Tides of History

We're often told that Classical Greece lies at the root of our modern world in some way, but what made it a special place? Professor Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, joins me to discuss his approach to that question. We discuss the unique political ecology of the Greek city-states, demographic growth, and the role of institutions in making Greece a place quite unlike the rest of the ancient world.

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

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Rome and war are inseparable topics, but how far back does their connection go? What was war like in the earliest days of the city's rise to prominence? Professor Jeremy Armstrong is an expert on early Rome and warfare in pre-Roman Italy, and he joins me to talk about warlords, generals, and the nature of warfare at Rome's beginning.

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

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We're often told that Greece's Classical period lies at the root of "Western Civilization," but what was actually special about that time and place? Why did it produce so many works of literature, art, architecture, and philosophy that have survived and shaped the millennia to come?

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

By 480 BC, the same year Xerxes and the Persians descended on Greece, Sicily had become a battleground for the rising powers of the Central Mediterranean: Carthage, on one side, and the Greek colony of Syracuse on the other. The result was a massive battle, and its remains still survive in the archaeological record.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Archaeology is changing quickly, and few people are playing more of a direct role in the wave of fascinating new studies exploring the Indus Valley Civilization, South Asia, and Iran than Professor Cameron Petrie. We talk about his work on South Asia, the scientific revolution in archaeology, and much more.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

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Carthage is known mostly as Rome's great rival, but it was a fascinating and meaningful Mediterranean civilization in its own right. Today, we track the rise of Carthage from its foundation as a Phoenician colony to the cusp of imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean around 500 BC.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

After our long sojourn in Central, East, and South Asia, it's time to return to a Mediterranean on the cusp of enormous changes. Around 500 BC, Rome was shedding its kings, Carthage was about to become the greatest power in the Central Mediterranean, and Greece would soon enter its Classical Era. Let's take a tour.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

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History is littered with terrible deeds and atrocities: conquest, genocide, mass enslavement, forced displacement, crimes of all sorts. Why do people agree to participate in these actions? Daniele Bolelli, host of the History on Fire podcast, joins me to discuss the topic and an essay I wrote on my Substack page, which you can find here: https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/ordinary-people-do-terrible-things

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Buddha - born Siddartha Gautama - is one of the most impactful people in human history, founder of a religious tradition that has shaped the world for the past 2,500 years. But the Buddha was also a real person who lived at a specific place and time. What can we know about the Buddha's world, and how did it shape him and his message?

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The world's climate isn't stable, but how can we understand climate change in the past? Dr. Alena Giesche is an expert on ancient climates, and she explains both how the field of paleoclimate studies works and its application to a massive issue: the fall of the Indus Valley Civilization, a topic on which she's spent years working.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Rigveda, a collection of hymns written in the Sanskrit language more than 3,000 years ago, is the oldest religious text in the Hindu tradition. It's also an incredible window onto life at the dawn of the Iron Age in South Asia.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Indus Valley Civilization is one of the most enigmatic, sophisticated, and compelling ancient societies. For seven centuries, it thrived in the western portions of South Asia, building enormous mud-brick cities without domination by ruling kings or elites. But then, over the course of several hundred years, the IVC slowly disintegrated. Why?

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Warring States period in China (c. 481-221 BC) was an era of mass-mobilization warfare unlike any other the world had seen to that point. Armies of hundreds of thousands of men fought on an increasing scale for centuries, wiping out state after state until only one - Qin - would remain to rule all of China.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Professor Kate Pechenkina is an expert on the bioarchaeology of East Asia, utilizing cutting-edge tools to tell us about the lives and experiences of ordinary people in the distant past: diet, disease, trauma, the kinds of topics that written evidence simply doesn't illuminate.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

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Confucius is one of the most famous and influential thinkers in all of human history, but who was he? What did he believe, and what did he teach? And how did his time and place - the closing years of the Spring and Autumn period - make him what he was?

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

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The Spring and Autumn period, lasting from 771 to 481 BC, marked the high point of aristocratic power in ancient China. This was an age of nobility and political fragmentation, as the Zhou Dynasty's power dwindled away and small states fought one another in endless cycles of violence. Rulers fell prey to plots and assassinations, and new families rose to power, upending the established order.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Venice's lagoon is an unstable environment, but it has hosted one of the longest-lasting and most stable cities in world history. The history of Venice is many different things: politics on an imperial scale, industrial production, cultural influence, tourism, and above all, trade. Professor Dennis Romano is one of the most eminent historians of medieval and early modern Venice and author of the new book Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City. He joins me to talk about La Serenissima and its place in the last 1500 years.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The environment of China has been so thoroughly shaped by human activity that it's difficult to imagine it as a wild landscape, as it was at the end of the last Ice Age. Since then, first agriculture and then the state have altered it, replacing native flora and fauna on an enormous scale. Professor Brian Lander, author of The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First States, joins me to discuss those two linked topics.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to Tides of History on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to bonus episodes available exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/tides-of-history/ now.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Zhou Dynasty ruled for longer than any other in Chinese history. Much of the cultural foundation of China was laid down during that age, from Confucius to Sun Tzu. While a powerful state at its inception, centralized power only functioned for a century at most during the Zhou; afterward, the ruling dynasty became increasingly irrelevant as a political force, and regional lords rose to rule independent states.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Shang Dynasty marks China's entrance to history, but it was very different than the China we know from later periods: Human sacrifice on a massive scale, shaman-kings conducting rituals to the ancestors, and loose alliances rather than bureaucratic administration defined the age.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chinese history is defined, more than anything else, by the importance of the state: its origins, its development, and the precise lineage leading back from the present deep into prehistory. But rather than a straightforward story of progress over time, the origins of the state in China are shrouded in mystery, in multiple developmental pathways, stops, starts, and new beginnings.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As an age of bronze gave way to one of iron, and then classical empires, the importance of writing grew all across Eurasia. That means more written sources for us to work with, but it also tells us dramatically more than we could have known before about the languages people were actually speaking across the continents.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Cities are one of the defining features of the Iron Age Mediterranean, as urbanism spread across the sea and beyond to form the backbone of the classical age that would follow. Professor Simon Stoddart is one of the world's leading experts on this process, specifically how it happened in Etruria, and how that particular example compares to urban formation elsewhere.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Justinian is, without a doubt, one of the most impactful historical figures of the past 2,000 years. Professor Peter Sarris, a longtime favorite historian of mine, has written an oustanding new account of the man himself, his times, and his legacy, entitled Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint, available now.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Scythians transformed the Eurasian steppe. They built giant burial mounds for their powerful kings, raided and plundered their sedentary neighbors, and laid down the template for every nomadic empire that would follow over the next 2000 years, from Attila to Tamerlane.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For millennia, the Eurasian steppe has been the highway connecting the distant ends of Europe and Asia. But at the beginning of the Iron Age, something important changed. A new people, the Scythians, rose to prominence, exploding outward from southern Siberia from the 9th century BC onward.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Persian Wars came to an end in the spring of 479 BC, when the land forces of the allied Greeks met the Persian army in an epic clash at Plataea. But the legacy of the Persian Wars would last for decades and centuries to come, shaping memory, identity, and the future relationship between the Greeks and the Persians.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory

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In excavating massive Iron Age burial mounds in southern Siberia, Dr. Gino Caspari is doing some of the most innovative archaeology in the world, and he's doing it in one of the most remote places on the planet. Dr. Caspari is an expert on the Scythians, the enigmatic, powerful people who ruled the vast grasslands of Eurasia during the Iron Age.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

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The Persian invasion of Greece aimed to do one thing above all else: punish Athens for its transgressions against the Great King. After defeating Leonidas, the vast army descended on Attica and burned much of the city. But the Greek allies were waiting for them nearby, and the result was one of the largest and most decisive naval battles in history - the Battle of Salamis.

