Tides of History

By Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Society & Culture History

What's Tides of History about?

Everywhere around us are echoes of the past. Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight. They determine what money we spend and how we earn it at work, what language we speak and how we raise our children. From Wondery, host Patrick Wyman, PhD (“Fall Of Rome”) helps us understand our world and how it got to be the way it is. New episodes come out Thursdays for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. Listen ad-free on Wondery+ or on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.

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From a World of Iron to Cla...

12.08.2022

Welcome to the Iron Age, and to a new season of Tides of History! The first millennium BC saw the emergence of two huge and enduring empires at either end of Eurasia - Rome and China - but it was ...

Tides of History episodes:

12.08.2022 From a World of Iron to Classical Empires Welcome to the Iron Age, and to a new season of Tides of History! The first millennium BC saw the emergence of two huge and enduring empires at either end of Eurasia - Rome and China - but it was ...
12.06.2022 Introducing: The Al Franken Podcast A five-time Emmy winning SNL comedy writer/producer, joins a four-time #1 NYT bestselling author, a three-time highest-rated national progressive radio host, a two-time Grammy winning artist, and a former US Senator. So, it gets a little crowded in the booth ...
12.01.2022 Retrospective: Prehistory Season After two and a half years and 126 episodes, Season 4 of Tides is coming to an end. Patrick recaps what we've learned, how things have changed in a rapidly shifting field, and why the study of prehistory and the ...
11.29.2022 Amazon Music Presents BACK OF THE NET: 2022 World Cup The World Cup fun doesn’t end when the stoppage time seconds tick away. Back of the Net: 2022 World Cup kicks new life into World Cup coverage, capturing the wild and weird world of soccer’s biggest tournament. Join Will Arnett ...
11.24.2022 Revisiting the Ancient Americas with Professor Shane Miller I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of great people during this season, and Professor Shane Miller of Mississippi State University has been incredibly generous with his time on multiple occasions. He and I catch up on the ...
11.17.2022 What is "Collapse?" Interview with Professor Guy Middleton "Collapse" is an evocative and powerful term, but what does it really mean? And how can we use it to help us understand the actual processes and events through which ancient people lived? Professor Guy Middleton is both one of ...
11.10.2022 The Battle of the Tollense Valley More than 3,000 years ago, two armies met in a titanic Bronze Age battle along a river in northern Germany. We don’t know why they fought or who won, but thanks to stunning archaeological discoveries, we know how they died, ...
11.03.2022 Tutankhamun's Trumpet and the Long, Winding Past of Ancient Egypt: Interview with Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson What ties the long history of ancient Egypt together into a meaningful whole? Professor Toby Wilkinson, one of the most renowned Egyptologists on the planet, visits to talk about the unity of ancient Egyptian history through the lens of the ...
10.27.2022 After the Bronze Age Collapse As dramatic and transformative as collapses are, they're rarely a complete apocalypse. People survived the Bronze Age Collapse, and then they had to wake up in the morning, care for their children, tend their crops, make their tools, and go ...
10.20.2022 Season 4 Mailbag: Prehistory and Early History It's mailbag time! Patrick answers a variety of questions about topics covered (and not covered) in this season of Tides, ranging from Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize in paleogenomics to Indo-European origins to changing sea levels. Patrick's book is now available! ...
10.13.2022 Empires, Networks, and the Hittites: Interview with Professor Claudia Glatz What is an empire? It sounds straightforward enough, but figuring out what the term means - much less whether it really helps us understand past political units - is actually pretty complicated. Professor Claudia Glatz is an expert on the ...
10.06.2022 Who Were the Sea Peoples? When assigning blame for the Bronze Age Collapse, the most common culprits are said to be the Sea Peoples: nomadic raiders and sackers of cities who plied the sea-lanes of the late Bronze Age world and brought to an end ...
09.29.2022 The Fall of Mycenaean Greece and the Trojan War Mycenaean Greece was one of the glittering jewels of the late Bronze Age world, but it fell to pieces in dramatic fashion: burned palaces, abandoned settlements, and the end of a centuries-old political tradition. Nor was Greece the only place ...
09.22.2022 How Ancient Economies Fell Apart: Interview with Professor Sarah Murray We're often told that trade was central to the interconnected world of the late Bronze Age, but what were people really trading? Why did trade matter so much? And what happened when that trade disappeared? Professor Sarah Murray is an ...
09.15.2022 What was the Bronze Age Collapse? The term "Bronze Age Collapse" is by now common, but what do we actually mean when we talk about "collapse?" Is it a matter of political reorganization or something rather more drastic? In the case of the Bronze Age, we ...
