Showing titles in Civilization

What if the tales from the Old Testament and other ancient writings, such as those from Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece, were not myths or allegory but accounts of actual historical events? Known for his ability to read and interpret ancient Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets, Zecharia Sitchin (1920-2010) took the words of our most ancient ancestors as fact and, through decades of meticulous research, showed that they revealed a coherent narrative about the true origins of humanity and civilization.

In 1922, Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb for the first time, the only light coming from the candle in his outstretched hand. Urged to tell what he was seeing through the small opening he had cut in the door to the tomb, the Egyptologist famously replied, "I see wonderful things". Carter's fabulous discovery is just one of the many spellbinding stories told in Three Stones Make a Wall.

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

Travel back to AD 17, during the fourth year of the reign of Wang Mang of the Han dynasty, a vibrant and innovative era full of conflicts and contradictions. But as different as the Han culture might have been to other great ancient civilisations, the inhabitants of ancient China faced the same problems as people have for time immemorial: earning enough money, coping with workplace dramas and keeping your home in order.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii in Italy, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence.

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays showcases the Hitchens rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson, and Michael Bloomberg.

The book shines a light into the hidden corners of Britain's history, exploring medieval ghost villages, former architectural masterpieces, the purported resting place of Anne Boleyn's heart, England's Atlantis, God's Gift, a German war cemetery, the hamlet of Lost in Aberdeenshire, the old Welsh railway run on seven different forms of power and a missing fort in County Down. It also explains just how Britain used to be connected to mainland Europe.

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. In A Human History of Emotion, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes listeners on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history.

The authors show how the spiritual and shamanic beliefs of more than 100 Native American tribes align with their theory, and they reveal how some of these shamanic transdimensional portals are still active, sharing vivid examples from Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and Bempton in northern England.

In this landmark study of Italy from the 14th through the early 16th centuries, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt chronicles the rise of Florence and Venice as powerful city-states, the breakup of the medieval worldview that came with the rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture, and the new emphasis on the role of the individual. All these, Burckhardt explains, went hand in hand with the explorations of science and the more naturalistic depiction of the world in art and literature.

Continuously inhabited for five millennia and at one point the most powerful city in ancient Greece, Thebes has been overshadowed by its better-known rivals, Athens and Sparta. According to myth, the city was founded when Kadmos sowed dragon’s teeth into the ground and warriors sprang forth, ready not only to build the fledgling city but to defend it from all-comers. It was Hercules’ birthplace and the home of the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus solved, winning the Theban crown and the king’s widow in marriage, little knowing that the widow was his mother, Jocasta.

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

Except most of the ideas that form Western Civilisation are just that—ideas. Taking cues from Greek philosophy and honed in the Enlightenment, certain notions about humanity and human society grew into the tenets we live by, and we haven't questioned them a great deal since. But isn't it time we asked who really benefits from the values at the core of our society? How much truth lies in a science that conjured up 'race'? Who do laws and nations really protect? Why does it feel like time is money? What even is 'art'?

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians.

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans have conspiracy theories? Did they come close to an industrial revolution? Did they drink beer? In a series of fast-paced essays, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines answers 40 questions that ancient historian Garrett Ryan has been asked in the classroom and through his popular YouTube channel ToldinStone. As in Dr. Ryan's previous book—Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants—the emphasis is on the fascinating details of daily life in the classical world.

From the Birthplace of the Gods in New Zealand, to the Andean home of the Shining People, and the Yucatec temple cities of the People of The Serpent, best-selling author Freddy Silva re-examines the world’s flood traditions and discovers an interconnected web of master seafarers, astronomers and magicians, their monuments and traditions, and a previously unknown island nation where the antediluvian gods lived before it sank.

The Middle Ages were a time of wonder. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky. In this book, we walk the path of medieval science with a real-life guide, a 14th-century monk named John of Westwyk - inventor, astrologer, crusader - who was educated in England's grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory.