The Slow Ages

The Akkadians. A slow, bedtime retelling of the world’s first true empire — the first time in human history that one man, from one small city, gathered a whole region of warring city-states under a single rule. Around twenty-four centuries before Christ, on the open alluvial plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris, a king named Sargon made that story true, and the clay has kept it ever since.

One hour, in the voice of the show: a deep, warm storyteller at the edge of sleep. We hear what the kings wrote about themselves, and what their enemies wrote about them — the birth legend of the basket on the reeds, the cupbearer’s dream, the thirty-four battles, the five thousand warriors who ate their bread in his presence, the stone stele set on the mountain slope.

This episode:

Written to be heard, not read. A low, steady bed of desert wind suits the opening. No music is required. Dates follow the Middle Chronology; where the record is genuinely uncertain, the narration says so.

Sources (a selection): Sargon of Akkad legend (ETCSL tr 214; Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts); the Sumerian King List (ETCSL); Sargon chronicles after Kramer and King; the Curse of Agade after Grayson/Gurney; a Gutian lamentation after Kramer; the Sargon and Ur-Zababa tablet (ETCSL); the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin (Louvre, entry by P. Pouysségur); the Bassetki Statue (copper base). Secondary: Frayne, The Sargonic and Gutian Periods (1993); Westenholz, Legends of the Kings of Akkade (1997); Zgoll, editions of The Exaltation of Inanna; Hallo & van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna; Delnero, “Scholarship and Inquiry in Early Mesopotamia” (2016); Kriwaczek, Babylon; World History Encyclopedia (Sargon entries); Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sargon; Tashlultum).

The Long Ships. A slow, bedtime retelling of the Viking Age — from the fire on the sacred island of Lindisfarne in 793, to the last of the great ships at the bridge in 1066, and the long shadow the north left on the west.

One hour, in the voice of the show: a deep, warm storyteller at the edge of sleep. We follow the ship — the shallow-draft, clinker-built hull that made raid, trade, and settlement the same work — across the fjords, the sea, and the river roads. We hear the annals and the chronicles, the stones and the silver, and the names the north left in the ground of the west.

This episode:

Written to be heard, not read. A low, steady bed of wind and water suits the opening. No music is required.

Sources (a selection): Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Annals of St-Bertin; Annals of Ulster; Annals of Saint-Vaast; Alcuin of York; Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus; National Museum of Denmark (Jelling); Parks Canada (L’Anse aux Meadows); UNESCO; Encyclopaedia Britannica. Secondary: Barrett (2008) “What caused the Viking Age?” Antiquity; Price, Children of Ash and Elm (2020); Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (2015); Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland (2007); Abels, Alfred the Great (1998); Crumlin-Pedersen, The Skuldelev Ships (2002); Christys, Vikings in the South (2015).

There is a plain, and it is very old. It is the land between two rivers, in the place we now call Iraq, and in the long evening of the world, it was the place where the first city was built, and the first words were written, in wet clay, by a people whose own name for their land was the country of the noble lords.

We know their name only because the people who came after remembered it: Sumer. The Sumerians gave us the first city, the first writing, the wheel and the chariot, the number sixty we still read on the face of the clock, the ziggurats that reached for the sky, and the oldest stories still told in the world, the flood, the descent of the goddess into the dark, and the king who crossed the sea looking for what cannot be found, and came home to the wall of his city.

This evening, we walk that plain, from the first light to the last. We stand in Uruk, the first city. We look up at the White Temple. We watch the reed press its first mark into the clay. We go down the seven gates with the goddess, and we cross the water with the king of Uruk. We stand in the royal tombs, in the blue and the white of the inlay. And we stay, on the plain, until the wind lets go of the light.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About forty-five minutes.

Source notes: Wikipedia and World History Encyclopedia articles on Sumer, Uruk, the Anu ziggurat, proto-cuneiform and cuneiform, the Sumerian King List, the Gilgamesh flood myth and Utnapishtim, the Standard of Ur, the ziggurat of Ur, the Descent of Inanna, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad and Lugal-zagesi (accessed 2026-09-21); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Origins of Writing," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (Ira Spar, 2004); Smarthistory entries on Uruk, the Standard of Ur and the Ziggurat of Ur; H. J. Nissen, P. Damerow & R. K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (1993); S. D. Houston, The First Writing (2004); J.-J. Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform Writing in Sumer (2003); ETCSL, "Inana's descent to the nether world."

 There is a particular hour on the Salisbury Plain when the light goes down to a soft amber and the wind does not so much blow as rest across the ground. It moves slow. It moves low. It folds around the long, low grass and lifts, here and there, a whisper of silver over the heads of the stalks, and then lets it go. If you were lying on that plain now, and it is evening, and the day has given its whole warmth to the turf beneath you, you could feel the field breathing out the last of the sun.

The year was four hundred and seventy-six. In it, the last ruler who held the western half of the Roman Empire was set aside from his office, in a quiet and largely ceremonial act. The man who was set aside was a young man called Romulus Augustulus. The man who set him aside was a Germanic chief called Odoacer. In the weeks that followed, the insignia of western imperial rule were sent east, to the court at Constantinople, and with that, the line of western emperors was finished.

The story I want to tell you this evening is a long one, and it moves slowly, the way a river moves. It is about how a small community by a river became, over many generations, a power that reached across the sea. There are kings in it, and senators, and generals. There are wars, told quietly. And there are quiet changes at the end — the kind of changes that happen so gradually that no one in the room can quite say when they happened.