09.08.2022 Clashing Empires in the Late Bronze Age The late Bronze Age was a time of powerful empires and intense competition between them. Never before had true states covered such a large area, or had such resources to devote to politicking and fighting with one another. The result ...
09.01.2022 Living as a Regular Person in Ancient Egypt: Interview with Professor Anne Austin What was it like to be a regular person in ancient Egypt? What did people do when they got sick or injured? Professor Anne Austin is an Egyptologist and bioarchaeologist who studies health and disease using both texts and human ...
08.25.2022 The Interconnected World of the Late Bronze Age We know the late Bronze Age world eventually collapsed, but what made it a world in the first place? The answer lies in the intense connections - trade, politics, and culture - that tied together a vast area of the ...
08.18.2022 Daily Life and Common People in Egypt's New Kingdom When we think about ancient Egypt, the vast majority of our attention goes to its elite: pharaohs, queens, priests, and nobles. But the elite made up only the tiniest portion of the population. What about the people who built the ...
08.11.2022 Why Did the Bronze Age World Collapse? Interview with Professor Eric Cline If we know one thing about the Bronze Age world, we know that it collapsed. But what made it a world? And why did it fall apart? There's nobody better to ask than Professor Eric Cline, who literally wrote the ...
08.04.2022 Kings, Images, and Violence in Ancient Egypt: Interview with Professor Laurel Bestock Kings are one of the constants of ancient Egypt's long history. But what, exactly, were kings supposed to do, and how did ancient Egyptians understand the role of their king? Professor Laurel Bestock is one of the world's leading experts ...
07.28.2022 Egypt's New Kingdom: Empire, Religious Change, and the Tomb of Tutankhamun Egypt's New Kingdom lasted for more than 400 years. In that time, Egypt changed dramatically, weathering ups, downs, and turmoil of all kinds. Much of that turmoil centered around a religious visionary who also happened to be pharaoh: Akhenaten, father ...
07.21.2022 The Rise of Egypt's New Kingdom Most of what we think we know about ancient Egypt is actually things we know about the New Kingdom, the last of Egypt's three classical golden ages: an empire stretching into the Near East and Nubia, warrior kings leading armies ...
07.14.2022 Lost Landscapes of the Ancient Pacific: Interview with Professor Mike Carson Sea levels rise, hills erode, and rivers change course over decades and centuries, dramatically affecting how people choose to live in their landscapes. Professor Mike Carson is an expert in the study of archaeological landscapes in the ancient Pacific, and ...
07.07.2022 Encore: Chivalry and Knighthood in Medieval Europe When we think of the Middle Ages, the first thing that comes to mind is usually knights in shining armor. Chivalry - the ideal of behavior that guided knights - was a major force in medieval life. Honor and piety, ...
06.30.2022 The Coolest Archaeological Site in the World: Interview with Professor Chantal Conneller on Star Carr and the Mesolithic Star Carr, located in the Yorkshire region of northern England, is one of the world's richest archaeological sites, a waterlogged window onto the European Mesolithic more than 11,000 years ago. Professor Chantal Conneller spent more than a decade excavating at ...
06.23.2022 The Polynesians and the Pacific: Interview with Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch Of all the Austronesian-speaking peoples, none have gone further than the Polynesians. Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch of the University of Hawaii is one of the world's leading experts on the Polynesian voyages and colonization of the Pacific, and we discuss ...
06.16.2022 The Austronesian Expansion, Part 2 The first wave of migration out of Taiwan brought speakers of Austronesian to the northern reaches of the Philippines, the homeland of the Malayo-Polynesians. From there, they spread out over a vast swathe of Southeast Asia and Oceania, eventually moving ...
06.09.2022 The Austronesian Expansion, Part 1 More than 4,000 years ago, a remarkable migration - one of the great journeys in human history - began in Taiwan. Within just a thousand years, people speaking the Austronesian languages spread out everywhere from the Philippines to Borneo to ...
06.02.2022 How Did Civilizations in the Andes Deal with Environmental Upheaval? Interview with Professor Jason Nesbitt The harsh, unforgiving conditions of the Andes and the nearby Pacific coastline make it one of the best places in the world to study the relationship between people and their environment. Professor Jason Nesbitt is an expert on the archaeology ...
05.26.2022 Human Sacrifice, Oracle Bones, and Shang China: Interview with Professor Rod Campbell China's Shang Dynasty is something of an enigma. It produced the earliest written evidence in China, in the form of inscribed oracle bones, and decades of archaeology have shed light on its capital city and society. Yet much about it ...
05.19.2022 The Beginnings of Civilization in the Andes: The Mounds of Norte Chico The arid shoreline between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific seems like an unlikely place to host one of the world's earliest complex societies. But more than 5,000 years ago, the people of the Norte Chico Culture built cities, temples, ...
