The Phoenician World

For most of human history, we were not alone. Human evolution was shaped by multiple human species living side by side, from Neanderthals in Europe to Denisovans in Asia, before all but one disappeared.Tristan Hughes is joined by Ella Al-Shamahi to explore the story of the early ...  Show more

Rome vs Alexander. It's a counterfactual of suitably epic proportions, fit for movie theatres and sprawling strategy video games. What would've happen had the great Macedonian general not perished in Babylon and advanced on an emerging Roman Republic?Tristan Hughes is joined by R ...  Show more

Few places weathered the Bronze Age Collapse better than the Levant, the strip of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean that runs from Syria to Egypt. One small part of that coastline, mostly in what's now Lebanon, became a launching pad for some of the most ambitious and w ...

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Phoenicians. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a people from the Levant who were accomplished sailors and traders, and who taught the Greeks their alphabet. He called them the Phoenicians, the Greek word for purple, although it is n ...  Show more

Soon after 1000 BC, Phoenicians began to take ever-longer voyages away from their homeland. Within just a few decades, they were already present at the far end of the Mediterranean and even further, past the Straits of Gibraltar on the Atlantic coast of Iberia. The process of ...

What does archaeology tell us about how regions in the Mediterranean built their wealth between the 10th and 12th centuries? How did economies grow in Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy? And what were their tr ...