why Study History Through Primary Sources

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• See texts at Modern History Sourcebook
• The Need for Source Criticism: A Letter from Alexander to Aristotle? [At this Site]
• WEB The Black Athena Dispute [At Reed College]
  With links to source material.
• 2ND Ancient Hellenes in America? [At Internet Archive, from ancientgr.com]
  A sort of "White Athena", useful for showing the type of argument which concentrates on minor details and ignores the wider picture.

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• General Guides to Net Texts [link to texts at other sites.]
  • Hanover Historical Texts Project
    Some local texts and links to texts all over the net. The approach taken to organization involves lots of small pages and much jumping around, which some people may prefer to the approach taken here. The site also links to signicant websites and secondary sources.
  • Great Books Index
    Concentrates on "Great Books", but gives links to various online editions all over the net.
  • Ancient History and Archaeology Texts [At MU]
  • MEGA Pomoerium: Classics Etexts [At Poemerium]
  • MEGA Electronic Etexts and Archives for the Classics [At UCI]
• General Etext Projects [sites with texts online.]
  • K. C. Hanson: Collection of Ancient Documents [At Internet Archive]
  • MIT Classics Archive [440 classical Greek and Latin texts!]
    These are all full text translations, and are presented in HTML and plain text forms. Some texts are links to the Perseus project (see below).
  • Diotima: Women and Gender in the Ancient World
    Includes an anthology of texts, much of Mary Lefkowitz' and Maureen Fant's Women's Life in Greece and Rome, as well as other sources.
  • University of Saskatchewan: Department Translations
    Select translations in modern idiom of many texts useful for class discussion. Useful for classroom use over the archaic language of many public domain sources.
  • Bibliotheca Augustana
    Texts in Latin and Greek. Can only be accessed in short segments. This, as at Perseus, is annoying since it inhibits the text search abilities inherent in e-texts.
  • Online Medieval and Classical Library
    A select library of full texts in translation.
  • J. P. Adams: Classics Dept, CSUN
    A variety of interesting texts presented.
  • Paul Brians: Reading About the World I [At WSU]
    Selections from a published sourcebook.
  • World Civilization Reader [At Internet Archive, from CCNY]
  • Northpark University History Department:
    Many texts integrated into the survey courses' class outlines.
  • World Cultures: An Internet Classroom and Anthology
    Online texts and notes by Richard Hooker at WSU. This is probably the best graphical design of any online texts site.
  • Exploring Ancient World Cultures
    A full scale online textbook, with texts and secondary discussions, of all ancient world cultures, Mediterranean, Indian, and East Asian.
• Egypt/ANE
  • Selected Ancient Near East Texts
    Contains selections of Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts from from Pritchard's ANET collection.
• Greece
  • Perseus Project Texts
    Perseus is perhaps the most ambitious text project on the web. It presents texts in English, Greek and now Latin as well. Unfortunately, from the perspective of an online sourcebook, where texts need to be printable, one can only access the texts in small segments. If possible I have avoided links to Perseus here. More than any other project, though, Perseus is of use to advanced scholars. [Note: From July 1st 1998, Perseus intends to charge for access to many parts of its site. Essentially this amounts to a destruction of an Internet resource.]
    See Perseus Texts Elsewhere for alternate locations of authors at Perseus.
  • Greek Philosophy Archive
• Rome
  • Latin Library
    Texts of major Roman and Medieval authors in Latin at Ad Fontes Academy [No longer at George Mason University].'
  • White Trash Scriptorium
    Despite the name, it really does have a number of Latin texts.
• Religion
  • Online Texts Related to Biblical Studies [at UPenn]
  • The Christian Classics Ethereal Library
    Full text of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. The basic texts for early Christian history. Some other texts are also available. The whole Church Fathers series may be accessed in a different form at the New Advent site.
  • Gnostic Texts
    The full texts of the Nag Hammadi Library.
  • Mircea Eliade: From Primitives to Zen [at eliade]
    Complete texts of Eliade's religion anthology online.
• Philosophy
  • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Text Collection
    Includes local texts, ancient and modern, as well as links to other online texts from articles.

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If you have public domain or copy-permitted etexts, I am very willing to add them to this project. If you would like to add to the available corpus of ancient history etexts, see the following list of texts/translations, now in the public domain, but not online. Basically any text or translation published more than 75 years ago is fair game in the US.

• Loeb Classical Library Texts in the Public Domain
  

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Links to major sites related to specific areas are given in all pages. These sites provide general overviews.

• WEB Frank E. Smitha: Antiquity Online [An Online Textbook][Website]
• WEB Seven Wonders of the Ancient World [At Pharos]
• WEB Ancient Scripts of the World [At http://www.ancientscripts.com/]
  Information on all ancient writing systems - East Asian, Near Eastern, Mesoamerican.
• WEB Duke Papyrus Archive [Website]
• WEB Course Notes [At Saskatchewan]
  Bibliographies and resource guides for a variety of Ancient history subjects.

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NOTES:

Dates of accession of material added since July 1998 can be seen in the New Additions page..

The date of inception was 4/8/1998.

Links to files at other site are indicated by [At some indication of the site name or location].

Locally available texts are marked by [At this Site].

WEB indicates a link to one of small number of high quality web sites which provide either more texts or an especially valuable overview.

The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook is part of the
Internet History Sourcebooks Project