05.12.2022 The Rise of the Olmecs Mesoamerica is one of only a few places in the world where "civilization" - states, writing, cities, monumental building, and so on - emerged independently. The first society to do all this were the enigmatic Olmecs more than 3,000 years ...
05.05.2022 Migration, Ancient DNA, and European Prehistory: Interview with Kristian Kristiansen Over the past several decades, ancient DNA and other archaeological sciences have transformed our understanding of Europe in prehistory. Professor Kristian Kristiansen has worked with these new methods since the very beginning, and combines them with a deep grounding in ...
04.28.2022 The Steppes of Central Asia in the Bronze Age: Interview with Professor Michael Frachetti The Eurasian steppe is central to grasping the past 5,000 years of human history, and in the past couple of decades, new tools of analysis have transformed our understanding of the place and its importance. Professor Michael Frachetti has developed ...
04.21.2022 Indo-Aryans, the Rigveda, and a World on the Move Four thousand years ago, the sprawling cities of the Indus Valley Civilization dominated much of South Asia; a millennium after that, however, the cities were in ruins, and new migrants ultimately deriving their ancestry from the Eurasian steppe had established ...
04.14.2022 The World of the Indo-Iranians More than a billion people around the world speak a language of the Indo-Iranian family today. These languages all trace their origin to a group of innovative people living on the steppes of southern Russia more than 4000 years ago, ...
04.07.2022 What was the Indus Valley Civilization? Interview with Dr. Adam Green The Indus Valley Civilization doesn’t get much attention compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt, but it covered an area of a million square kilometers, was home to hundreds of thousands or millions of people and a unified culture, and lasted for ...
03.31.2022 Languages of the World in 1200 BC Language is fundamental to how people experience the world, but how can we know what languages people spoke in the distant past? By 1200 BC, the linguistic outlines of the world were becoming a bit clearer, thanks to an explosion ...
03.24.2022 Kathryn de Luna on Africa, Bantu, and Historical Linguistics About one in every five people alive on the planet today speaks a language belonging to the Bantu family, and Bantu-speaking peoples have shaped the history of Africa in profound ways. But how did they expand from their original homeland, ...
03.17.2022 What is the State? The state - a centralized administration that exerts control over a territory and can coerce the people living there - is one of the driving forces of the last several thousand years of history. But when and where did states ...
03.10.2022 Mary Prendergast on Ancient Africa Ancient DNA and new archaeological work have changed our understanding of many different parts of the global past, but nowhere more so than Africa. Professor Mary Prendergast sits on the very cutting edge of both fields, having worked on both ...
03.03.2022 The Green Sahara and African Neolithics The most striking environmental shift on the planet in the Holocene epoch was the greening of the Sahara. For thousands of years, the now-deserts of northern Africa were a mosaic of savannahs, river valleys, and shallow lakes. This unique environment ...
02.24.2022 Africa and the Many Cradles of Humanity Africa is rightly known as the “Cradle of Humanity,” because that’s where the most recent wave of modern human migrants originated and so much of our species’ evolutionary history took place there. But the reality is far more complex. Africa ...
02.17.2022 Who Were the Human Sacrifices in Shang China? Interview with Dr. Christina Cheung Human sacrifice is an ugly but essential topic in understanding the Shang Dynasty, but we know very little about precisely who these people were, where they came from, and what their lives were like prior to their deaths. Dr. Christina ...
02.10.2022 The Genetic Origins of Indigenous Americans: Interview with Professor Jennifer Raff Professor Jennifer Raff, a longtime friend of the show, returns to discuss her work on the genetic ancestry of America’s Indigenous peoples. We talk about Beringia, waves of migration, the troublesome relationship between science and Indigenous peoples, and her fantastic ...
02.03.2022 The Shang Dynasty, Oracle Bones, and the Roots of Chinese History More than 3,000 years ago in China’s Central Plains, the Shang Dynasty crossed the threshold from prehistory to history. For the first time in China, we have access to the written word, in the form of the famous inscribed oracle ...
01.27.2022 The Complicated World of the Bronze Age Near East: Interview with Aaron Burke The reality of the Bronze Age Near East was much messier and harder to understand than a straightforward story of city-states, empires, and kings. Different ethnolinguistic groups, lifestyles, dynasties of would-be rulers, migrating mercenaries, and ephemeral states were all essential ...
01.20.2022 The Dawn of History in China China’s written history goes back more than 3,000 years, stretching deep into the Bronze Age. But just how far back does it go, and how reliable are those first legendary texts when discussing a world that had already been lost ...
01.13.2022 Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages How did Latin splinter into the Romance languages? In this episode, we explore how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on - of related but no longer ...