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In 480 BC, the Persian Great King Xerxes descended on mainland Greece with one of the largest armies and navies the world had ever seen. The Persians swept through the approaches to Greece, winning allies and destroying their foes along the way, before meeting the Spartan king Leonidas at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae.

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The wars between the Persians and the Greeks have become a cornerstone of the idea of "Western Civilization," a defining moment when Greeks became Greeks in opposition to the outside world. But this series of conflicts was far more complicated than a simple civilizational clash; it was born of a particular world, and to properly understand the Persian Wars, we need to grasp the background that made them possible.

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When we think about the wars between the Persians and the Greeks, our perspective is quite explicitly that of the Greeks. But how did the Persians view these conflicts, and what were they after? Professor John Hyland explains his fascinating research on how the Persians understood war and their war with the Greeks.

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While Cyrus the Great built the Persian Empire from the ground up, his successors expanded it until the new state stretched from the Indus Valley of Pakistan to the Upper Nile, Kazakhstan to the Aegean, the Balkans to the Hindu Kush. This new Persia was built not just to expand through conquest but to endure, becoming an empire that would last for 200 years.

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The kingdoms of Iron Age Anatolia survive only as whispers in the archaeological and historical record; others exist through enigmatic references and legends in the writings of foreigners; and still others left behind relatively abundant records, allowing us to reconstruct a thriving world of states that have been almost totally forgotten.

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What was life like in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah? Few people are better qualified to answer that question than Professor Avraham Faust, who has excavated and written extensively about the archaeology of the ancient southern Levant, with a compelling blend of breadth and depth.

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Welcome to "The Pursuit of Dadliness." This is a podcast for folks who want to enjoy their passions and their hobbies, whatever those might be, and genuinely strive to get better at doing stuff and more knowledgeable about the world around them. That, to me, is the essence of Dadliness. If you like tall wooden ships, smoked meats, remembering mediocre athletes of yesteryear, home gyms, comfortable sneakers, and much more, then subscribe now to "The Pursuit of Dadliness" wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Persians were unlikely successors to the Assyrians and Babylonians, a fringe people of no particular importance, until Cyrus the Great became the most successful conqueror the world had ever seen. He built an empire stretching from Central Asia to the borders of Egypt, the Aegean to the Persian Gulf, and laid the foundations for a state that would last for 200 years.

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Egypt's New Kingdom, the peak of its monumental building and international power, ended in the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse. Once again, Egypt fragmented into multiple smaller states. Yet millions of people still lived and died under the rule of those claiming the mantle of the ancient pharaohs, and Egypt in the Third Intermediate Period was far from a backwater.

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Despite controlling a huge swathe of the Near East for the better part of a century, the Neo-Babylonian Empire is nearly forgotten today, aside from one key act: the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people of the kingdom of Judah.

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The Persian Empire followed in the footsteps of the Assyrians and Babylonians, but it was a much different entity than its predecessors, and its founder - Cyrus the Great - deserves to be mentioned among history's most accomplished conquerors. Professor Matt Waters joins me to discuss Cyrus, the Persians, and the empires that shaped life for millions upon millions of people.

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It's summertime, and I hope you're reading some great books. Dr. Keith Pluymers joins me once again to talk about one that you all might enjoy, by the historian Pekka Hamalainen - Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America.

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Israel and Judah flourished for centuries as kingdoms on the margins of the Near East's great empires, but when the Assyrians turned their attention toward their smaller neighbors, disaster and destruction quickly followed.

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The roots of ancient Judaism, and the Abrahamic religions, are to be found in the arid hills and fertile valleys of Canaan more than 3,000 years ago. That was where the kingdoms of Israel and Judah came into being, and their inhabitants began to develop traditions that still shape the world millennia later.

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Professor Ian Armit has ranged both widely and deeply over the study of European prehistory, examining everything from headhunting practices among the ancient Celts to migration in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

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Thanks to cutting-edge tools, archaeologists can study the lives of past people in ways that were never before possible. Professor Katharina Rebay-Salisbury applies those tools to children and mothers in Bronze and Iron Age Europe, shedding light on the experiences of those often left out of traditional narratives.

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What really happened in the last years of the 6th century BC? The Romans believed that this was the time when they overthrew their last king, Tarquinius Superbus, and founded the Republic, but how much did they actually know about events centuries in the past?

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The Hallstatt Culture defines the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in Continental Europe. It was a time of long-distance connections between rich and powerful elites, migration, trade, and the remaking of Europe's ethnic and linguistic map, when the people we know as Celts emerged into history.

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While the Mediterranean world was experiencing its Bronze Age Collapse and the beginnings of the Iron Age, continental Europe north of the Alps was in the midst of its own fundamental transformation. A new way of burying the dead - cremation - and the arrival of warriors on horseback, leading armies, remade Europe and were likely responsible for the initial spread of the Celtic languages.

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How and why did so many people come to Rome in the Archaic Period, and how did it become a city? Dr. Francesca Fulminante is an expert on the archaeology of ancient Italy, particularly the process of urbanization that turned small villages into some of the great cities of the ancient world. Rome was both unique and a part of these larger processes that took place not just near the Eternal City, but also in nearby Latium and Etruria.

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Ideas, goods, and fashions bounced around from place to place in the Iron Age Mediterranean, the most recognizable of which was a particular style of art that we call "Orientalizing." But this distinctive and widespread artistic style, rooted in the imagery of the ancient Near East, was only a byproduct of the movements of actual people through an interconnected sea.

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Iberia is the hinge between worlds: Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. That was never more true than at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, when a new civilization - the Tartessians - arose in southern Iberia at the meeting point of these different worlds.

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What was Rome like before it became one of the biggest cities in the ancient world? How did its early inhabitants adapt to the threat of flooding, and change the landscape to suit their needs? Dr. Andrea Brock of the University of St. Andrews is an expert on the archaeology of Rome's first few centuries and especially the local environment.

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Rome eventually became the heart of one of the largest and most powerful empires the world has ever known, but in the beginning, it was just a collection of villages on the Tiber River. How those villages merged and became a city, then a state, is one of the crucial stories in human history.

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When we think of the ancient Mediterranean, our minds first turn to familiar names, such as the Greeks and Romans. Yet the ancient world was full of peoples, all of them living in sophisticated societies that were no less interesting than those we we know well. Professor Peter van Dommelen is an expert in these less traveled places of the ancient world, especially Sardinia, and how they fit into the broader world beyond.

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The Etruscans are often called "mysterious," but we actually know quite a bit about them, from their unique language to their amazing metalwork and impressive cities. But where did the Etruscans come from, and how did they come into being?

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One of the best ways to understand how the ancient world functioned is to think in terms of networks and interactions between people and places. Dr. Lieve Donnellan of the University of Melbourne is an archaeologist who specializes in applying network theory to southern Italy and the Greek world in the Iron Age, and she's come up with some fascinating and innovative ways of understanding the ancient Mediterranean.

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At the beginning of the Iron Age, around 950 BC, Italy was a land of farming villages; just a few centuries later, it was one of the wealthiest and most densely urbanized parts of the Mediterranean world. This dramatic change was a product of a new world driven by metalworking, cities, and powerful elite groups.

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Archaic Greece went through some of the most explosive and rapid transformations of any ancient society, but why? What stands out the most is the intense strand of competition running through every aspect of society, from athletics to the economy to politics.

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In the space of just a few decades toward the end of the 8th century BC, Greek colonies sprang up across across southern Italy and Sicily. These new foundations would become the heart of the Greek world, just as Greek in every way as the better-known cities of Greece itself.

