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Ancient Empires before Alexander

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Ancient Empires before Alexander

By: Robert L. Dise Jr., The Great Courses
Narrated by: Robert L. Dise Jr.
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About this listen

Complete your knowledge of the ancient world with this comprehensive look at the dozen empires that flourished in the 2,000 years before the conquests of Alexander the Great. Over the course of 36 insightful lectures, you'll follow the Egyptians, the Mycenaean Greeks, the Persians, the Carthaginians, and others as they rise to glory, create administrative and military structures, clash with one another, and eventually collapse.

Professor Dise immerses you in the political, administrative, and military details of these thrilling civilizations, analyzing three basic questions: How did this particular empire emerge? How was it governed and defended? How and why did it ultimately fall? These questions raise a host of profound issues on the growth, development, and failures of vast imperial systems.

Grounded in a chronological approach, you'll find no better guide through the palatial halls, administrative offices, and war-torn battlefields of these empires than Professor Dise. Each lecture is packed with a range of rich sources on which our current understanding of the ancient Near East rests, including cuneiform tablets, colorful narratives, and archaeological remains.

As you comb through these intriguing records, you quickly become more informed about how the past is recorded and passed down to subsequent generations. Spanning thousands of years of human history and encompassing regions both familiar and forgotten, this course is a remarkable tour through the farthest reaches of the ancient world - in all its marvelous diversity.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2009 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2009 The Great Courses
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This is my favourite audiobook and has ignited in me a passion for ancient Near Eastern history. The lecturer is knowledgeable and articulate. I personally find him quite engaging to listen to.

Excellent. My favourite.

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why 15 words? seems a bit silly to me.
why 15 words? seems a bit silly to me.

hard to follow. bit all over the place

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Well this is not it. The facts are ok. It’s the American spin and bias inflicted onto facts that is beyond intolerable. He is after all, ex US Military and often wonders why a certain culture did not wipe out another culture and relies on the US military paranoiac term ‘omnipresent threat’ once too often. The eons before Alexander are both exciting and gripping times. This author does homage to neither of those points.

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