“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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