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Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones, authors of the new book How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, join Patrick to discuss the history of data, why enumerating things isn't a neutral act, and the ethics of building a world on the foundation of data.

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Despite their obvious importance to understanding the Iron Age and Classical Mediterranean, the Phoenicians remain something of an enigma. Professor Carolina Lopez-Ruiz is one of the world's leading experts on the Phoenicians, and she joins Patrick to talk about trade, migration, and what made the Phoenicians who they were.

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In the year 800 BC, Greece was an unremarkable corner of the Aegean. Over the next century, however, it underwent a remarkable transformation. Greece's population exploded, cities came into being, long-distance trade boomed, and the first overseas colonies - the beginnings of an extended Greek world - had been founded. The roots of a recognizable ancient Greece had begun to sprout.

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Soon after 1000 BC, Phoenicians began to take ever-longer voyages away from their homeland. Within just a few decades, they were already present at the far end of the Mediterranean and even further, past the Straits of Gibraltar on the Atlantic coast of Iberia. The process of creating an interconnected Mediterranean had begun.

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Few places weathered the Bronze Age Collapse better than the Levant, the strip of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean that runs from Syria to Egypt. One small part of that coastline, mostly in what's now Lebanon, became a launching pad for some of the most ambitious and wide-ranging commercial ventures in history. The Phoenicians, natives of this area, were the primary builders of the ancient Mediterranean.

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Every historian I know has a secret dream of writing historical fiction, but few ever do it. Dan Jones, a longtime friend of Tides of History and an outstanding historian, has actually done it: Essex Dogs, his fantastic debut novel about a group of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War, is out now. I talk to Dan about writing historical fiction and what it can do that pure history can't.

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After the Bronze Age Collapse, Greece changed dramatically. The palaces were gone, long-distance trade declined, and crafts became much simpler. Most of all, there were fewer people living in Greece than there had been during the Mycenaean period. For all these reasons, scholars have often called this time the "Greek Dark Age." But how dark was it, and what was life like after the palaces fell?

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Sergeant Jill Evans is a small town cop in Wales with an impressive record in her job, and a less than impressive record in her love life. After three engagements, two divorces and one affair, she’s beginning to worry that love is only true in fairy tales. That is until she meets: Dean. He’s a wealthy beauty entrepreneur with his own range of toiletries.

Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl. They kiss and fall in love. Roll credits.

But that would be boring, wouldn’t it? Instead, this is a love story like no other. It’s all going so well for Jill and Dean, until Halloween night, when Dean disappears. And Sgt. Jill is left to pick up the pieces.

From Wondery and Novel, comes a new series. Hosted by Kerry Godliman.

Follow Stolen Hearts on Amazon Music of wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free by subscribing to Wondery+ in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. 

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The Iron Age Mediterranean's new density of connections between people and places was about more than the economy and trade; it also remade the culture of the whole region, bringing new ideas and practices - such as wine-drinking and the alphabet - across its entire expanse. Professor Tamar Hodos is one of the world's leading experts on the Iron Age Mediterranean, and she joins me to talk about archaeology, globalization, and the tools we can use to understand the past.

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What happened after the Bronze Age Collapse and the end of the palaces that had defined Mycenaean Greece? It's easy to present this time as a "dark age," but is that really the best way to understand it? Professor Alex Knodell is an expert on the archaeology of Greece from the Bronze Age through to the Iron Age, and his perspective on this oft-neglected period is fascinating.

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Prior to the Iron Age, the Mediterranean had already been a highway moving around goods, people, and ideas for millennia. But as a new era dawned, the Mediterranean became something very different: an interconnected space, bringing together all of its shores for the first time.

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When the end came for the Assyrian Empire, it came quickly. Former enemies pounced on the weakened state, and brought home the violence that for so long had characterized Assyrian conquests abroad.

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On History Daily, we do history, daily. Every weekday, host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back in time to explore a momentous event that happened ‘on this day’ in history. Whether it’s to remember the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, the day “that will live in infamy,” or to celebrate that 20th day in July, 1969, when mankind reached the moon, History Daily is there to tell you the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world—one day at a time. So if you’re stuck in traffic, bored at work—wherever you are, listen to History Daily to remind yourself that something incredible happened to make that day historic.

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The Assyrian Empire had a well-deserved reputation for brutality, but brutality alone doesn't explain why it lasted for so long; its residents must have bought into the imperial system for some reason. Professor Bleda During, an expert on the archaeology of empires, shows how people outside the center of Assyria interacted with the empire, and what they got out of it.

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The Neo-Assyrian Empire has been almost forgotten in comparison to the other massive states of the ancient world, but at its peak, it stretched from the Nile to the Caspian Sea and central Turkey to the Persian Gulf. Assyria was a brutal and dominating force for centuries, and it pioneered the infrastructure and ideology of empire, laying the ground work for everything that came after.

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The sheer amount of time separating the establishment of the first cities in the ancient Near East, and the invention of cuneiform writing, from the end of the period that they define is mind-boggling: almost 3,000 years, far longer than the span that separates us today from the end of that period. Professor Amanda Podany has written a fantastic book on this whole age, entitled Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, that looks at both kings and everyday people in a fascinating time and place.

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Welcome to the Iron Age, and to a new season of Tides of History! The first millennium BC saw the emergence of two huge and enduring empires at either end of Eurasia - Rome and China - but it was also the time of Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, and much more. Let's start getting settled in a brand-new world.

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After two and a half years and 126 episodes, Season 4 of Tides is coming to an end. Patrick recaps what we've learned, how things have changed in a rapidly shifting field, and why the study of prehistory and the deep human past matters.

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I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of great people during this season, and Professor Shane Miller of Mississippi State University has been incredibly generous with his time on multiple occasions. He and I catch up on the state of the debate about who came first to the Americas, what agriculture in the eastern United States looked like, and how to find really old dirt.

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"Collapse" is an evocative and powerful term, but what does it really mean? And how can we use it to help us understand the actual processes and events through which ancient people lived? Professor Guy Middleton is both one of the world's leading experts on collapse as a concept and an accomplished archaeologist of the late Bronze Age Aegean, and we discuss the usefulness of ""collapse"" and how Bronze Age people experienced their famous time of troubles.

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More than 3,000 years ago, two armies met in a titanic Bronze Age battle along a river in northern Germany. We don’t know why they fought or who won, but thanks to stunning archaeological discoveries, we know how they died, where they come from, and what their lives were like.

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What ties the long history of ancient Egypt together into a meaningful whole? Professor Toby Wilkinson, one of the most renowned Egyptologists on the planet, visits to talk about the unity of ancient Egyptian history through the lens of the fascinating array of objects found in Tutankhamun's tomb. Check out his new book, Tutankhamun's Trumpet!

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As dramatic and transformative as collapses are, they're rarely a complete apocalypse. People survived the Bronze Age Collapse, and then they had to wake up in the morning, care for their children, tend their crops, make their tools, and go about creating a new world.

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It's mailbag time! Patrick answers a variety of questions about topics covered (and not covered) in this season of Tides, ranging from Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize in paleogenomics to Indo-European origins to changing sea levels.

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What is an empire? It sounds straightforward enough, but figuring out what the term means - much less whether it really helps us understand past political units - is actually pretty complicated. Professor Claudia Glatz is an expert on the dynamics of empire in general and the Hittites in particular, and she walks us through how these ancient empires functioned - and often didn't.

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When assigning blame for the Bronze Age Collapse, the most common culprits are said to be the Sea Peoples: nomadic raiders and sackers of cities who plied the sea-lanes of the late Bronze Age world and brought to an end centuries of flourishing trade and culture. Yet who were the Sea Peoples? And were they actually responsible for all of this devastation?

