The Gnostics and Their Remains, Ancient and Mediaeval

About this book

Carved gems show strange gods, hybrid creatures and sacred signs. What beliefs lay behind these small objects, and how did the religious movements later called Gnostic understand the visible world?

C. W. King explores surviving artefacts and historical accounts in a richly illustrated study of late antique religious traditions. His interpretations sometimes reflect the limitations of nineteenth-century scholarship, but the objects themselves remain absorbing. Each engraving gives material form to a belief that might otherwise survive only as a fragment in an ancient argument.