Books by Richard Miles

In an epic series of battles, the mighty empires of Carthage and Rome vied for supremacy of Mediterranean - before the Carthaginians finally buckled and their great capital city was razed to the ground, burning for six days and nights, its inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. This title charts one of the bloodiest dramas of the Ancient World.

Across the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Nile Delta, awe-inspiring, monstrous ruins are scattered across the landscape - vast palaces, temples, fortresses, shattered statues of ancient gods, carvings praising the eternal power of long-forgotten dynasties. These ruins - the remainder of thousands of years of human civilization - are both inspirational in their grandeur, and terrible in that their once teeming centres of population were all ultimately destroyed and abandoned.In this major book, Richard Miles recreates these extraordinary cities, ranging from the Euphrates to the Roman Empire, to understand the roots of human civilization. His challenge is to make us understand that the cities which define culture, religion and economic success and which are humanity's greatest invention, have always had a cruel edge to them, building systems that have provided both amazing opportunities and back-breaking hardship.This exhilarating book is both a pleasure to read and a challenge to us all to think about our past - and about the present.