Sublime

Oddly enough, the potters of the fifth century and beyond did not always use the best materials available to them. The distinctly localized oeuvres within which they mixed their clay and shaped their pottery, reinforced by many ethnographic studies of potters from around the world, suggest that the determinants of form, fabric and decoration were a

A GROUP OF ISRAELI scholars known as the “new historians,” often associated with Israel’s political Left, argues that Ben-Gurion’s motivation was at least as much about demography as it was about territory. He understood, they claim, that the demographic balance that the UN’s partition plan would create was untenable for the Jewish state in the lon

As the earliest settlers in the region, the Jews occupied Yathrib’s most fertile agricultural lands, called “the Heights,” quickly becoming masters of Arabia’s most prized crop: dates. The Jews were also skilled jewelers, clothiers, arms makers, and vintners

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

In the twenty-first century, many dimensions of sustainable development will require public goods on a multi-country or global scale. Rivers, ecosystems, pollution, climate control, international financial flows, the Internet, power transmission, highway systems, railroad networks, and aviation all require strong regional and global cooperation. No

Crucial to the long success and ultimate failure of hunting-and-gathering bands is the fact that they had to operate on a very small scale over a very wide area. Foragers could survive only where population densities were light. To see why, think of the problems that larger groups would have posed. For one thing, a thousand hunters parading togethe

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

The evidence, then, is fragmentary, but when all of it is considered—texts from the ancient Near East, the Bible, and archaeological data—it does, generally, fit together. An analogy is a large jigsaw puzzle that is missing many of its pieces—but enough of them fit so that the reconstruction is probable, if not certain. This applies to chronology,