The End

Introduction

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0:12It was quiet in the atrium of the house. That was why Marcus liked to write there. Now entering his eighth decade of life, he had little tolerance for interruptions of any kind. Or rather, Marcus liked to use the atrium to dictate his words to his Greek secretary, who then wrote them in shorthand on a long papyrus scroll. He told the Greek to read that last sentence back to him, weighed it, added an adjective in one spot and cut an adverb in another, and pronounced it good.

0:42His history was finally done. His years of research and writing over. Marcus had set out on this project the better part of a decade ago, mostly because of his distaste for a certain Titus Livius, who was embarking on a similar task of writing history. Livius produced only the most tedious stories, in Marcus's opinion, and he was convinced he could do it better. In the beginning, Marcus's intention had been to write the history of all the Republic's wars since the days of Tarquinius Superbus and Brutus.

1:12This was no small task, Marcus soon realized, because the Republic had gone to war practically every year since its inception. He himself had served in the cavalry during his younger years, five decades before, fighting for Mark Antony and Octavian, as he was then, during the campaign at Philippi. Things were better now, Marcus thought, compared to those chaotic years of his youth. Augustus, as Octavian called himself now, was still in charge and had been for years. He was even older than Marcus, but Augustus was still hanging on,

1:43and Marcus refused to go until the old First Citizen did. He certainly wasn't going to die before he finished his history. Titus Livius had never seen a battle, Marcus thought. He didn't know what it was like. That provincial might rub elbows with Rome's great and good now, but he had never smelled the coppery tang of blood in the air after a big scrap, carried the wounded to the doctors for aid, or felt the pain of a friend's loss. The speeches he put in the mouths of generals and senators were ludicrous. Was it jealousy, Marcus thought?

2:15No, surely not. Never jealousy. His new and comprehensive history would be read for generations, he was sure. Students would copy passages, and grammarians would force them to parse his fluid, clean Latin. Perhaps someday he would be quoted widely, his bust displayed in libraries, a sign of his impact on the world to come. Or perhaps not. Marcus was wise enough to know that he was a biased observer, and works were rarely read and discussed for their quality alone. A note of panic struck him.

2:46Perhaps nobody would ever read his history, and his name would be forgotten by all except his descendants, who would keep his wax death mask and bring it out for special occasions. But then he calmed. Even if nobody ever read this long collection of scrolls, even if he was forgotten, there were worse ways to spend ten years than writing history. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner?

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Tides of History Introduction

4:26Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

4:42I've always wondered how it would feel to write and record the very last episode of this show. And now that the time has finally arrived, I'm full of emotions. Sadness, of course, that this is the end, but also joy for the future, anticipation of all the topics I have yet to cover, and awareness of all the many debts I owe. I want to thank Hernán López, the founder of Wondery, who brought me on as a callow and inexperienced podcaster and gave me a ton of freedom to make Tides what I wanted it to be. Marshall Louis, who oversaw Tides for years.

5:12And all the many folks at Wondery who did the thousand things behind the scenes that make a show like this run. Sergio Enriquez has been the show's sound engineer almost since the beginning, and in addition to being great at his job, he's a wildly cool guy. Morgan Jaffe has produced Tides for most of its run, and their consistency has made my life much easier than I had any right to expect. But I find what I'm feeling most is gratitude. Gratitude to you, the listeners, whose interest, support, and engagement brought me so much happiness and made Tides of History the kind of show that could run for nearly nine years.

5:46Tides has been downloaded almost 55 million times. Hundreds of thousands of people have listened. That is so cool. And I never could have imagined it when we put out the first episode way back in July of 2017. The world has changed a bit since then, to say the least. What hasn't changed in that time is Tides of History's focus on people and their role in the human past. We are all the raw material of history, not just the most famous and powerful among us. And more than anything else, I've tried to keep Tides in direct contact with the people whose work made entire societies function,

6:22and whose lives form most of the vast tapestry of human experience. For this last episode, I didn't want to leave you all with some potentate's rise to power or a rundown of abstract processes and concepts, much less a whole episode of self-congratulatory back-slapping for making a show that lasted nine years. I want our final memories of Tides of History to be about those people whose lives, ordinary as they might have been, make up the actual stuff of our shared past. As a reminder, if you like these kinds of stories, you can subscribe to my new show, Past Lives,

6:54where we explore the life of a real person every single week. Today, we'll proceed through time in a series of vignettes, stops at some of my favorite points in the journey we've taken on Tides through the millennia. The composite characters we encounter were people just like you and me, and it was their actions, aggregated together millions and millions of times, that have shaped the future in which we live today.

