New Books Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam

(Princeton University Press) This book traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. McCants uses primary sources and focuses on Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests in the Near East. While both the Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture, the Arabs did not, leading to hundreds of years of Muslim competition over Islam’s cultural orientation. McCants is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University.