A Timeline of Texts

My intellectual history is quite complicated. I wrote half a million words between 1986 and 1989, very little of which is currently available (but all of it indexed). Meditations on the Egyptian Ka and Coelum Terrae were both written on an IBM golfball typewriter in 1988, but most other stuff was written in longhand.  A study of Henri Frankfort's view of Parmenides is however available in longhand on this site. 

I was always focussed on ancient history, but I spent a long time studying the English and Italian renaissances as well, which taught me many things which were useful in the study of antiquity. Particularly how to read images.This work was done before I went off to study at UCL in September 1989-92.

I was writing before the advent of a useful internet, and Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web. I was aware that what I was writing was not fitted to the contemporary market (which is what most writers and scholars write for these days). This is part of the explanation for the sequence of the following list.

 In 1993, who was going to publish J.G Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being? Frazer had been heavily criticized since his death, but no-one was looking at his work from my point of view. Most scholars would have agreed with Frazer’s view that a reductionist interpretation of Plato was the right one, even if they disagreed with his methods, and sometimes his interpretations. So that book was finished (over many evenings) in a third floor office in Devonshire Street, London, in 1993, and then parked, because there was nothing I could do with it. For a while at least.

I first gained access to the Internet and the Web in March 1994, at the computing services building in Oxford..I'd learned about what was now possible through a number of Internet magazines on sale in the Science Fiction bookshop in Oxford Street. After that I was always looking for Internet related jobs. I ended up working in Oxford on a Leverhulme funded project focussed on making an author's work available via the web. I wrote a report for the funders and the stakeholders, which mentioned in passing the copyright issues which would arise. That pretty much killed the project as it was originally conceived. But I’d learned a great deal along the way, including how to get Mac files into Word files.

I then moved to a newly minted Encyclopedia company in plush modern offices in South West London, where I built their first proper website. It was an odd sort of company, which attracted the attention of the UK government by not having any visible income at the time. It did eventually get a return on the project, but was initially bankrolled by a member of the government in the United Arab Emirates. I spent a couple of weeks in the UAE along the way.  

In 1997 I moved to the University of Bath as an internet magazine editor and scribe, as well as a manager of web pages and builder of websites. All the staff had personal webspace available to them. I created a website focussed on a well-known poet, and built it up over a few years. It was in existence from 1998 to 2005. Lots of traffic, and questions from students. The files still exist. 

Then in late 1998 I decided to make the book on Frazer available on the Web, partly in response to a request from a Catalan friend, who was (and is) an anthropologist. I didn’t get much feedback from him, which was disappointing, but the access statistics (which I still have) were pretty good. My future course was set.

After that I spent eight years or so as a project manager in Edinburgh, mainly working on institutional repository development, including business analysis and system design. I departed the university in July 2013 in order to write full time.  

Here's the production sequence:

  

Henri Frankfort (et al) on Parmenides. 1987 Unpublished

Meditations on the Egyptian Ka 1987. Unpublished

Coelum Terrae 1988 Unpublished.

Mirrors of the Divine 1991-2 Unpublished

J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being 1993. Unpublished on completion. This version was available on the web in html format between New Year’s Day 1999 till September 2005

Magic or Magia? Plato’s Sophist 1994 Unpublished on completion. Available on the Web from 2018 in jpeg format.

The Sacred History of Being 2003-5 initial draft. Unpublished.

Ontology and Representation in Assyria and The Ancient Near East 2005-9. Unpublished.

The Sacred History of Being 2011-14 Published as an ebook in November 2015

J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being. Published as an ebook in 2016

Understanding Ancient Thought Published as an ebook in 2017

Man and The Divine Published as an ebook in 2018

Echoes of Eternity Published as an ebook in 2020 (contains a revised version of Mirrors of the Divine plus many other essays written between 2004 and 2020)

Meditations on the Egyptian Ka. 1987 Available on the web in jpeg format in 2020 

Henri Frankfort (et al) on Parmenides. 1987  Available on the web as jpeg files, 2017

Ontology and Representation in Assyria and The Ancient Near East 2005-9. First section published 2021

The Death of Pan  Publication as an ebook in 2021 

The Keys of the Kingdom..Contains new material and revised chapters from The Sacred History of Being 2015, and from later books. Publication as an ebook in 2021.

Items marked in orange are publicly available in some form.Try searching on this site. A number of chapters and articles are also available from institutional repositories, often full-text.