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From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, William McCants looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire.

In antiquity, astrology as the “science of the stars” combined the calculation of the stars’ movements with a hermeneutical attempt to interpret the meaning of planetary dynamics for human affairs. The chapter traces the origins of astrological reasoning to ancient Mesopotamia and discusses its reception in Greek culture. A brief outlook on the place of astrology in the Roman Empire concludes the overview.

I begin with two commonplace, but nonetheless important, observations. First, that with the conquests of Alexander the Great went also a rapid and massive diffusion of Hellenic culture to non‐Greek lands. And secondly, that the writing of history was deeply implicated in Alexander's empire building: historians accompanied him on his march; a number of his lieutenants later in life turned to the writing of history; and, perhaps most importantly, earlier historical writing, in particular Herodotus, directly affected Alexander's own understanding of the world and his plans to conquer it. It should come as no surprise, with the rapid spread of Greek paideia to non‐Greeks and the importance placed on historiography in the early Hellenistic period, that within a generation of Alexander's death, histories of Egypt and Babylon should appear, written in the Greek language by non‐Greeks.

J. Dillery explores each writer's cultural and intellectual affiliations through their use of chronology and geography and offers new readings of the narrative sections of the Babyloniaca and Aegyptica.

During the Hellenistic period (323-331 BCE), a distinctive literary genre developed-\"intentional history.\" This was a mix of myth and events, meant to affirm a community's identity and past. Two were written on the periphery of Greek culture-Berossus's history of Babylonia and Manetho's of Egypt.