Mammoth Steppes

7:22The mammoth steppes of Eurasia, 25,000 years ago. The wind never seemed to stop. During the all-too-brief summers, it howled across the drying flatlands, kicking up clouds of dust and fragments of yellowing grasses that choked the hunter's eyes and mouths with detritus. The winters were far worse. The gales slid over the icy crust that blanketed the grassland and found any gap in carefully stitched clothing and shelters, freezing them to their core no matter how protected a hillside

7:52or depression they'd found to wait out the cold. The river valleys that ran from north to south through the steppes were much better, summer or winter, than the vast expanses of open space between them. The hunters tended to leave that land to the herds of large grazers that could tolerate both the cold of winter and the lack of water in summer, and the predators who preyed on them. Not that the hunters weren't predators. They were, in fact, highly accomplished at tracking and slaying game, armed with throwing spears and some of the earliest bows and arrows ever invented.

8:25Reading the spore of mammoth, horses, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer was second nature to them. They could identify the number of mammoth matriarchs and juveniles in a herd from the depth of the trails they left in the omnipresent snow. They knew the landscape well enough to tell which watering hole the herd was heading to, and they had already planned where they might spring an ambush along the route. But they understood their limits. Venturing into the vast, nearly featureless emptiness of the steppe, navigating by the direction of the sun and the presence of the rare, stunted conifers sticking up through the snow

8:58or jutting up out of the grass, was a perilous business. The hunters had lived in this land for thousands of years, and surviving there meant that fools were rare indeed. Smoke curled upward from below the lip of the hill, pointing down toward the valley of the Don River below. Its source was the rounded roof of an enormous building covered with layers of mammoth hides. Smaller structures, held up by thin wooden poles and also draped in hides, surrounded the main dwelling. Not a single person could be seen outside.

9:29The freezing temperatures and the wind whistling along the grain of the Don River Valley made sure of that. Inside the structures, however, it was a different story. Fires crackled in well-used hearths. The thin, precious fragments of conifer wood burned out far too quickly for the hunters' taste. And the handfuls of dried grass and dung that made up the rest of their fuel gave off less heat than they preferred. But, out here on the steppe, they used what was available. An intricate lattice of mammoth bones held up the largest dwelling,

10:00scavenged from more than 60 skeletons the hunters found on their journeys across the landscape, or created through their own expertise in predation. The structure was big enough that dozens of people could fit inside at once, more than 10 meters, 33 feet across, and high enough that nobody's head would graze the hides. With so many people inside, the small, sputtering fire provided an ancillary benefit of heat. It was mostly used for cooking the frozen meat they'd stashed outside in the snow. Others munched on strips of smoked and dried meat

10:31that they'd worked so hard to acquire over the all-too-brief summer and autumn. They ate while they worked, because there was always work to do, and there was nothing else to occupy them during the short winter days and seemingly endless nights. Rock clashed on rock, and tiny pieces of flint fell to the packed dirt floor, as they napped new projectile points and scrapers. Razor-sharp blades carved bone and antler into awls and needles. Preserved plant fibers were wound over and over again until they formed durable nets,

11:02which the inhabitants would use to trap small game in the lighter, longer days that would eventually come when winter breathed its last. Tight stitches of sinew joined pieces of mammoth and reindeer hide into the thick, protective garments that kept out the vicious cold. Soft fur from smaller animals, rabbits and foxes mostly, lined the insides of their gloves and hoods, which left little exposed skin for the frostbite to take. Not that they could escape winter altogether. Many had lost the tips of their noses, fingers, and toes

11:32to the lethal cold when their garments were soaked, the trail disappeared under a fresh snowfall, or their fire-starting tools wouldn't spark in a howling blizzard. That was better than death, though, and the loss of a digit or two was a small price to pay compared to survival. Within the hut, they wore softer, lighter garments, only pulling on their heavy mammoth-hide outerwear for journeys into the freezing gusts that battered against the bone and hide structure.

