The fall of the world’s earliest cities has long looked like a riddle of vanished peoples and abandoned streets. A growing body of climate research now points to a simpler, starker driver: water, and ...

The feeling will be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic Assembly, Plato's Academy, and ...

Guest: Paul Cooper is a podcaster, a historian, and the author of Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. He writes, produces, and hosts the Fall of Civilizations podcast which ...

“Great civilizations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.” The great historian Arnold Toynbee concluded this in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of ...

If you liked this story, share it with other people. John Perlin’s A Forest Journey explores how forests and wood were fundamental to the rise and fall of civilizations, providing materials for ...

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