Rise of the Persians

Three thousand years ago, Phoenician ships sailed west across the Mediterranean, their holds packed with pottery, wine and enslaved people to trade. Passing beyond the fabled Pillars of Heracles, they were pushing at the familiar limits of the ancient world.In this episode of The ...  Show more

In 1999, a mysterious bronze disc buried for millennia in central Europe transformed how we see the prehistoric world. The Nebra Sky Disk - forged 3,600 years ago - is the oldest known depiction of the night sky.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined, once agai ...  Show more

For a little over 200 years, the First Persian Empire ruled over a vast expanse across three continents, making it arguably the world’s first great superpower. At its peak, it stretched from its base in Persia - roughly analogous to modern-day Iran, all the way to India in the Ea ...  Show more

In the latest in our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, an expert in ancient history, responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries on the Persian empire. Once the largest empire the world had ever s ...  Show more

Persia was the first great superpower. The empire built by Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of the Achaemenids stretched from India in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, from Russia in the north to the Gulf of Oman in the south. It laid the foundation for empires of the ...  Show more

The British Empire was one of the most influential and far-reaching empires in history. Dan and his guest journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera remember school lessons on the small island that rose to global dominance. From the 16th century to the 20th century, the British Em ...