Older episodes

Tides of History

What's Tides of History about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Tides of History episodes:

From a World of Iron to Classical Empires

Introducing: The Al Franken Podcast

Retrospective: Prehistory Season

Amazon Music Presents BACK OF THE NET: 2022 World Cup

Revisiting the Ancient Americas with Professor Shane Miller

What is "Collapse?" Interview with Professor Guy Middleton

The Battle of the Tollense Valley

Tutankhamun's Trumpet and the Long, Winding Past of Ancient Egypt: Interview with Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson

After the Bronze Age Collapse

Season 4 Mailbag: Prehistory and Early History

Empires, Networks, and the Hittites: Interview with Professor Claudia Glatz

Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The Fall of Mycenaean Greece and the Trojan War

How Ancient Economies Fell Apart: Interview with Professor Sarah Murray

What was the Bronze Age Collapse?

Clashing Empires in the Late Bronze Age

Living as a Regular Person in Ancient Egypt: Interview with Professor Anne Austin

The Interconnected World of the Late Bronze Age

Daily Life and Common People in Egypt's New Kingdom

Why Did the Bronze Age World Collapse? Interview with Professor Eric Cline

Kings, Images, and Violence in Ancient Egypt: Interview with Professor Laurel Bestock

Egypt's New Kingdom: Empire, Religious Change, and the Tomb of Tutankhamun

The Rise of Egypt's New Kingdom

Lost Landscapes of the Ancient Pacific: Interview with Professor Mike Carson

Encore: Chivalry and Knighthood in Medieval Europe

The Coolest Archaeological Site in the World: Interview with Professor Chantal Conneller on Star Carr and the Mesolithic

The Polynesians and the Pacific: Interview with Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch

The Austronesian Expansion, Part 2

The Austronesian Expansion, Part 1

How Did Civilizations in the Andes Deal with Environmental Upheaval? Interview with Professor Jason Nesbitt

Human Sacrifice, Oracle Bones, and Shang China: Interview with Professor Rod Campbell

The Beginnings of Civilization in the Andes: The Mounds of Norte Chico

The Rise of the Olmecs

Migration, Ancient DNA, and European Prehistory: Interview with Kristian Kristiansen

The Steppes of Central Asia in the Bronze Age: Interview with Professor Michael Frachetti

Indo-Aryans, the Rigveda, and a World on the Move

The World of the Indo-Iranians

What was the Indus Valley Civilization? Interview with Dr. Adam Green

Languages of the World in 1200 BC

Kathryn de Luna on Africa, Bantu, and Historical Linguistics

What is the State?

Mary Prendergast on Ancient Africa

The Green Sahara and African Neolithics

Africa and the Many Cradles of Humanity

Who Were the Human Sacrifices in Shang China? Interview with Dr. Christina Cheung

The Genetic Origins of Indigenous Americans: Interview with Professor Jennifer Raff

The Shang Dynasty, Oracle Bones, and the Roots of Chinese History

The Complicated World of the Bronze Age Near East: Interview with Aaron Burke

The Dawn of History in China

Encore: How Latin Became the Romance Languages

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