The Assyrian Empire: The Militaristic Society That Built the World’s First Great Empire — Sleep Podcast
There is a plain in the far north of what is now Iraq where the upper Tigris moves slow and deep, and on its bank stood, for more than a thousand years, a trading town with a god’s name — Ashur. From ...
23 Sep 1h 11min
The Hittites — Sleep Podcast
They are the people of a name that was invented for them — named, by an Egyptian scribe, after the marauders of his nightmares — and yet for a time they were the empire that everyone else had to recko...
23 Sep 1h 2min
The Phoenicians: The Purple People Who Gave the World the Alphabet — Sleep Podcast
On the far south of the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, where the light comes down off the mountains and the sea turns the colour of old bronze, there was a city at the edge of the known world. Fr...
23 Sep 1h 2min
The Babylonians: Gate of the God — Sleep Podcast
One name, and everyone knows it: Babylon. The city of a famous lawgiver and a famous tower — and of a sky-keeping craft so precise that the divisions of it are still running in the room with you tonig...
22 Sep 1h 35min
The Akkadians: The World's First Empire — Sleep Podcast
The Akkadians. A slow, bedtime retelling of the world’s first true empire — the first time in human history that one man, from one small city, gathered a whole region of warring city-states under a si...
21 Sep 1h 2min
The Long Ships: The Vikings — Sleep Podcast
The Long Ships. A slow, bedtime retelling of the Viking Age — from the fire on the sacred island of Lindisfarne in 793, to the last of the great ships at the bridge in 1066, and the long shadow the no...
21 Sep 1h 2min
The Builders of the First City: Sumer — Sleep Podcast
There is a plain, and it is very old. It is the land between two rivers, in the place we now call Iraq, and in the long evening of the world, it was the place where the first city was built, and the f...
21 Sep 38min
Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria
The Lamp and the Library: Hypatia of Alexandria, and the City That Kept the World's Learning. Hypatia's life and intellectual world, the Library and its cultural role, late-antique Alexandria the murd...
9 Sep 46min
