The Slow Ages

In the far west of the land we now call Iran, the great dry plateau comes down gently into a wide, flat plain that runs all the way down to where two great rivers bend toward the sea. There, for a tho...

24 Syys 1h

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 Syys 1h 11min

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 Syys 1h 2min

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 Syys 1h 2min

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 Syys 1h 35min

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 Syys 1h 2min

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 Syys 1h 2min

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 Syys 38min