The Glorious Deeds of Men

Where can I find a woman like...Dante's girl? On this episode of Young Heretics, we finally get the high-fallutin' invocation of the Muses we've come to expect from any epic poem. But it's not enough! Dante needs more woman than the Muses can be...more grace, more truth, more lig ...  Show more

I'm very pleased to introduce a new Young Heretics feature. Since I've been teaching at the University of Austin, Texas, I've had the chance to get to know some brilliant, energetic, and charismatic professors. And none more so than J.J. Kimche, assistant professor of religion an ...  Show more

The late Bronze Age world of the Near East was an incredibly rich and complex place, full of long-distance trade, the exchange of ideas, bickering kings, and empires rising and falling. Among those empires, one of the most powerful and enigmatic was that of the Hittites, whose ...

What if everything we think we know about the history of our species is wrong? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by today’s guest, David Wengrow. Hailed as fascinating, brilliant, and potentially revolutionary, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Hu ...  Show more

The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of ...

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. ...