Ancient Egypt didn’t exist in isolation from the world around it. Trade goods, ideas, and especially people flowed in and out over the millennia, but never more so than during the Second Intermediate Period, when a foreign dynasty of kings known as the Hyksos ruled much of Egypt. But were the Hyksos really the invading marauders the Egyptians portrayed them as? I talked to Dr. Anna-Latifa Mourad of Macquarie University to get the cutting-edge story of who the Hyksos really were. Patrick's...
Nov 04, 2021•45 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Just to the south of ancient Egypt, a civilization we think we know well, was a deeply connected but unique world that existed along the Middle Nile: Nubia, or Kush, which produced its own distinctive cultures and states that held strong for many thousands of years. 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 . Support us by supporting our sponsors! See Pri...
Oct 28, 2021•46 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast The discovery of 21,000-23,000-year-old human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico is one of the most exciting developments in the study of the deep past in recent years. But do these footprints hold up to real scrutiny? And if they’re real, how do they change our understanding of the first people in the Americas? I asked two experts on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas what they thought of this incredible new evidence: Dr. Jessi Halligan, Assistant Professor of Ant...
Oct 21, 2021•50 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast The Middle Kingdom, beginning around 2000 BC, was the second of ancient Egypt’s classical ages. Powerful pharaohs ruled from the cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean, building enormous monuments and patronizing exceptional art and literature. But on either side of the Middle Kingdom lay two ages of chaos, the Intermediate Periods, when the pharaoh’s rule - the defining feature of ancient Egyptian history - essentially disappeared. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Refor...
Oct 14, 2021•50 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Located to the south of Egypt, in today’s Sudan, ancient Nubia had a complicated relationship with the old state of the Nile, and scholars have traditionally understood it through the shadow of its much better understood northern neighbor. But, as Dr. Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan explains, Nubia had a long and fascinating history of its own and a stunning array of achievements, spanning thousands of years and many different cultures. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. ...
Oct 07, 2021•41 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast When we think of Ancient Egypt, we think of the pyramids: vast, eternal monuments to the glory of long-dead pharaohs. But we shouldn’t take them for granted: They belong to a specific place and time, and the people who built them had their reasons for doing so. The world that produced the pyramids was Egypt’s Old Kingdom, one of its three classic ages. We’ll explore it here today. Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in ha...
Sep 30, 2021•46 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast We can’t understand the past without understanding when things happened, because if we can’t place them in some sort of chronological order, we can’t understand the relationship between them. But how do we know when things happened in the distant past? Professor Sturt Manning of Cornell University is an expert on chronology, using tree-rings, radiocarbon, and historical sources to date events and archaeological sites from many thousands of years ago. Patrick's book is now avail...
Sep 23, 2021•57 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast The Late Bronze Age was a remarkable time in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. An interconnected world sprang up, tying together the lands from Greece and Crete in the west all the way to Mesopotamia in the east and the Nile cataracts in the south. Let’s explore the Aegean during this time, looking at how palaces on Crete continued to grow and how Minoan civilization reached an apex of sophistication and reach. And on the Greek mainland, a new people - the Mycenaeans - emerged, buildi...
Sep 16, 2021•50 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole of human history can be divided into two parts: before the Industrial Revolution, and after. Economist Duncan Weldon joins me to talk about the Industrial Revolution, why it started in Britain, and the trajectory of the British economy over the past two centuries. Get Duncan’s book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through , here . Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in ha...
Sep 09, 2021•41 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast From mainland Greece to Minoan Crete and the famous city of Troy, what made the Aegean Sea one of the constituent pieces of the Bronze Age world? All of these cities are linked, not just by their proximity, but by much bigger things: trade, the emergence of cities and elite classes, the development of state structures and the written word. 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...
Sep 02, 2021•47 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Bestselling author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan returns to Tides to talk about his new book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution . It’s a wonderful book about a fascinating character who lived through and shaped impossibly eventful times, and I highly recommend both it and Mike’s other work. Get Hero of Two Worlds here. Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wonder...
Aug 26, 2021•49 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast More than 4,000 years ago, a ruler came to power in the fractious, war-torn lands of Mesopotamia. He ruled a small state north of the region's ancient heartland, a place called Akkad, but over the course of his life, Sargon built something sprawling and unique: the world's first empire, the Akkadian Empire. Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Availa...
Aug 19, 2021•50 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast To mark the release of Patrick's book The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World , he did a virtual event with Powell's Bookstore in Portland, hosted by history podcaster extraordinaire and bestselling author Mike Duncan. Mike and Patrick discussed the book, but also the art of doing popular history, key periods in history, and a whole variety of other topics in the course of their talk. You can get the book through Powell's here , or elsewhere here. Listen to new ...
Aug 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Friend of the Show Dr. Keith Pluymers returns to tell us about how people thought about and fought over resources, especially wood, in early modern England. Scarcity, Keith argues, is more about perception than an actual lack of resources. Different groups within society had different perceptions, and they fought constantly about what to do about this shortage, including colonizing North America. Check out Keith's book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic , available h...
Aug 05, 2021•53 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast We're often told that ancient Mesopotamia was the "Cradle of Civilization," but what made the region stand out in comparison to its neighbors and contemporaries? More than anything else, it was living in cities and working in a hyper-specialized economic role as subjects of kings that defined life in Mesopotamia. 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 . Listen to new ep...
Jul 29, 2021•50 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to an exclusive sneak peak of Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World , which comes out today, July 20th! This chapter looks at the one-armed German mercenary knight Goetz von Berlichingen, and the emergence of large-scale gunpowder warfare in the 16th century. Listen to the rest of The Verge on Audible here . You can order a hard copy or e-book of The Verge here . Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to a...
