Ancient History

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.... 

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....

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....

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....

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....

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt....

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....

Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods is a work of monumental importance....

The past truly comes alive as you take a series of imaginative leaps into the world of history's anonymous citizens....

The story of the tumultuous years that set the stage for the fall of the Roman Republic....

These lectures consistently deliver a fresh level of understanding about medieval England, its rulers and subjects, and their significance....

Long sources of mystery, imagination, and inspiration, the myths and history of the ancient Mediterranean have given rise to artistic, religious, cultural, and intellectual traditions....

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

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....

For eons, the wisdom cultivated by the Egyptian people has been extolled time and time again. These timeless myths are fountains of insight and, many would argue, beacons of light that can shatter the darkness of ignorance. Listen to learn more....

Tom Holland's 'stirring new translation' (Telegraph) of Herodotus' Histories, one of the great books in Western history....

This audiobook narrated by best-selling author Mary Beard explores how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power....

This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priest-queens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two centuries in self-imposed seclusion....

The Minoans were an ancient civilization that built their settlements on islands in the Aegean Sea. They lived almost 5,000 years ago and left behind traces of their lives, but not enough for people to create a complete picture....

Take a journey across the ancient world, throught the traditional domains of politics and war, as well as religion, philosophy, architecture, science and the visual arts....

Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome is a comprehensive and enthralling introduction to Ancient civilisation....

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

The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity....

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....

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. 

 Nuclear War BEFORE recounts an ancient description of what was undoubtedly a nuclear war in India thousands of years ago, and was referenced in our era by J. Robert Oppenheimer the moment we detonated our first atomic bomb in 1945. 

Thanks to ancient Greece, we know more about philosophy, politics, the democratic system, mythology, art, the Olympics, and many, many lingual references imbedded in almost every European language. Ancient Greece has had a significant impact on many concepts we still hold true today.

When we think of Ancient Egypt, we picture movies with mazes, pyramids, traps, mummies, and symbols. And although some of these things were definitely part of it, there is so much more to this ancient civilization. Ancient Egypt was a North African society that grew in the lower banks of the Nile River, in what's now the nation of Egypt. Let’s explore some of the most important features of that society today, and try to grasp what transpired in the culture, the thoughts, the problems, and the development of the Egyptian region more than 5,000 years ago.

The Anglo-Saxon period, stretching from the fifth to the late eleventh century, begins with the Roman retreat from the Western world and ends with the Norman takeover of England. Between these epochal events, many of the contours and patterns of English life that would endure for the next millennium were shaped. In this authoritative work, 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.

The name of Sargon of Agade, or Akkad, bulks mainly in later Mesopoatmian tradition, and modern writers have regarded his reign as marking the most critical epoch in the ancient history of his country. The reference in the text of Nabonidus to the age of Naram-Sin has caused the Dynasty of Akkad to be taken as the canon, or standard, by which to measure the relative age of other dynasties or of rulers whose inscriptions have from time to time been recovered upon various early Mesopotamian sites. 

The reign of Hammurabi is a convenient point at which to observe general changes in and later introductions to the pantheon of the Sumerian gods. The political alterations in the kingdom were reflected in the sacred circle. Certain gods were relegated to the cold shades of obscurity, while new deities were adopted and others, hitherto regarded as negligible quantities, were exalted to the heights of heavenly omnipotence. The worship of Merodach first came into prominence in the days of Hammurabi.

The objects found in the graves of the predynastic Egyptians, i.e., vessels of food, flint knives, and other weapons, etc., prove that these early dwellers in the Nile Valley believed in some kind of a future existence. However, as the art of writing was unknown to them, their graves contain no inscriptions, and we can only infer from texts of the dynastic period what their ideas about the other world were.  

The Hittites were mentioned in the Bible. They were an Anatolian people that contributed to creating a kingdom in Kussara before 1750 BC, the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom between 1750 and 1650 BC, and finally an empire based upon Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1650 BC. Under uppiluliuma I, the empire reached its peak in the mid-14th century BC, when it ruled over much of Anatolia and areas of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

Spend a year in the company of the ancient Egyptians, during the twenty-sixth and final year of the reign of Amenhotep II (c.1400 BC), which saw a royal transition bringing Thutmose IV to the throne of Upper and Lower Egypt. Following the Egyptian calendar year, which was divided into three seasons (inundation, sowing and harvest), we will meet a farmer and his family, an embalmer, an artisan, a royal physician, a priest and even a royal wife as they live their lives in Thebes and Memphis during the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom in this year in ancient Egyptian history.

The most mysterious Anunnaki governor of all was Ur-Nammu of Ur, who subsequently became an independent Anunnaki king (2113-2096 BC) and founded a spin-off Anunnaki dynasty known as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which endured for more than a century. This Anunnaki empire was more compact than the Sargon of Agade and showed an advanced Anunnaki Sumerian civilization. It was a highly organized bureaucratic society, reflected by cuneiform tablets from this period, represented in world museums to the number of well over 100,000; most of these are waiting to be published. 

Don't think that because it is such a small country with only about 17 million people, it should be neglected. The Netherlands has a long history, with a high influence on our cultures, trading routes, the stock market, business, and art. The Dutch were all over the world. They "owned" and colonized a big portion of what was then the known world. They were among the first settlers, had the biggest haven, and biggest fleet for some time. The Dutch East-Indian Trading Company, or VOC, is probably the biggest or at least one of the biggest companies that has ever existed.

When man first came, there is another matter. The earliest archaeological proof of human presence is only from a century or two before 7000 BC, but it cannot be ruled that Anunnaki Sumerian settlements were already there much earlier. Even today, archaeologists argue this. The Anunnaki Sumerian settlements were created with hydraulic engineering in mind. Historians admit the writings of the Sumerians declare the Anunnaki gods came first, that they gave them all this knowledge, and admit that the archaeological record reflects this; however, they outright label it mythology.

Whether you have played a Prince of Persia video game, seen the movie, or just heard about it in history class, it is hard to ignore the Persian Empire, which was among the greatest empires of the world for some time. The typical area for the Persian Empire was what is now Iran. The Persians had a vast influence on surrounding countries and regions. Their style, art, music, rule, and culture have had an influence on the development of science and the forming of nations. Learn more in this audiobook about this empire of old.

Ur was a considerable Sumerian city-state in old Mesopotamia, situated near modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar in the Dhi Qar Governorate in Southern Iraq. Ur was formerly a seaside city on the Persian Gulf, near the mouth of the Euphrates, but the shoreline has modified, and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometers (about 9.9 miles) from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq.