SOME BOOKS ON MIDDLE EAST HISTORY
(Compiled by T. Pavlidis. Books are listed alphabetically
by last name of first author)
| [FB78] | Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror
and his Time, Princeton Univ. Press, 1978. Translated
from the German. First German edition was in 1953. |
| [JB83] | Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine
the Great, Univ. of California Press, 1983.
Reprint of the original 1949 edition. |
| [EW92] |
R. Eisenman and M. Wise, The
Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Barnes&Noble, 1992. |
| [CF05] |
Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story
of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923, Basic Books, 2005. |
| [EG] | Edward Gibbon, The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in 1788.
Note: I use the 1978 reprint of the 1910 Everyman's
Library (Dutton: New York) unabridged edition with comments by Oliphant Smeaton.
I cite chapters (independent of the edition) as well as volume and page. Some
people consider this book unfair to the Byzantines. However numerous footnote
quotations in Greek from Byzantine authors confirm Gibbon's judgment. (Because
the footnotes contain large amounts of Greek and Latin text, they are usually
omitted from abridged editions.) |
| [Hu61] |
J. M. Hussey, The Byzantine World, Harper,
1961. A nice concise (188pp) history, but out of print. |
| [HI94] | Halil Inalcik, An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1600, Cambridge Univ. Press,
1994. |
| [Ku07] |
James L. Kugel How to Read the Bible,
Free Press, 2007. |
| [LL98] | Lee I. Levine,
Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, Univ. of Washington Press, 1998. |
| [BL95] |
Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, A brief History
of the last 2000 years, Touchtone, 1995. This
is the book to read, if you have time for only one book from this
list. |
| [BL02a] | Bernard Lewis, The Emergence
of Modern Turkey, Third Edition, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. |
| [BL02b] | Bernard Lewis What Went Wrong?,
Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. |
| [HL03] |
Heath W. Lowry The Nature of the Early Ottoman
State, SUNY Press, 2003. |
| [SM02] |
Sandra Mackey Reckoning - Iraq and the Legacy
of Saddam Husseing, Norton, 2002. |
| [CM02] |
Cyril Mango, editor, The Oxford History of
Byzantium, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. Richly illustrated. |
| [SM10] |
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express:
The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, Harvard
Univ. Press, 2010. |
| [ES92] | Ε. Σκοπετεα,
Η Δυση της Ανατολης,
Γνωση, Athens, 1992.
A scholarly study of the interaction
between East (the Ottoman Empire) and Western Europe. Probably, the best book
I have read on the subject. |
| [VT59] | V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization
and the Jews (Hendrickson reprint in 1999 of the original 1959 edition).
The
classic treatise on the subject. |
| [WT97] |
Warren Treadgold, A HIstory of the Byzantine
State and Society, Stanford Univ. Press, 1997. 1019pp. |
| [SV71] | Speros Vryonis, Jr, The Decline
of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the
Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Univ. of California Press, 1971.
Note: This book is kept in
print by ACLS and it can
be purchased directly from ACLS or from Amazon. It contains numerous
references and quotes from texts of that period. |
| [MW96] | Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium,
600-1025, Univ. of California Press, 1996. |
| [Wr09] | R. Wright, The Evolution of
God, Little, Brown, New York, 2009. |
| [FZ03] | Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, Norton, New York,
2003. |
First Posted: December 14, 2009. Latest Revision:
February 20, 2011.
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