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Mycenaean Greece was one of the glittering jewels of the late Bronze Age world, but it fell to pieces in dramatic fashion: burned palaces, abandoned settlements, and the end of a centuries-old political tradition. Nor was Greece the only place in the Aegean to suffer: On the Asian side of the sea, a city we know as Troy was among those destroyed at this time. Was this the context that, centuries later, gave rise to Homer's famous tale of the Trojan War?

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We're often told that trade was central to the interconnected world of the late Bronze Age, but what were people really trading? Why did trade matter so much? And what happened when that trade disappeared? Professor Sarah Murray is an archaeologist and an expert on the economy of Mycenaean Greece - and how and why it fell apart.

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The term "Bronze Age Collapse" is by now common, but what do we actually mean when we talk about "collapse?" Is it a matter of political reorganization or something rather more drastic? In the case of the Bronze Age, we have a copious material and written record to help us understand what actually happened around 1200 BC, and how it affected the people who lived through it - and didn't.

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The late Bronze Age was a time of powerful empires and intense competition between them. Never before had true states covered such a large area, or had such resources to devote to politicking and fighting with one another. The result was war on a scale never before seen in human history.

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What was it like to be a regular person in ancient Egypt? What did people do when they got sick or injured? Professor Anne Austin is an Egyptologist and bioarchaeologist who studies health and disease using both texts and human remains, allowing us to answer questions about the bodily experience of ancient life in ways we never thought possible. 

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We know the late Bronze Age world eventually collapsed, but what made it a world in the first place? The answer lies in the intense connections - trade, politics, and culture - that tied together a vast area of the ancient world, from Mycenaean Greece to Elamite Iran and the Caucasus Mountains to the Upper Nile in Nubia.

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When we think about ancient Egypt, the vast majority of our attention goes to its elite: pharaohs, queens, priests, and nobles. But the elite made up only the tiniest portion of the population. What about the people who built the pyramids, royal tombs, great temples, and palaces? What can we know about them? A great deal, as it turns out.

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If we know one thing about the Bronze Age world, we know that it collapsed. But what made it a world? And why did it fall apart? There's nobody better to ask than Professor Eric Cline, who literally wrote the book - 1177 BC - on the end of the Bronze Age.

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Kings are one of the constants of ancient Egypt's long history. But what, exactly, were kings supposed to do, and how did ancient Egyptians understand the role of their king? Professor Laurel Bestock is one of the world's leading experts on the institution of kingship in ancient Egypt, as well as an experienced archaeologist, and she brings several fascinating viewpoints to help us understand the central role of the pharaoh.

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Egypt's New Kingdom lasted for more than 400 years. In that time, Egypt changed dramatically, weathering ups, downs, and turmoil of all kinds. Much of that turmoil centered around a religious visionary who also happened to be pharaoh: Akhenaten, father of the famous Tutankhamun, whose incredible tomb and less-than-impressive reign was a reflection of those unsettled times.

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Most of what we think we know about ancient Egypt is actually things we know about the New Kingdom, the last of Egypt's three classical golden ages: an empire stretching into the Near East and Nubia, warrior kings leading armies of chariots, the lavish tombs of the Valley of the Kings, and the well-preserved faces of royal mummies.

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Sea levels rise, hills erode, and rivers change course over decades and centuries, dramatically affecting how people choose to live in their landscapes. Professor Mike Carson is an expert in the study of archaeological landscapes in the ancient Pacific, and his work has provided incredible insights into how the ancient speakers of the Austronesian languages saw and lived in their world.  

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When we think of the Middle Ages, the first thing that comes to mind is usually knights in shining armor. Chivalry - the ideal of behavior that guided knights - was a major force in medieval life. Honor and piety, bravery and reputation: these were core values for the secular elite. We explore what they actually meant to medieval people.

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Star Carr, located in the Yorkshire region of northern England, is one of the world's richest archaeological sites, a waterlogged window onto the European Mesolithic more than 11,000 years ago. Professor Chantal Conneller spent more than a decade excavating at Star Carr, and she joins me to talk about this enigmatic and little-known but incredibly fascinating period of human history.

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Of all the Austronesian-speaking peoples, none have gone further than the Polynesians. Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch of the University of Hawaii is one of the world's leading experts on the Polynesian voyages and colonization of the Pacific, and we discuss how, why, and with what impact the Polynesians spread out over half of the planet.

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The first wave of migration out of Taiwan brought speakers of Austronesian to the northern reaches of the Philippines, the homeland of the Malayo-Polynesians. From there, they spread out over a vast swathe of Southeast Asia and Oceania, eventually moving to the distant reaches of Indonesia and the previously uninhabited spaces of Remote Oceania.

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More than 4,000 years ago, a remarkable migration - one of the great journeys in human history - began in Taiwan. Within just a thousand years, people speaking the Austronesian languages spread out everywhere from the Philippines to Borneo to the previously uninhabited islands of Vanuatu and Fiji in Remote Oceania.

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The harsh, unforgiving conditions of the Andes and the nearby Pacific coastline make it one of the best places in the world to study the relationship between people and their environment. Professor Jason Nesbitt is an expert on the archaeology of the Andes and has extensively worked on how ancient people in the region organized themselves to deal with El Nino events and other climatic disasters.

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China's Shang Dynasty is something of an enigma. It produced the earliest written evidence in China, in the form of inscribed oracle bones, and decades of archaeology have shed light on its capital city and society. Yet much about it is still unclear, including precisely how the Shang understood themselves and their world. Professor Rod Campbell is one of the world's leading experts on the Shang, and his work has done a great deal to illuminate the Shang worldview and why they did the things they did, including human sacrifice on an enormous scale.

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The arid shoreline between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific seems like an unlikely place to host one of the world's earliest complex societies. But more than 5,000 years ago, the people of the Norte Chico Culture built cities, temples, and monuments that laid the foundation for thousands of years of Andean civilization.

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Mesoamerica is one of only a few places in the world where "civilization" - states, writing, cities, monumental building, and so on - emerged independently. The first society to do all this were the enigmatic Olmecs more than 3,000 years ago. Today the Olmecs are known mostly for their colossal carved stone heads, but they were the pioneers of a distinctively Mesoamerican form of civilization that lasted for millennia.

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Over the past several decades, ancient DNA and other archaeological sciences have transformed our understanding of Europe in prehistory. Professor Kristian Kristiansen has worked with these new methods since the very beginning, and combines them with a deep grounding in both traditional archaeology and big-picture thinking about what it all means.

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The Eurasian steppe is central to grasping the past 5,000 years of human history, and in the past couple of decades, new tools of analysis have transformed our understanding of the place and its importance. Professor Michael Frachetti has developed and applied a whole series of innovative approaches to understanding the people of the Bronze Age steppe and much more, ranging from ancient DNA to isotope analysis to more traditional archaeology.

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Four thousand years ago, the sprawling cities of the Indus Valley Civilization dominated much of South Asia; a millennium after that, however, the cities were in ruins, and new migrants ultimately deriving their ancestry from the Eurasian steppe had established themselves throughout much of the region. These new arrivals have become known as Indo-Aryans, and they left behind some of the earliest writing in an Indo-European language - the texts of the Rigveda.

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More than a billion people around the world speak a language of the Indo-Iranian family today. These languages all trace their origin to a group of innovative people living on the steppes of southern Russia more than 4000 years ago, people who inhabited a surprisingly far-flung, complex, and mutable world.

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The Indus Valley Civilization doesn’t get much attention compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt, but it covered an area of a million square kilometers, was home to hundreds of thousands or millions of people and a unified culture, and lasted for the better part of a millennium. More than that, the Indus Civilization doesn’t seem to fit the models we have for how early states functioned. Dr. Adam Green of Cambridge University joins me to explain the unusual way in which the Indus Civilization was organized, its lack of powerful elites, and how and why it eventually fell apart.

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Language is fundamental to how people experience the world, but how can we know what languages people spoke in the distant past? By 1200 BC, the linguistic outlines of the world were becoming a bit clearer, thanks to an explosion in written texts. Follow along as we go on a historical linguistic tour of the globe around 1200 BC, from the first Bantu-speakers of western Africa to the Indo-Iranians of the steppe to the Austronesians of southeast Asia.

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About one in every five people alive on the planet today speaks a language belonging to the Bantu family, and Bantu-speaking peoples have shaped the history of Africa in profound ways. But how did they expand from their original homeland, and how can we tell? Professor Kathryn de Luna joins me to talk about historical linguistics, archaeology, and how they can shed light on one of the most important processes of the past several thousand years.

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The state - a centralized administration that exerts control over a territory and can coerce the people living there - is one of the driving forces of the last several thousand years of history. But when and where did states appear, and why? And can we really call all of the various forms of political control that emerged around the world “states?” We can’t understand the world today without understanding the state, but that’s no easy task.

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Ancient DNA and new archaeological work have changed our understanding of many different parts of the global past, but nowhere more so than Africa. Professor Mary Prendergast sits on the very cutting edge of both fields, having worked on both the largest-scale studies of ancient DNA in Africa and some of the most fascinating and innovative work being done on the continent.

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The most striking environmental shift on the planet in the Holocene epoch was the greening of the Sahara. For thousands of years, the now-deserts of northern Africa were a mosaic of savannahs, river valleys, and shallow lakes. This unique environment produced the ways of life that eventually brought pastoralism and food production, as well as a variety of language families and populations, to the furthest corners of the continent.

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Africa is rightly known as the “Cradle of Humanity,” because that’s where the most recent wave of modern human migrants originated and so much of our species’ evolutionary history took place there. But the reality is far more complex. Africa is a big place, and its relationship with our species spans hundreds of thousands of years, different environments, and multiple instances of interbreeding with other archaic human groups.

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Human sacrifice is an ugly but essential topic in understanding the Shang Dynasty, but we know very little about precisely who these people were, where they came from, and what their lives were like prior to their deaths. Dr. Christina Cheung is a bioarchaeologist specializing in the study of stable isotopes, and she has produced some of the first work to shed light on who the sacrificial victims were. But that’s just one part of Dr. Cheung’s fascinating body of work, which extends all the way to Roman Britain and Neolithic France.

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Professor Jennifer Raff, a longtime friend of the show, returns to discuss her work on the genetic ancestry of America’s Indigenous peoples. We talk about Beringia, waves of migration, the troublesome relationship between science and Indigenous peoples, and her fantastic new book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, which is available now.

Get Origin here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/jennifer-raff/origin/9781538749715/  

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More than 3,000 years ago in China’s Central Plains, the Shang Dynasty crossed the threshold from prehistory to history. For the first time in China, we have access to the written word, in the form of the famous inscribed oracle bones. Thanks to that writing, we can peer inside their society and understand its logic - the logic of violence, authority, and the power of the ancestors.

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The reality of the Bronze Age Near East was much messier and harder to understand than a straightforward story of city-states, empires, and kings. Different ethnolinguistic groups, lifestyles, dynasties of would-be rulers, migrating mercenaries, and ephemeral states were all essential pieces of the fabric of that world. Professor Aaron Burke of UCLA joins us to talk about mobility, migration, and the formation of identities in the ancient Near East.

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China’s written history goes back more than 3,000 years, stretching deep into the Bronze Age. But just how far back does it go, and how reliable are those first legendary texts when discussing a world that had already been lost for centuries? They speak of powerful kings and capital cities, and a dynasty called the Xia, but can we find them in the rich archaeological record?

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How did Latin splinter into the Romance languages? In this episode, we explore how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on - of related but no longer mutually intelligible tongues.

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China’s late Neolithic period saw the emergence of increasingly powerful groups of elites who buried themselves in lavishly decorated tombs and built palaces and public buildings at the hearts of their fortified settlements. From these political centers, the elites built and ruled a patchwork of small, competing states. But by around 2000 BC, all of these early states had fallen apart, destroyed by changing climatic conditions, social upheaval, and interstate conflict.

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States have defined China from the very beginning of its recorded history more than 3,000 years ago, but how did they come into being? Professor Li Liu of Stanford University is one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistoric archaeology of China, and she returns to Tides for the second time to tell us about states, elites, and why they’re so central to the story of the Chinese past.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The late Bronze Age world of the Near East was an incredibly rich and complex place, full of long-distance trade, the exchange of ideas, bickering kings, and empires rising and falling. Among those empires, one of the most powerful and enigmatic was that of the Hittites, whose ruling dynasty survived more than five centuries of intrigue and war to build a state stretching across the region. Professor Trevor Bryce literally wrote the books on the Hittites, and I ask him about the Hittites, the people of Troy, and the world they inhabited.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Viewed from the perspective of international trade, political complexity, and written culture, the late Bronze Age world of the Aegean and Near East marked a high point before the fall. But how did this world come into existence? The empires of the Hittites, Mittani, and Assyrians - along with Egypt’s New Kingdom - marked the beginning of something new, an age of intense war and political competition on a scale larger than ever before.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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If we know the name of an ancient Near Eastern ruler, it’s probably that of Hammurabi, thanks to his famous Code. But Hammurabi was just one ruler in a time of conflict throughout the region, and the state he built in his lifetime didn’t last beyond his death. This was an age of fragmentation that lasted for centuries, where ambitious would-be conquerors fought one another in endless rounds of warfare and bloodshed.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Archaeology has come a long way since the first crude excavations at Stonehenge more than a century ago. Our guest, Mike Parker Pearson, spent the better part of a decade excavating in the vicinity of Stonehenge, offering new interpretations of the monument that form the backbone of current understanding. And Stonehenge is just one of Professor Parker Pearson’s areas of interest over the course of a long career that has redefined our understanding of British prehistory.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.

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The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.

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Friend of the Show, TV presenter, author extraordinaire, and historian Dan Jones returns to Tides to discuss his new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages. It’s a wonderful book and a tremendous achievement, written with both a consummate grasp of the huge scope of medieval history and a cinematic style of storytelling that keeps the reader engaged. How can we say something new about a very old period, and do it in entertaining fashion? That’s the key question for one of the most accomplished popular historians working today.

Get Powers and Thrones here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Ancient Egypt didn’t exist in isolation from the world around it. Trade goods, ideas, and especially people flowed in and out over the millennia, but never more so than during the Second Intermediate Period, when a foreign dynasty of kings known as the Hyksos ruled much of Egypt. But were the Hyksos really the invading marauders the Egyptians portrayed them as? I talked to Dr. Anna-Latifa Mourad of Macquarie University to get the cutting-edge story of who the Hyksos really were.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Just to the south of ancient Egypt, a civilization we think we know well, was a deeply connected but unique world that existed along the Middle Nile: Nubia, or Kush, which produced its own distinctive cultures and states that held strong for many thousands of years.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The discovery of 21,000-23,000-year-old human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico is one of the most exciting developments in the study of the deep past in recent years. But do these footprints hold up to real scrutiny? And if they’re real, how do they change our understanding of the first people in the Americas? 

