The Origins of Civilisation

The Library of Alexandria was one of the most important and most celebrated buildings of the ancient Mediterranean. It was a great hub of learning and literature and made Alexandria one of the ancient world’s foremost centres of knowledge and culture, and the jewel of the Nile De ...  Show more

Apollo, the favourite son of Zeus and twin brother of Artemis, was a Greek God with many faces. Perhaps most famous as Phoebus, the God of the Sun, he was the patron of poetry and prophecy, of music and dance. And yet he also possessed a darker side. He was a terribly vengeful ch ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the importance of geography and ecology in determining world history since civilisation began. The 18th century historian Thomas Carlyle said that world history was the history of what great men have accomplished, but this understanding of history ...  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

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