Ancient Empires before Alexander

By: Robert L. Dise Jr., The Great Courses

Narrated by: Robert L. Dise Jr.

Length: 18 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Great narrative of the ancient world

Easiest-to-follow ancient history book/course that I've heard. highly recommend to get your bearings on the topic.

An interesting recitation of the early civilizations of the Mediterranean and Persia from Sumer to Carthage.

Not that I haven’t heard and read much of this before, but who can keep it straight? We all know Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib, maybe, but who were Shamshi-Adad, Ashurbanipal and Suppilumiuma?

He presents one hypothesis the I found astonishing: the Sea Peoples were Mycenaeans. The story goes that the Heroes of Troy returned to their scattered city states and turned on each other in a civil war, the destruction of Sandy Pylos and Mycenae itself was perpetrated not by the mysterious Sea Peoples as I had thought, but by themselves, but the result was the same: the collapse of the economy and social structures. The remaining warriors and their destitute families took to the sea. The tablets of Ugarit speak of only seven ships, not a huge armada of an empire on the march. Then there’s the archeological evidence of the Philistines: their remains very closely resemble Mycenaean. And who are the Philistines? They were the remnant of the Sea People invaders of Egypt defeated and exiled by Ramses III, just a few steps ahead of Moses who dallied for 40 years in The Sinai. So … young David fought a grandson of Homer’s heroes? Certainly the story of Odysseus is a story of a pirate, why not also the sons of Menalaeus and Agamemnon?

Very Dry

Most of these courses I am barreling through in a couple of days. this one took me over a week because of the lackluster way the material is presented. Even so, it is a good course and covers a lot of material.

A fantastic sampler of Ancient Empires.

Absolutely loved this dive into various empires pre-Alexander. I put this on with out much enthusiasm as I typically listen to discussions on very specific periods and people's. I was a fool. I was absolutely enthralled by this presentation. Please add more! Love this professor.

Solid Instruction on Ancient Med. Empires

Any additional comments?

This course is great to guide you through the ebb and flow of ancient in Empires of the Mediterranean region. It doesn't end when Alexander dies but continues to speak on the Roman Empire as well. The Professor may incorrectly pronounce a few words here and there, but perhaps his education has taught him differently, and I am the one who is incorrect. I enjoyed this course and found it to be a great stepping stone as I continue learning about history, and now target each individual history of the Empires spoken of in this course.

Captivating and Haunting

All of these lectures were great. However the two lectures on Mycenaean civilization are two of the greatest lectures I've ever listened to. They are captivating and truly haunting, especially at the very end where he reads the contemporaneous account of the very last days and of the human sacrifices offered to Hera and Zeus as a final plea for salvation.

Wonderful

Very interesting, informative and interesting. I enjoyed it very much and will listen to it again!

the Dream of Empire.

great courses isn't just a title this is truly a great course. I enjoyed every minute of these lectures listening for hours at a time

fabulously good

wow. this prof has both a superb mastery of the subject and extremely effective communication skills. I could hardly stop listening. I wish I had gotten his grounding in the subjects he addresses a long time ago. thank you thank you chs

Mostly excellent

If you're a history need like me and are interested in the cultures of the ancient Middle and Near East, you'll love this book - most of it, anyway. After hearing Robert Dise's thorough and well-researched discussion of what little we know about several other ancient societies and how we know it, I was really excited when he got to the ancient Greeks and the battle of Troy. But instead he glossed over it quickly, talking about how the war was just about one man stealing another man's wife and how the siege lasted ten years, ideas that are straight from Homer but are now believed to be incorrect (it's thought to have been all about control of a vital point controlling trade routes and to have been a seasonal siege). The Greeks experienced a dark age soon after the war, supposedly because their hero culture was a case of toxic masculinity being bad for running an empire (h'mmm, he didn’t bring this up when discussing any other culture, and he's not exactly convincing given the realities of the world they lived in at the time). He's nearly as derogatory talking about the Jews.
Dise's coverage of the Assyrians is equally questionable. Sure, they treated conquered peoples as fellow Assyrians once they deported them to a different part of the empire (if we can trust their records on this). Sure, forcible relocation followed by citizenship is generally better than being killed or carried off as slaves. But Dise claims repeatedly that this relocation freed the newly-conquered peoples from the roles they'd been born into. Social mobility may have been a gift to the lower classes, but on more than one occasion he mentions that the highest-ranking members of these tribes and kingdoms were the ones who were relocated. In one instance, he mentions that the poorer folk were killed or sold into slavery when the upper classes were relocated. This doesn't sound like something either group of conquered peoples would appreciate. The Assyrians may have been better in some ways than the cultures around them, but Dise's portrayal of them is excessively rosy.
Regardless, it's still a great book and highly informative. It just clearly shows the author's biases.