11:59The people who occupied the site we now know as Kostenke 11 had lived this way for thousands of years. When conditions permitted, they ranged far and wide from their bases along the Don River and the other waterways coursing from north to south through the Pontic Caspian Steppe. They hunted the large game that came down into the valleys to drink and shelter from the weather, gathered the few edible plants growing along the riverbanks, and counted the days until the sun would sink low for months at a time. When the days began to shorten and the nights grew longer,

12:31they knew time was slipping away. All that mattered now was collecting enough to see them through the winter, enough fuel to keep the fires going, enough food to keep them fed, enough goodwill to tamp down the inevitable conflicts that came when dozens of people were crammed together in tight spaces for months on end. Their survival depended on it, and they knew no other way of life.

12:55What the inhabitants of Kostenke 11 couldn't know on that winter day 25,000 years ago was that the world conspired to make their already difficult lives even harder. The planet was cooling, and while that wasn't unusual during the last glacial period, the extent of this freeze would eventually be worse than anything people had seen in more than 40,000 years. The last glacial maximum, the point when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent and the oceans were at their lowest ebb, was just around the corner.

13:26These hardy people would have to use every scrap of their considerable intelligence and ingenuity to survive. Perhaps they did, adapting to the increasing cold just as their tough, inventive ancestors had done, leaving a legacy to thousands of descendants. They were probably genetically related to the population we call ancient North Eurasians, whose descendants include indigenous Americans, Siberians, Europeans, and many more. But we don't know if they were directly ancestral or a parallel branch lost in time.

13:57What we can say without reservation is that they built viable, long-lasting lives in an environment far harsher than most of us have ever experienced. Wherever their path would eventually lead, they had made it that far, showcasing just one piece of our tremendous human capacity for adaptation and survival.

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15:23I'm Raza Jaffery, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fix-it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya,

15:53and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons.

16:08Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early and at free on Audible.

16:24The Shores of Doggerland,

Doggerland

16:298,200 years ago. The dugout canoe cut through the now still waters of the bay, pushing aside clumps of floating tree branches and reeds as it moved. Paddles snagged on mangled grasses and assorted debris. Devastation reigned everywhere the Mesolithic people navigating the canoe could see. They had known this shoreline since they were children, every inlet and cove and marsh familiar to their practiced eyes. They knew where the stone and wicker fishing weirs were just out under

16:59the surface of the water, where the shellfish beds would be exposed as the tides went out, where the marsh birds liked to gather during their migrations, and where the deer came down to the creeks and streams to drink, making them vulnerable to the stone-tipped arrows the Mesolithic inhabitants aimed so well. Now, all of that was gone, swept away in a tidal wave of destruction. None of them had ever seen a tsunami before. They didn't even have a word for the wall of seawater that had slammed into the shoreline the previous day.

17:31It came without warning. The waves had unexpectedly drawn back from the beaches they combed for the fine shells that became personal ornaments, exposing the shallow inlets and coves that the steadily rising waters of the North Sea had yet to fully inundate. And then the waves returned with shocking force. They scoured the beaches, crashed against the low, stubby hills backing the dunes, and roared up the narrow valleys leading inland from the coast, inundating areas far inland that had never once had to consider the possibility

18:01of flooding. The many villages of wood and hide structures overlooking the best fishing and shellfish gathering spots were simply washed away. Not a single sign of them, places people had been coming to over and over for centuries, remained. The Mesolithic inhabitants of Doggerland, or what was left of it after centuries of steadily rising seas, looked out on an entirely new and far less welcoming landscape.

18:29Those Mesolithic people knew how to survive here. They'd been doing so successfully for more than a hundred generations, ever since their ancestors had tramped north from the fringes of the Mediterranean, through the fast-growing post-glacial forests of Europe, and to the edge of the North Sea. Doggerland was much larger then, less a land bridge connecting the continent in Britain than a full-blown region in its own right. As the centuries wore on and the glaciers melted across the earth, Doggerland shrank and shrank. Hills became islands

18:59and plains transformed into open ocean. Where the water was clear, the Mesolithic people could still see skeletal forests beneath the waves, the remnants of places that had once been productive and spiritually powerful disappearing further below year after year. The inhabitants took that in stride. It was part and parcel of life along the shores of Doggerland, and they knew how to adapt when a sudden surge pushed the shoreline higher, or a cold snap altered the seasons, and the food sources on which they relied shifted. This tsunami

19:30was something different. It was no mere winter storm surge or anomalous climatic event. It was the apocalypse, the end of the delicate human chain that had once connected the disparate parts of the Mesolithic world between Britain and Central Europe. Neighboring bands traded, exchanged marriage partners, and occasionally fought one another, but always they stayed in contact. Now, thousands of people were simply gone, and those who remained would be focused first and foremost on survival. The men and women

20:01paddling their canoes around the devastated landscape understood that intuitively. All their carefully hoarded supplies of acorns and preserved meat, their familiar fishing and hunting grounds, the strips of wetland where they had gathered eggs and trapped birds with nets. All of it was gone now.

