Civilization

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

Yuval Noah Harari returns with an original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods....

The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The Emperor of All Maladies reveals the many faces of an iconic, shape-shifting disease that is the defining plague of our generation....

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....  

Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives....

The author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization....

Civilization was born 8,000 years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place....

The epic history of the crossroads of the world - the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization....

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages....

In this landmark work, one of the world's most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation-state to its final absorption....

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion....

The cohost of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs....

So much of our human body is made up of salt that we'd be dead without it...

In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more....

The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves, but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history....

From Graham Hancock, best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that's been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world's oceans....

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style....

Providing an insider's look into the decades of research behind Zecharia Sitchin's complete works as well as an in-depth overview of his theories, this collection includes carefully selected chapters from the Earth Chronicles series....

Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the 21st century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date....

On October 12, 1492, one of the most important “first contacts” of the modern era was made when three ships of Spanish origin approached the island archipelago now known as the Bahamas, cautiously dropping anchor as the captain of the fleet gazed across to what he assumed was the coast of India. According to the popular version of the story, amazed at the sight of ships and men of such unfamiliar appearance, the native people of the island plunged into the clear waters of the western Atlantic, expertly swimming or aboard dugout canoes, and came out to greet the strangers.

India has been the location of many different empires throughout its long history. The Indus Valley Civilization was home to one of the world’s first civilizations more than 5,000 years ago, which was followed by the Aryan-Vedic culture and then a host of other kingdoms that flourished across the subcontinent. India has also been the birthplace of many religions. The Vedic religion of the Aryans evolved into the Hindu religion, and Buddhism and Jainism were also born in India. By the Middle Ages, India was home to many different religions and ethnic groups.

You’ll be amazed to discover the incredible leaps humanity made and how each ancient civilization flourished. Learn more about the culture, achievements, and religions of some of the world’s most famous civilizations. You will be surprised to learn just how much the six ancient civilizations in this audiobook had in common, despite being thousands of miles apart or even thousands of years apart! And you’ll be amazed when you hear how much their cultures have shaped our own societies today.

Ancient Mesopotamia’s legacy was truly revolutionary. Childlike pictures scratched into wet clay evolved into the first written language. The Mesopotamians wrote the first epic poems, the first hymns, the first histories, and the first law codes. They developed the first wheel for transportation; simple carts that hauled bricks or produce morphed into chariots racing along at 35 miles per hour.

Numida was the complete opposite of the North African stereotype of a desolate place--it was a land of plenty, the home of rich agricultural land that provided a good share of the Roman Empire’s food. Numidia was also home to the Numidian people, who were known for their horsemanship skills, bellicosity, and capriciousness when it came to their friends and allies. From the third century BCE until the mid-first century BCE, the Numidians ruled their land as independent kingdoms that dealt with their more powerful neighbors on a relatively equal footing.

When Richard Fidler came across the account of Ibn Fadlan—a tenth-century Arab diplomat who travelled all the way from Baghdad to the cold riverlands of modern-day Russia—he was struck by how modern his voice was, like that of a 21st century time-traveller dropped into a medieval wilderness. On further investigation, Fidler discovered this was just one of countless reports from Arab and Persian travellers of their adventures in medieval China, India, Africa and Byzantium. Put together, he saw these stories formed a crazy quilt picture of a lost world.

The land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers is called the “cradle of civilization”, and for good reason! Although Mesopotamia’s first civilization, Sumer, developed parallel with those of Egypt and nearby Elam, it was a place of many firsts for humanity. Some of them are well known, such as the wheel and the writing script. But it was the ancient Mesopotamians who first came up with the concept of time, the mathematical sexagesimal system, and a calendar with 12 months. 

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world. 

Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. The story of the shifting, umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via some of the lesser-known Eurasian steppe cultures, the great nomad empires of the Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and Mughals, as well as the mobile native North American peoples, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the power of the settled.

This book, like the first of the series the Book of the Ancient World, was used in its original manuscript form by one of my history classes. It carries on the story of the way in which man has been learning how to live from the time of the coming of the Greeks to the loss of Greek independence in 146 BC. The spirit of a nation is expressed, and its history is recorded in three ways: in its political history, in its literature, and in its art.