Tides of History

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 a...

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 ar...

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. Patrick's book is now...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcop...

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. 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 Listen to n...

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...

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. Patrick's book is now availab...

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. Patrick's b...

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, a...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years...

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. 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) h...

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. Patrick's book is now...

"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 B...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy...

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! Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reform...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook,...

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. 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: http...

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. Patrick's book is...

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? Patrick's book is now available! Get The V...

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 l...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissa...

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. Patrick's...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World...

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.  Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge...

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. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and...