I asked two experts on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas what they thought of this incredible new evidence: Dr. Jessi Halligan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University, and Dr. Shane Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Mississippi State University. Both have extensive experience on the topic, and help us understand precisely what these footprints tell us about the human past in North and South America.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The Middle Kingdom, beginning around 2000 BC, was the second of ancient Egypt’s classical ages. Powerful pharaohs ruled from the cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean, building enormous monuments and patronizing exceptional art and literature. But on either side of the Middle Kingdom lay two ages of chaos, the Intermediate Periods, when the pharaoh’s rule - the defining feature of ancient Egyptian history - essentially disappeared.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Located to the south of Egypt, in today’s Sudan, ancient Nubia had a complicated relationship with the old state of the Nile, and scholars have traditionally understood it through the shadow of its much better understood northern neighbor. But, as Dr. Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan explains, Nubia had a long and fascinating history of its own and a stunning array of achievements, spanning thousands of years and many different cultures.

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Emberling’s excavations at Jebel Barkal, you can do so here; if you’d like to learn more about community archaeology in Sudan, check out the “Narrating Nubia” project here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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When we think of Ancient Egypt, we think of the pyramids: vast, eternal monuments to the glory of long-dead pharaohs. But we shouldn’t take them for granted: They belong to a specific place and time, and the people who built them had their reasons for doing so. The world that produced the pyramids was Egypt’s Old Kingdom, one of its three classic ages. We’ll explore it here today.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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We can’t understand the past without understanding when things happened, because if we can’t place them in some sort of chronological order, we can’t understand the relationship between them. But how do we know when things happened in the distant past? Professor Sturt Manning of Cornell University is an expert on chronology, using tree-rings, radiocarbon, and historical sources to date events and archaeological sites from many thousands of years ago. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The Late Bronze Age was a remarkable time in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. An interconnected world sprang up, tying together the lands from Greece and Crete in the west all the way to Mesopotamia in the east and the Nile cataracts in the south. Let’s explore the Aegean during this time, looking at how palaces on Crete continued to grow and how Minoan civilization reached an apex of sophistication and reach. And on the Greek mainland, a new people - the Mycenaeans - emerged, building their own palaces and society, the foundations of the Greek world that would later encompass so much of the Mediterranean and beyond.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole of human history can be divided into two parts: before the Industrial Revolution, and after. Economist Duncan Weldon joins me to talk about the Industrial Revolution, why it started in Britain, and the trajectory of the British economy over the past two centuries. 

Get Duncan’s book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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From mainland Greece to Minoan Crete and the famous city of Troy, what made the Aegean Sea one of the constituent pieces of the Bronze Age world? All of these cities are linked, not just by their proximity, but by much bigger things: trade, the emergence of cities and elite classes, the development of state structures and the written word.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Worldin hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Bestselling author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan returns to Tides to talk about his new book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. It’s a wonderful book about a fascinating character who lived through and shaped impossibly eventful times, and I highly recommend both it and Mike’s other work.

Get Hero of Two Worlds here.

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More than 4,000 years ago, a ruler came to power in the fractious, war-torn lands of Mesopotamia. He ruled a small state north of the region's ancient heartland, a place called Akkad, but over the course of his life, Sargon built something sprawling and unique: the world's first empire, the Akkadian Empire.

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To mark the release of Patrick's book The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World, he did a virtual event with Powell's Bookstore in Portland, hosted by history podcaster extraordinaire and bestselling author Mike Duncan. Mike and Patrick discussed the book, but also the art of doing popular history, key periods in history, and a whole variety of other topics in the course of their talk.

You can get the book through Powell's here, or elsewhere here.

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Friend of the Show Dr. Keith Pluymers returns to tell us about how people thought about and fought over resources, especially wood, in early modern England. Scarcity, Keith argues, is more about perception than an actual lack of resources. Different groups within society had different perceptions, and they fought constantly about what to do about this shortage, including colonizing North America.

Check out Keith's book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic, available here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Worldinhardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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We're often told that ancient Mesopotamia was the "Cradle of Civilization," but what made the region stand out in comparison to its neighbors and contemporaries? More than anything else, it was living in cities and working in a hyper-specialized economic role as subjects of kings that defined life in Mesopotamia.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Listen to an exclusive sneak peak of Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, which comes out today, July 20th! This chapter looks at the one-armed German mercenary knight Goetz von Berlichingen, and the emergence of large-scale gunpowder warfare in the 16th century.

Listen to the rest of The Verge on Audible here.

You can order a hard copy or e-book of The Verge here.

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Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, comes out next Tuesday, July 20th! He worked really hard on it, people like Mike Duncan and Dan Jones say it's good, and you should read it if you liked the seasons of Tides of History on the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.

But what's it about? And what's it like to sell, write, edit, and release a book? To answer these questions, Patrick chats with two wonderful people: ex-Tides of History producer Leah Sutherland, now the Podcast Director for Headspace; and Rachel Kambury, who bought and edited The Verge for Twelve Books, an imprint of Hachette.

Get the audiobook version of The Verge on Audible here.

You can order a hard copy or e-book of The Verge here.

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While Mesopotamia and even the Indus Valley get the lion's share of the attention, sophisticated and long-lasting societies inhabited the lands fringing the Caspian Sea for thousands of years. The people of the Kura-Araxes Culture, the Oxus Civilization, and Elam left their mark everywhere from Anatolia to Mesopotamia to South Asia, shaping future cultures for millennia to come.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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When we think of the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppes, we usually imagine nomadic herders taking their livestock from place to place on horseback. But the steppes are a vast and varied place, and so too were the ways of life that ancient people developed to live there. Professor Alicia Ventresca Miller of the University of Michigan joins me to talk about diet, mobility, and how chemical isotopes can tell us more about the diversity of life on the ancient steppes.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Things didn't stop happening on the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppes once the first waves of migrants had departed to make their mark on Europe and beyond. New societies, languages, and ethnic groups emerged. The chariot was invented, and bronze metallurgy spread far and wide. One of those innovative societies on the steppe gave rise to the Indo-Iranians, whose descendants would spread out everywhere from Siberia to Syria.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Professor David Anthony is one of the world's foremost experts on the archaeology of the ancient Eurasian steppes and sits at the cutting edge of Indo-European studies. We discuss the unique nature of the Yamnaya and the prehistoric steppe, the people who lived there, what ancient DNA can tell us about these past societies, and why they matter even 5000 years later.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Human bones are one of our most valuable and illuminating sources of information about the past, but how do we use them, and what can they tell us about prehistory? I talked to Dr. Jess Beck, a bioarchaeologist and expert on later European prehistory, about the incredible insights we can glean from the study of human remains and about her specialty, the Copper Age (c.3250–2200 BCE) in the Iberian peninsula.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Around 4,500 years ago, bell-shaped ceramic drinking vessels called "beakers" begin showing up with the dead in tombs all over western Europe. Everywhere from Portugal to Sicily to Scotland to Slovakia, these distinctive containers show up, often accompanied by archery equipment and upheaval in the societies established in these places. The Bronze Age and metallurgy would soon follow. But what were the Beakers for? Who used them, and why? Thanks to ancient DNA and cutting-edge archaeological science, we can explore the Beaker Phenomenon in all its manifestations, from marriage networks and trade to prehistoric genocide.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Five thousand years ago, small groups of herders began making their way from the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppe into the hills and forests of northern Europe. They moved west, intermarrying with the local farmers and sometimes fighting them, eventually reaching as far as present-day Belgium. These were the people of the Corded Ware Culture, and they brought their language - Indo-European - and genes into the heart of Europe.

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At the heart of the ancient Middle East, a sophisticated, urbanized, and long-lived world, was a writing system: cuneiform, used for everything from heroic epic to receipts and medical texts, and first developed in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago. Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid of Oxford joins me to talk about cuneiform literature, medicine, and mental health in this fascinating and little-known ancient world.

