From the Beginning to about 500 BC in (Roughly) 18 Hours
November 27, 2013 11:26 AM   Subscribe

Scott Chesworth has recently finished his epic-scope but bite-sized The Ancient World podcast.

Often recommended by Mefites when discussing Mke Duncan's much lengthier The History of Rome, The Ancient World is a rather breathless trip through millennia of history, mostly focusing on the Mediterranean and Middle East (with occasional forays into China, India, the Americas, and Africa. Not quite as assured (and a bit more credulous) than Duncan, Chesworth still admirably condenses his unruly subject into 36 episodes, making it a good listen for history-minded podcast aficionados.

Chesworth recently did an AMA on Reddit.
posted by GenjiandProust (17 comments total) 91 users marked this as a favorite
 
In case it wasn't clear from the context, The Ancient World is a history podcast that endeavors to get from the earliest archeological and historical records of human settlement to about 500 BC in a relatively succinct 30 episodes (it, in fact, took 36).
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:50 AM on November 27, 2013


So it's not about some sort of Cannonball Run-style time machine race? Oh well.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:53 AM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yay! I've been waiting for him to finish so I can listen to it all in one go while playing Civ. Good news!
posted by Our Ship Of The Imagination! at 12:24 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]


If, like me, your understanding of ancient Middle Eastern history comes from the Bible and a vague understanding of Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, and some other guys, this podcast provides a massive counterpoint.

Basically, the Ancient Near East (tm) is pretty much about one huge empire after another conquering most of the Fertile Crescent, followed immediately by the Babylonians revolting. For millenia. "Bible times" are a quick hiatus between the Bronze Age Collapse and when the Assyrians finally got their act back together and decided to conquer the Levant again, and then it's back to the huge empire status quo.

It would probably take me two hands to count up the big, centuries-long empires that I had never heard of before.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:39 PM on November 27, 2013 [4 favorites]


OK I was kind of on the "no" side of this, and then I realized that I actually know fuck all about the Ancient Near East.

I tend to prefer my history podcasts to get as in depth as possible, and hate five minute dumbings down and "Don't Know Much About History" and the like, but the reality is that most people know so little about the Assyrians that this could actually serve a purpose.

I'm more enjoying Mike Duncan's current podcast, Revolutions, which is telling the story of the English Civil Wars at the moment over 12 half-hour episodes to this guy's 36 for the entire history of the goddamn world.

(Duncan is also going to do at least the American Revolution and the French Revolution after the English Civil Wars. I'm hoping he follows the French Revolution with 1848 and the October Revolution, but I guess I can respect the fact that the dude has a life and probably doesn't want to spend 20 years covering every damn revolution for all of time.)
posted by Sara C. at 1:26 PM on November 27, 2013 [3 favorites]




Holy cow, this is gold! Thank you for the post!
posted by darkstar at 5:54 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]


Was looking perhaps for a zip of the whole thing but rahnefans link at least will get me started. Sounds very interesting - nice post.
posted by rosswald at 7:38 AM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Worth it for his paraphrases of letters between various Near East cultures and Egypt alone.

It does move extremely fast, though, and after an evening of listening to 8 or 9 of these, I'm not much more clear on the difference between the Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Elamites, Hittites, etc. than I was when I started. I know we don't know a ton about a lot of these cultures, but so far he leans really hard on assuming you have context for who all these folks are.
posted by Sara C. at 9:27 AM on November 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


listen to it all in one go while playing Civ

Well that's my weekend plans sorted. Cheers!
posted by shelleycat at 11:33 AM on November 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


I know we don't know a ton about a lot of these cultures, but so far he leans really hard on assuming you have context for who all these folks are.

Spend some time in a museum with a good Near Eastern collection. The Met's is pretty solid and the Louvre's and the British Museum's are amazing. I find it really hard to connect to a culture without having a sense of its material world, and the major empires of the ancient Near East had dazzling (and in some cases pretty well-studied) material cultures.

