Ancient

The story of Troy speaks to all of us - the kidnapping of Helen, a queen celebrated for her beauty, sees the Greeks launch a thousand ships against the city of Troy, to which they will lay siege for 10 whole and very bloody years.... 

Graham Hancock's multi-million best seller Fingerprints of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth's lost civilisation....

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history....

Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves....

A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world....

Graham Hancock, the internationally best-selling author, has made it his life's work to find out - and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion....

Listeners can discover all the foul facts about the Groovy Greeks....

Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness....

In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For 70 years, victory had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire....

The Greek myths are among the world's most important cultural building blocks, and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories....

Tribune Cato and Centurion Macro, hardened veterans of the Roman army, have faced the empire's enemies from Britannia to Parthia, from Hispania to Judea....

The phenomenon of “conspiracy” or “fringe” theories has always been with people, which makes sense since captivating and entertaining hypotheses arouse the public interest with seemingly sound conclusions that are often based on incomplete, unrelated, or erroneous suppositions....

Where did God come from? What do the bible stories really tell us? Who or what was Jesus Christ? This audiobook challenges everything we think we know about the nature of religion....

Even today, the influence of Ancient Rome is indelible, with Europe and the world owing this extraordinary empire a huge cultural debt in almost every important category....

In a thrilling and adventurous new history of discovery, Professor Michael Scott takes us on a global tour and traces the evolution of modern archaeology from colonial expeditions to today's cutting-edge digs, unearthing traps, curses and buried treasure along the way....

Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions....

An extraordinary and involving portrait of an ancient town, its life and its continuing rediscovery, by Britain's favourite classicist....

From Graham Hancock, best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that's been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world's oceans....

Dynasty tells the story of Rome's first dynasty of emperors, from its establishment by Augustus Caesar in the last decades of the first century BC to its final, florid extinction....

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style....

This erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled....

N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan reexamine Anglo-Saxon England in the light of new research in disciplines as wide ranging as historical genetics, paleobotany, archaeology, literary studies, art history, and numismatics....

Helen of Troy is one of the most evocative names in ancient history. For nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that it can wield....

This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power.

Procopius appeared to be a loyal part of the Byzantine establishment, his official writing glorifying the deeds of the Emperor Justinian (d. AD 565). However, he also produced a work that he knew could never be published within the Emperor’s lifetime: The Secret History, a vitriolic indictment of the rule of Justinian and his wife Theodora. In The Secret History, the general Belisarius is presented as an idiot who is manipulated by his conniving wife Antonina, while the Emperor is depicted as a demon king, a dishonest and autocratic destroyer of established institutions.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is one of the oldest and greatest classics of Western spirituality. Until now, the available translations have treated these writings as historical curiosities that have little relevance to our contemporary situations. This new version approaches the Book of the Dead as a profound spiritual text capable of speaking to us today. Devoted like an Egyptian scribe to the principle of "effective utterance," Normandi Ellis has produced a prose translation that unfolds like pure diaphanous verse

The social importance placed on food and wine in the Greek world was even more pronounced, with profound consequences for the rest of the world.

One of the masterpieces of classical literature, the "Histories" describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colorful digressions - a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and gold-digging ants. With its kaleidoscopic blend of fact and legend, the "Histories" offers a compelling Greek view of the world of the fifth century BC.

Uncovering the physical remains of our past is a quintessential human itch; the pursuit of every society from the ancients through to today. But the stories behind archaeological exploration and discovery - what we look for when, what we end up finding, and what we then do with it - tell us as much about ourselves today as they do about the past. Through eight sensational stories of discovery, Professor Michael Scott traces the evolution of modern archaeology from colonial expeditions to today's cutting-edge digs, unearthing traps, curses and buried treasure along the way.

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in freefall. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence.

There can be no doubt that military conflict between France and England dominated European history in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Hundred Years War is of considerable interest both because of its duration and the number of theatres in which it was fought. Drawing on the latest research for this new edition, Hundred Years War expert Professor Anne Curry examines how the war can reveal much about the changing nature of warfare: the rise of infantry and the demise of the knight; the impact of increased use of gunpowder and the effect of the war on generations of people.

If you’ve ever been curious about ancient Rome and the time of Caesar, but felt overwhelmed by the information available, this handy biography of Julius Caesar’s life might just be what you’ve been looking for.

The Romans, through sheer military strength, turned Judea into a client state. They forced the Jews to submit to Roman law, Roman taxation, and to countenance Roman religion. The Jews of Judea exhibited unbelievable strength in resisting assimilation into Roman Hellenistic culture. Their history of dealing with foreign overlords inspired the Jews to hold out and revolt against the Romans.

Philosophy, art, democracy, language, even computers—the glories of Greek civilization have shaped our world even more profoundly than we realize. Pericles and the Parthenon may be familiar, but what of Epaminondas, the Theban general who saved the Greek world from Spartan tyranny? Alexander the Great's fame has rolled down the centuries, but the golden Hellenistic Age that followed is largely forgotten. "Byzantine" conjures decadence and deadly intrigue, yet the thousand-year empire that ruled from Constantinople and saved Europe twice from invasion was, in fact, Greek.

The concept of international trade was born in the ancient Mediterranean, which provided the perfect set of circumstances needed to produce an intricate trading system whose influence can still be seen in present-day economic practices.

Book five in the Spirit Whirled series takes the listener to Ancient Britain and uses its languages to unlock its history. The Etrusco-Phoenician origins of the ancient Britons connect them to the ancient universal empire that was forgotten about, or covered up to preserve Mosaic history.

Ramesses II ruled the Nile Valley and the wider Egyptian empire from 1279 to 1213 B.C., one of the longest reigns in pharaonic history. He was a cultural innovator, a relentless self-promoter, and an astute diplomat—the peace treaty signed after the Battle of Kadesh was the first in recorded history. He outbuilt every other Egyptian pharaoh, leaving behind the temples of Abu Simbel; the great hypostyle hall of Karnak; the tomb for his wife Nefertari; and his own memorial, the Ramesseum.

This new edition introduces the core elements of ancient Greek and Roman narratives about immortal gods and heroic humans. It explains how myths once shaped ancient ways of thinking, and how they have fascinated and inspired artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and scholars since.