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More than 5,000 years ago, a group of wandering herders on the Eurasian steppes - the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European - began to move outward from their homeland. With their wagons, horses, and livestock, they traveled hundreds of miles through the Danube Valley and into Central Europe, forever shaping the linguistic, cultural, and genetic future of the continent and beyond.

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What do Achilles and Gilgamesh, two of the most renowned literary figures of the ancient world, have in common? A great deal more than you might expect. I talked to Professor Michael Clarke of the National University of Ireland, Galway, one of my favorite people in the world and an enormously creative and thoughtful scholar, about his recent book - Achilles beside Gilgamesh: Mortality and Wisdom in Early Epic Poetry. We discussed Homer, the world of the Bronze Age, how literature moved, and why so many of the same motifs appeared at various places and times in heroic literature.

Get Professor Clarke's book, Achilles beside Gilgamesh, here.

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Egypt and Mesopotamia are the most famous civilizations of the ancient world, but at the same time in South Asia - today's Pakistan and India - an even larger and more populous society came into being: the Indus Valley Civilization, whose peak lasted from 2600 to 1900 BC. But the Indus Valley Civilization challenges much of what we think we know about ancient societies, from inequality and violence to political control.

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South Asia - encompassing Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan - is one of the cradles of human civilization, and today it's home to one in every four people in the world. But who were the early inhabitants of South Asia, where had they come from, and what led them to develop agriculture, writing, cities, and some of the ancient world's most complex and populous societies?

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Professor Tim Denham is one of the world's leading experts on Kuk Swamp, the most important archaeological site for understanding the origins of agriculture in New Guinea. He explains how we can use cutting-edge techniques in the study of ancient soils and tiny bits of plant to understand these fascinating past developments. We also talk about "civilization," the invention of agriculture in global context, and why it took so long to understand New Guinea as an agricultural center.

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The Highlands of New Guinea are one of the most remote places on the planet, a maze of crosscutting valleys and enormous mountains that weren't reached by outsiders until the 1930s. Yet they're also one of the world's original centers of agriculture, a place responsible for domesticating crops like taro and the omnipresent banana. Crops on which millions of people rely today trace their origin all the way back to the isolated high valleys of New Guinea many thousands of years ago.

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Professor David Wengrow is one of the world's leading experts on Egypt before the pharaohs. He's also one of the most creative and wide-ranging archaeologists working right now, and he has fascinating insights into the primordial emergence of inequality, hierarchies, states, and all of the other things. Check out his new book, co-authored with the late David Graeber: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

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Tattoos, and other forms of body decoration, are as old as humanity itself. But what can we know about the skin of long-past people that no longer exists? I talk to Aaron Deter-Wolf, Prehistoric Archaeologist for the State of Tennessee’s Division of Archaeology and one of the world's experts on the archaeological study of tattooing, to get some answers.

Follow Aaron on Instagram @archaeologyink - it's a fascinating page.

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Understanding the first migrants to the Americas more than 13,000 years ago is a big task. So is figuring out how the ancestors of indigenous peoples transformed themselves from hunters of mammoth and mastodon to farmers to the builders of complex societies. Professor Shane Miller, an archaeologist working in the American southeast (and a Tides listener!) joins me to talk about cutting-edge archaeology and how our understanding of the early Americas is changing.

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Language is one of the foundational pieces of being human, but in the absence of writing, what can we know about it in the deep past? Historical linguistics and the comparative method shed valuable light on these long-lost languages, and uncover the roots of some of today's most widely spoken tongues.

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There are still people living now who make their living by foraging, and understanding them is an essential component of grasping the breadth of human experience. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils from a bygone age, but studying them can give us deep insights into the more distant past. In this episode, I discuss ethnography, ethnoarchaeology, and how we can apply these tools to prehistory.

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Kings are practically synonymous with ancient Egypt, and it's not just because their monuments - like the pyramids - still tower above the desert and the Nile. Egyptian society was organized around the pharaohs in many different ways, but how did they come into being? What turned Egypt into one of the world's longest-lived kingdoms?

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What can we learn about the deep human past by studying present-day hunter-gatherers? I asked that question to Professor Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming, who's both one of the world's experts on hunter-gatherers and an accomplished archaeologist. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils who provide a direct window onto the distant past, but their lifeways do offer fascinating insights into that past.

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More than 5,000 years ago, the city of Uruk in what's now Iraq was the heart of a new civilization. Cities, kings, armies, monumental temples, and writing were all new developments. But why here? Why then? And who suffered so that civilization could rise?

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Pyramids, mummies, and pharaohs define our understanding of ancient Egypt, a timeless and eternal land. But the Nile wasn't always ruled by god-like kings, and long before they emerged, Egypt was home to other peoples and other ways of life. As Egyptian civilization emerged, these older traditions didn't disappear, but remained, shaping thousands of years of subsequent history.

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Boxing has a long past, one deeply connected to race, labor, and broader developments in American history. Professor Louis Moore joins me to talk about those topics and about his outstanding book, I Fight For a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915.

Find Professor Moore's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Living-Manhood-1880-1915-Society/dp/0252082877.

This episode originally aired on August 8, 2019.

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Civilization first emerged in the fertile floodplains of Mesopotamia - present-day Iraq - with priest-kings and cities full of temples and ziggurats, pictographs and cuneiform writing. But what were the conditions and processes that led up to this complex of developments? How and why did it happen, and why there?

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I'm not just talking about the wonderful Sid Meier game series, which I've spent far too many hours playing; how do we define "civilization," how does it come into being, and why does it matter?

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Stanford University's Professor Li Liu is one of the world's leading experts on prehistoric East Asia and one of the world's primary inventions of farming. I ask her about that, the deep continuities of Chinese civilization, and her recent research on the origins of brewing and alcohol.

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Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte Chico, but hunter-gatherers produced the first great mound complexes of the American southeast. How did farming change, and not change, the diverse societies of the Americas?

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The initial migrations to the Americas get most of the attention, but people didn't stop living there in the aftermath of those first movements of peoples; they spread out over the Great Plains and the forests of the eastern United States, south into the deserts and jungles of Mesoamerica, and into every corner of South America. In the process, they invented agriculture no fewer than three different times.

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The relationship between agriculture, migration, and the distribution of today's most prominent language families is direct but complex. Professor Peter Bellwood, one of the world's leading experts on prehistory, explains how farming led to population growth and movements of people that still shape our world today.

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Plague, war, and a worsening climate drastically changed Europe in the years and decades after 1350. This new state of affairs laid the groundwork for the explosion around 1500 that gave rise to the modern world.

This episode originally aired on June 28, 2018.

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East Asia was one of the world's primary centers of agricultural innovation. Farming was invented there, rice and millet domesticated, and the people who did so grew in numbers and sophistication. Some of the world's most-spoken language families grew out of Neolithic China, and so did the roots of Chinese civilization.

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Hominins have lived in East Asia - what's now China, Korea, and Japan - for millions of years, at least as far back as Homo erectus if not further. And as the glaciers began to recede for the last time after 20,000 years ago, people in this part of the world developed humanity's first pottery, rice-farming, and complex societies of incredible diversity and resilience.

If you'd like to see visuals of some of what we've discussed here, check out the accompanying Substack post.

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Professor Stephen Shennan is one of the world's leading experts on the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent and Europe. In this interview, I pick his brain about why early farmers were so, uh, fertile, and produced so many descendants; how those farmers spread outward from their regions of origin; and how we can understand their Neolithic world. Professor Shennan also one of the world's most accomplished archaeological theorists, and he answers my questions about archaeology in the age of Big Data, statistics, and new ways of understanding the past.

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Peasants and common folk were oppressed by their social superiors, but they didn't accept that as a natural state of affairs: They resisted in small, everyday ways, and they rebelled, sometimes spectacularly.