The Blackwell sourcebook is also pretty good.
posted by oinopaponton at 6:19 PM on November 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Spend some time in a museum with a good Near Eastern collection.

I have, actually.

The first thing he said that jogged my existing knowledge of ancient Near Eastern cultures was when he mentioned a particular Hittite artifact that is in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Which I've been to. So I was able to mentally connect the Hittites with Turkey and thus Anatolia, and they sort of popped into place.

But, like, I'm a huge history dork. I worked at the Met for two years. If his expectation is that listeners are going to be able to remember particular artifacts in the collections of certain museums, I'm not entirely sure who his audience is meant to be.

I think I prefer either the In Our Time approach (focusing on one thing, and give a lot of background about that thing), or Mike Duncan's approach (explaining everything in infinite detail, as deep as he needs to to make it make sense, even if it means doing 300 podcasts instead of 30).

Though, again, it's clever as hell, and I'm really enjoying listening to it. I'm just not really learning much.

Another thing that would help would be if he had visual aids and supplemental info on the blog, like Mike Duncan has. The episode Duncan did about the geography of the Roman world, where he found a map he really liked and physically walked everyone through it, was probably my favorite History Of The Roman Empire episode.
posted by Sara C. at 7:51 PM on November 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


Another thing that would help would be if he had visual aids and supplemental info on the blog, like Mike Duncan has.

There are some in a sidebar on the blog. They are a little confusingly all in one place rather than attached to the individual entries. I find that checking Wikipedia is a good way to find maps, which helps situate, for example, the Akkadians vs the Assyrians.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:43 AM on November 29, 2013


Yeah, but I could get 100% of the information he's providing from Wikipedia. If I wanted to just read Wikipedia entries about the Near East, then why listen to the podcast?
posted by Sara C. at 10:05 AM on November 29, 2013 [2 favorites]


Sadly I'm having a similar experience to Sara C.'s. I appreciate the heck out of what he's trying to do, but I'm not getting as much out of it as I did from Duncan's History of Rome, or Dan Carlin's podcasts. I think Chesworth's project has two serious strikes against it. First, it's trying to cover a huge amount of time and area, so it feels like it skips around a lot. Second, the records we have for many of these civilizations are more monumental inscriptions than individual narratives. That makes it harder for me to get pulled in.

So if you get something from his podcast, great, but if it's the first history podcast you've tried and it's not engaging you, it's still worth trying others out there.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:19 AM on November 29, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah, after listening to the first one, I'm somewhat less excited about the podcasts. I mean, they're very informative and it's a great feat to develop them all and folks who'd rather listen to this than read it from a book or web article would find them useful. But I encountered a similar issue that Sara C. found.

That is, I already know a bit about the ancient Near East, but trying to keep the cultures and civilizations all apart, to distinguish them in some more meaningful way than I already do, is not greatly facilitated by these podcasts. Of course, it's perhaps not the intent, so there's that.

I've been to museums all over the world, which helps. Sadly, the one time I had the opportunity to visit the Louvre, they had their Near East wing closed for renovation. That was a real disappointment.

On preview: what benito.strauss just said.
posted by darkstar at 10:23 AM on November 29, 2013 [2 favorites]


If I wanted to just read Wikipedia entries about the Near East, then why listen to the podcast?

Well, the maps, mostly.

The biggest disappointment for me was that I decided I wanted to know more about the ancient Greeks, so I picked up the only iTunes U course just about ancient Greece, which is by Donald Kagen of Yale. It was pretty unpleasant, I am sad to say -- he's not a great speaker for an audio venue (lots of coughing and throat clearing), but he's also condescending to his students and can't resist a chance to stick littel bits of Neoconservatism into every lecture. Sigh.

Why can't there be a Mike Duncan for ancient Greece?!
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:09 PM on November 29, 2013 [1 favorite]


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