The Origins of Civilisation

In July 1799, French soldiers unearthed a stone that would transform our understanding of the ancient world. Discovered in a fort at Rashid, the Rosetta Stone became the key to deciphering Egypt’s long-lost hieroglyphs. Within two decades, scholars began unlocking its secrets. Bu ...  Show more

Fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal artists in Ice Age Europe painted symbols and handprints deep inside caves, leaving behind some of the oldest known art on the continent. These discoveries are transforming how we understand our closest human relatives.Today, Tristan Hughes i ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of the human species. Where did we come from - we being Homo Sapiens? Let’s not go back to the Big Bang or in search of Genesis, but sift through the evidence from biology, palaeontology, climatology and anthropology.The story of huma ...  Show more

‏حلقة جديدة من #بودكاست_١٩٤٩، تأخذنا إلى عُمق التاريخ لاستكشاف أصول الحضارات القديمة التي ازدهرت على أرض المملكة، لتُجيب على التساؤل الأبرز: بمَ تفيدنا معرفة التاريخ ودراسة الآثار؟ وما دورها في بناء المستقبل؟ 

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. D ...  Show more

The ancient world proved itself capable of remarkable feats of construction. Thousands of years later, historians and archeologists are still unsure of how such marvels were constructed. As our understanding of the capabilities of ancient empires as grown, so has the suspicion th ...  Show more