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The Buddha and His World
Season 5 Episode 65
The Buddha - born Siddartha Gautama - is one of the most impactful people in human history, founder of a religious tradition that has shaped the world for the past 2,500 years. But the Buddha was als…
Published on 1 year, 9 months ago
Climate Change and the Fall of the Indus Valley Civilization: Interview with Dr. Alena Giesche
Season 5 Episode 64
The world's climate isn't stable, but how can we understand climate change in the past? Dr. Alena Giesche is an expert on ancient climates, and she explains both how the field of paleoclimate studies…
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago
The Rigveda and the Dawn of the Iron Age in South Asia
Season 5 Episode 63
The Rigveda, a collection of hymns written in the Sanskrit language more than 3,000 years ago, is the oldest religious text in the Hindu tradition. It's also an incredible window onto life at the daw…
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago
The Fall of the Indus Valley Civilization
Season 5 Episode 62
The Indus Valley Civilization is one of the most enigmatic, sophisticated, and compelling ancient societies. For seven centuries, it thrived in the western portions of South Asia, building enormous m…
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago
The Rise of China's Warring States
Season 5 Episode 61
The Warring States period in China (c. 481-221 BC) was an era of mass-mobilization warfare unlike any other the world had seen to that point. Armies of hundreds of thousands of men fought on an incre…
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago
Ordinary People in Ancient East Asia: Interview with Professor Kate Pechenkina
Season 5 Episode 60
Professor Kate Pechenkina is an expert on the bioarchaeology of East Asia, utilizing cutting-edge tools to tell us about the lives and experiences of ordinary people in the distant past: diet, diseas…
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago
Confucius and His Age
Season 5 Episode 59
Confucius is one of the most famous and influential thinkers in all of human history, but who was he? What did he believe, and what did he teach? And how did his time and place - the closing years of…
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago
China in the Eastern Zhou: Spring and Autumn
Season 5 Episode 58
The Spring and Autumn period, lasting from 771 to 481 BC, marked the high point of aristocratic power in ancient China. This was an age of nobility and political fragmentation, as the Zhou Dynasty's …
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago
Venice through the Ages, from Salt-Panners to Maritime Empire to Tourism: Interview with Professor Dennis Romano
Season 5 Episode 57
Venice's lagoon is an unstable environment, but it has hosted one of the longest-lasting and most stable cities in world history. The history of Venice is many different things: politics on an imperi…
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago
The State and the Environmental History of Early China: Interview with Professor Brian Lander
Season 5 Episode 56
The environment of China has been so thoroughly shaped by human activity that it's difficult to imagine it as a wild landscape, as it was at the end of the last Ice Age. Since then, first agriculture…
Published on 1 year, 11 months ago