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Based on the highly acclaimed podcast with over 1 million subscribers, Fall of Civilizations brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse
Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztec empires of the Americas; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui. With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time as they witnessed the end of their world.
'Eminently readable... one can almost hear the spoken word as one reads. Yet Cooper has built his narrative out of close reading of the original sources... the author’s strength is his ability to evoke the physical setting of the great cities that lay at the heart of empires' David Abulafia, Spectator
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Based on the highly acclaimed podcast with over 1 million subscribers, Fall of Civilizations brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse
Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztec empires of the Americas; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui. With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time as they witnessed the end of their world.
'Eminently readable... one can almost hear the spoken word as one reads. Yet Cooper has built his narrative out of close reading of the original sources... the author’s strength is his ability to evoke the physical setting of the great cities that lay at the heart of empires' David Abulafia, Spectator