Jul 20, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World , comes out next Tuesday, July 20th! He worked really hard on it, people like Mike Duncan and Dan Jones say it's good, and you should read it if you liked the seasons of Tides of History on the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. But what's it about? And what's it like to sell, write, edit, and release a book? To answer these questions, Patrick chats with two wonderful people: ex-Tides of History pro...
Jul 19, 2021•52 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast While Mesopotamia and even the Indus Valley get the lion's share of the attention, sophisticated and long-lasting societies inhabited the lands fringing the Caspian Sea for thousands of years. The people of the Kura-Araxes Culture, the Oxus Civilization, and Elam left their mark everywhere from Anatolia to Mesopotamia to South Asia, shaping future cultures for millennia to come. I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Re...
Jul 15, 2021•51 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast When we think of the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppes, we usually imagine nomadic herders taking their livestock from place to place on horseback. But the steppes are a vast and varied place, and so too were the ways of life that ancient people developed to live there. Professor Alicia Ventresca Miller of the University of Michigan joins me to talk about diet, mobility, and how chemical isotopes can tell us more about the diversity of life on the ancient steppes. I wrote a book, and it co...
Jul 08, 2021•53 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Things didn't stop happening on the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppes once the first waves of migrants had departed to make their mark on Europe and beyond. New societies, languages, and ethnic groups emerged. The chariot was invented, and bronze metallurgy spread far and wide. One of those innovative societies on the steppe gave rise to the Indo-Iranians, whose descendants would spread out everywhere from Siberia to Syria. I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in ...
Jul 01, 2021•49 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Professor David Anthony is one of the world's foremost experts on the archaeology of the ancient Eurasian steppes and sits at the cutting edge of Indo-European studies. We discuss the unique nature of the Yamnaya and the prehistoric steppe, the people who lived there, what ancient DNA can tell us about these past societies, and why they matter even 5000 years later. I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Re...
Jun 24, 2021•58 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Human bones are one of our most valuable and illuminating sources of information about the past, but how do we use them, and what can they tell us about prehistory? I talked to Dr. Jess Beck, a bioarchaeologist and expert on later European prehistory, about the incredible insights we can glean from the study of human remains and about her specialty, the Copper Age (c.3250–2200 BCE) in the Iberian peninsula. I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or a...
Jun 17, 2021•59 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Around 4,500 years ago, bell-shaped ceramic drinking vessels called "beakers" begin showing up with the dead in tombs all over western Europe. Everywhere from Portugal to Sicily to Scotland to Slovakia, these distinctive containers show up, often accompanied by archery equipment and upheaval in the societies established in these places. The Bronze Age and metallurgy would soon follow. But what were the Beakers for? Who used them, and why? Thanks to ancient DNA and cutting-edge archaeological sci...
Jun 10, 2021•48 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Five thousand years ago, small groups of herders began making their way from the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppe into the hills and forests of northern Europe. They moved west, intermarrying with the local farmers and sometimes fighting them, eventually reaching as far as present-day Belgium. These were the people of the Corded Ware Culture, and they brought their language - Indo-European - and genes into the heart of Europe. I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (...
Jun 03, 2021•45 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast At the heart of the ancient Middle East, a sophisticated, urbanized, and long-lived world, was a writing system: cuneiform, used for everything from heroic epic to receipts and medical texts, and first developed in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago. Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid of Oxford joins me to talk about cuneiform literature, medicine, and mental health in this fascinating and little-known ancient world. Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad ...
May 27, 2021•40 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast More than 5,000 years ago, a group of wandering herders on the Eurasian steppes - the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European - began to move outward from their homeland. With their wagons, horses, and livestock, they traveled hundreds of miles through the Danube Valley and into Central Europe, forever shaping the linguistic, cultural, and genetic future of the continent and beyond. I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: ...
May 20, 2021•43 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast What do Achilles and Gilgamesh, two of the most renowned literary figures of the ancient world, have in common? A great deal more than you might expect. I talked to Professor Michael Clarke of the National University of Ireland, Galway, one of my favorite people in the world and an enormously creative and thoughtful scholar, about his recent book - Achilles beside Gilgamesh: Mortality and Wisdom in Early Epic Poetry. We discussed Homer, the world of the Bronze Age, how literature moved, and why ...
May 13, 2021•44 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Egypt and Mesopotamia are the most famous civilizations of the ancient world, but at the same time in South Asia - today's Pakistan and India - an even larger and more populous society came into being: the Indus Valley Civilization, whose peak lasted from 2600 to 1900 BC. But the Indus Valley Civilization challenges much of what we think we know about ancient societies, from inequality and violence to political control. I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-...
May 06, 2021•49 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast South Asia - encompassing Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan - is one of the cradles of human civilization, and today it's home to one in every four people in the world. But who were the early inhabitants of South Asia, where had they come from, and what led them to develop agriculture, writing, cities, and some of the ancient world's most complex and populous societies? I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Ren...
Apr 29, 2021•44 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Tim Denham is one of the world's leading experts on Kuk Swamp, the most important archaeological site for understanding the origins of agriculture in New Guinea. He explains how we can use cutting-edge techniques in the study of ancient soils and tiny bits of plant to understand these fascinating past developments. We also talk about "civilization," the invention of agriculture in global context, and why it took so long to understand New Guinea as an agricultural center. I wrote a book...
Apr 22, 2021•42 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast 
