The Palace of the Golden Gate

How long is the Great Wall of China? When was it built? Are there really skeletons buried inside it?Matt Lewis poses these questions and many more to Dr Jeremiah Jenne, co-host of the Chinese history podcast, Barbarians at the Gate. Together they recount the storied development o ...  Show more

What really happened to the French crown jewels? On the 19th October, 2025, a gang of thieves disguised as construction workers broke into the Louvre. Their target: the Gallery of Apollo, where the French Crown Jewels were on display. They made off with eight pieces of the crown ...  Show more

“No city in the world will ever rival it for prosperity...“ Baghdad, originally a Christian village in Iraq, was chosen by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur as the site for the new capital of his empire, and it would become a cosmopolis to rival Rome or Babylon. Its foundations were b ...  Show more

Baghdad was a place of fabulous sophistication and teeming multitudes, where terrible things could happen, but great wonders could also be found… During the Islamic Golden Age, it was the most global city the world had ever seen, a truly diverse cosmopolis, with silks and porcela ...  Show more

The setting for so many of the Arabian Nights, like the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or Aladdin, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age had a shimmering image, a dimension of mystery and wonder… Join Tom and Dominic in the final part of our series ...  Show more

Professor Zainab Bahrani tackles popular internet search queries, and questions submitted by listeners, about the Mesopotamian city, which was one of the jewels of the ancient world. Topics range from religion, food and kings to the Hanging Gardens and the myth of the Tower of Ba ...  Show more