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2018.

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What were Neanderthals really like? Our closest relatives shared an incredible amount in common with us, argues Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of the wonderful new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. But we shouldn't pigeonhole them; Neanderthals persisted for hundreds of thousands of years across time and space, living diverse and varied lives everywhere from mountains to deserts to icy tundra.

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Five thousand years ago, a man died more than 10,000 feet high in the Alps of northern Italy. He had been shot in the back with an arrow, the corpse left behind, where he was frozen into a glacier along with all of his belongings. He stayed there until two hikers found him - still half covered in ice - in 1991. What was Ötzi's life like? And what can we learn about his final days and hours? Thanks to incredible scientific studies, we know more about Ötzi than almost anybody who's ever lived.

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Today, everywhere from Bengal to British Columbia, some 3.2 billion people speak an Indo-European language. All of these diverse languages are descended from a common ancestor spoken long before the advent of writing. But where and when was that, and who were the speakers of Proto-Indo-European? Follow us more than 5,000 years back in time to a story about livestock herding, horseback riding, chieftains, burial mounds, and powerful new gods.

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The first farmers of Europe and their descendants persisted for thousands of years. In the Neolithic heartland of eastern Europe, along the Danube River and through the northern Balkan Mountains, they built a unique civilization: Old Europe, with its artificial mounds, gorgeous pottery, and for the first time, the use of metal. The first cities in the world grew out of this long-lived Neolithic just before it disappeared forever.

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When we think of the medieval world, our minds usually turn to knights, royalty, and clergy. But the backbone of the medieval economic and social order was the humble peasant. In this rebroadcast from 2018, we explore the world and lives of the vast bulk of the people who actually lived in the Middle Ages, and why they matter.

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How do we know what we know about the deep past? What languages did people speak in prehistory? And why, if the life of an early farmer seemed to be so miserable, did farmers have so many children? I answer all of these questions and more in our first prehistory mailbag episode.

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It didn't take long for the first pioneering farmers of Europe to establish mature and stable societies. The monuments of these societies are still with us today: enormous earthen tombs and standing stones, silent reminders of a lost civilization.

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Farming came into existence in the Fertile Crescent, but it didn't stay there. By 5000 BC, agriculture had spread east and west, reaching both Central Asia and the Atlantic Ocean. But how did this happen? Did indigenous hunter-gatherers adopt farming, or did the farmers themselves move and bring their way of life with them?

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The domestication of animals has transformed the way that people eat, clothe themselves, and live over the past 10,000 or so years, but what in the world does "domestication" even mean? How did this happen, and why did people start doing this? I talk with Professor Greger Larson of Oxford University about the genetics of animal domestication and how cutting-edge science is helping us answer these age-old questions.

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The domestication of plants and animals has remade the way that people feed themselves, organize their societies, and interact with the landscapes around them. But for most of the human past, this isn't how people subsisted. When, where, and how did people start farming? And most importantly, why?

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For most of Homo sapiens' time out of Africa, we lived in a world defined by ice. But by around 20,000 years ago, the ice had begun to melt, the glaciers retreating back toward the poles and mountain ranges. This left behind a new world, a whole different series of environments, opportunities, and perils for the people who had made it through the Ice Age.

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Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the world's best communicators on the deep human past and paleoanthropology, joins me to talk about archaic humans, genomics, and whether the concept of different human species even makes sense these days. Check out his blog, which is an amazing resource, and follow him on Twitter.

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Our understanding of the past is constantly in flux, and there's no field where that's clearer than with the early settlement of the Americas. I'm joined by Professor Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas, an anthropological geneticist, to discuss the game-changing (or not?) recent work pushing back the date of first settlement to 30,000 years ago or more.

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The Americas were the last continents Homo sapiens reached. Why did it take so long for people to enter this vast and promising expanse of land? Who were they, and where had they come from? In today's episode, we explore the latest - just days old! - science of the First Americans, and discover the descendants they've left behind even today.

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Twenty thousand years ago, the world was locked in ice. The glaciers advanced from the poles and mountain ranges, swallowing huge portions of the planet's surface and making the rest colder and drier, a more difficult place to live. Yet people nevertheless thrived, spreading out across the continents and creating some of the most incredible art in human history.

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Ancient DNA is the key that's unlocking the deep history of humanity, allowing us to answer questions about our collective past that we never dreamed of addressing even 20 years ago. Eske Willerslev is a pioneer in the field of extracting, sequencing, and analyzing the preserved DNA of people who lived thousands upon thousands of years ago; on top of that, he's a fascinating person with unique perspectives on how to understand the human past.

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Until very recently, Homo sapiens - our species - was only one of several varieties of humans on this planet. As our ancestors spread outward from Africa in their great migration, they encountered those other species. The results of those encounters left us a genetic legacy that is still with us today.

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things in this episode, check out this post on my Substack blog.

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Welcome to a new season of Tides of History! Over the next year, we'll be traveling from the very origins of our species through the peopling of the planet, the Ice Age, and then to the beginnings of agriculture, cities, metalworking, and states. Today, we cover our deepest past, from the divergence from our closest ape relatives to the first appearance of anatomically modern humans.

To see visuals of our earliest ancestors, and how-to videos for making ancient stone tools, check out Patrick's website.

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How do we tell when one period ends and another begins? What are the fundamental characteristics of the early modern period? My dear friend (and friend of the show!) Keith Pluymers, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, returns to chat with me about periodization, the Great Divergence, and riots in the early modern period.

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Around the year 1000, merchants, explorers, and missionaries linked the world together from Newfoundland to China. Trade goods, people, and above all ideas flowed across a rich assortment of routes, connecting previously distant places into a single unit. This was the first instance of what we can call globalization, according to Professor Valerie Hansen of Yale, who wrote a compelling new book on the topic: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began.

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Alaric was one of the most famous barbarians of antiquity, and yet we know little about him - or at least, we knew very little, until Douglas Boin's excellent new book came out. It's entitled Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome. In today's episode, I chat with Professor Boin about the book, the Goths, and how we should understand this period of Roman - and Gothic - history.

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John Maynard Keynes was one of the most important figures of the 20th century, creating the economic structures and ideas that defined the Second World War and its aftermath. I spoke with Zach Carter, author of the wonderful new Keynes biography The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, about Keynes's wild life and enduring legacies.

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We reach the epic conclusion of our series on the early modern period with the Great Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto.

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For much of the 16th century, the Habsburgs of Spain and the Ottoman Empire waged an epic conflict for control over the Mediterranean. Follow along with two composite characters, a Barbary corsair and a Hospitaller knight, as they raid, pillage, and fight a holy war for decades on end.

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Charles V controlled more of Europe than any ruler in centuries, with resources other monarchs could only dream of. But that was never enough to give the Holy Roman Emperor more than a momentary victory; there was always a new enemy, some unforeseen calamity, waiting around the corner.

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DISCLAIMER: If you do not think that this pandemic is a big deal; if you do not want to hear our personal political views; if you don’t care about present-day politics; if you think that this will somehow offend you; then please don't listen to this episode.

Author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan joins me to talk about pandemics, social instability, and present-day politics.

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Charles V was the most powerful European ruler since Charlemagne: king of Spain and Naples, Holy Roman Emperor, and ruler of a whole bunch else besides. How did all of these vast territories, and the central political role that went along with them, come into his possession? The answer wasn't ability or merit; it was inheritance.

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All of us are dealing with the ongoing pandemic in different ways, and I decided to wedge myself into my closet to record an informal talk with you all about pandemics throughout history and what, if anything, they might help us understand about what we're dealing with today. Economic effects, political upheavals, and disease all play together, so let's try to figure out the connections.

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