Civilisation

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

While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place....

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

Major BBC series rediscovering some of the key thinkers and achievements from the Golden Age of Islam....

From the earliest civilizations to the 21st century: a global journey through human history, published alongside a landmark BBC One television series....

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....

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen....

This audiobook tells the gripping story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed—why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever.

This audiobook gives a dramatic account of the Antonine plague, the mysterious disease that struck the Roman Empire at its pinnacle....

According to legend, the Roman emperor Nero set fire to his majestic imperial capital and fiddled while the city burned. It’s a story that has been told for more than two millennia - and it’s likely that almost none of it is true....

The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning....

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....

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

Following seven centuries of conflict, The Eagle and the Lion is the epic story of the imperial rivalry between two of the greatest empires of the ancient world—Parthian and Persian—and how they rose and eventually fell....

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Find out....

In The March of Folly, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages...

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic, geographic, or anthropogenic as it is narrative....

On August 24 and 25 in the year 79 A.D., a Volcanic eruption from Mt. Vesuvius spewed fire...

Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline....

For listeners eager to experience Gibbon’s brilliant primary historicism, to understand the long decline of Rome—and the reasons for the Empire’s demise—there exists no better or more accessible condensation of Decline and Fall.

This amazing analysis of family and religious life among the ancient Greeks and Romans is the key to understanding ancient Mediterranean civilizations....

Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self....