20:20Despair was the natural emotion to feel, and many did despair, weeping and lamenting the fate that had befallen them. How could it be otherwise when the world seemed to end in a single day of devastation? What rebirth could they hope for in a suddenly unfamiliar landscape bereft of everything they thought they'd known? And yet, those Mesolithic people did survive. The Storiga tsunami, as this event is known, wasn't the end of Doggerland or the deeply rooted Mesolithic communities that had made their home

20:51in the region for millennia. They adapted once more, seeking out surviving forests in which to hunt deer and boar, new fishing grounds where the disturbed catch might congregate, new shellfish beds ready to give up their bounty. They lasted long past the arrival of the first farmers on these same shores, coexisting for another thousand years or more with the descendants of Neolithic cultivators whose roots ultimately lay in far away Anatolia. Even something as apocalyptic as the largest tsunami in the known history

21:22of the North Sea wasn't enough to wipe them away for good. The Great Hungarian Plain

Great Hungarian Plain

21:315,000 Years Ago This was good land, the chieftain thought, looking out over the wide expanse of grassland from the lip of the hill. The Carpathians rose up behind him, more in his inner eye than in reality, wreathed as the mountains were on this fine spring day by the last remnants of winter clouds. It was early to make the crossing from the open step to the east, the land of his birth, but worth the difficulty of traversing melting snow and patches of ice to arrive here so soon. In past years, when the chieftain had led

22:01raiding parties over the passes, it had been summer or even early autumn. This time, however, he brought not a warband mounted on their hardy little horses, but an entire caravan of wagons rattling and crunching over the uneven ground, barely making it up steep inclines and down lethal grades, the oxen straining at their yokes as they struggled to pass through the mountain. It hadn't been an easy journey for the chieftain and his extended clan of children, wives, half-brothers, cousins,

22:31uncles, hangers-on, and slaves. One wagon had gone off a narrow trackway into a gorge, the draft animals bellowing in fear all the way down before the horrendous sound of impact. A lowly shepherd had lost three fingers to frostbite after staying out too long on one cold night. The chieftain's aunt's son, one of his favorite cousins, had shattered his leg trying to hold back a yoke of terrified oxen from rushing down a steep hill. The fever had taken the lad a few days later. One of the slaves simply disappeared one morning after leaving camp

23:03to get fuel for the fire. She might have run away, but based on the howls they heard over and over, the chieftain suspected the wolves had gotten her. A dozen of their hundreds upon hundreds of sheep had frozen to death on the icy mountain nights. Others hadn't been strong enough to make the journey, especially the pregnant ewes and the old and young. Their prized horses were even skinnier than they should be before the summer grazing fattened them up. There was a price to pay for coming so early, but the chieftain was happy to pay it.

23:34There were two reasons for that. On one hand, arriving so early meant that they would have first pick of the pastures and campsites in this nearly empty land. Centuries of raids by the chieftain's predecessors and ancestors cleared out entire villages and drove others either far away from the great Hungarian plain or up into the mountains where the raiders and their horses rarely ventured. He had seen the deserted remnants of their dwellings, the thatched roofs long since caved in, the wattle and daub walls crumbling to nothing,

24:04the reminders of the farmer's presence on the land wasting away until barely a sign remained that they had ever even been there. That hadn't bothered the chieftain at all. If they wanted this land, they could fight for it. His hand strayed to the bronze-headed axe hanging from his belt by a loop of cord, and the weapon seemed to call out to him, demanding to be put to use. Soon enough, he thought, it was a new axe to replace the one he'd lost the previous summer in the fighting with his more powerful cousins. That was the second reason

24:34he and his band were here. They couldn't stay on the Pontic Caspian steppe any longer. That had been made clear to him by chieftains who would one day be buried in a far larger kurgan, a burial mound, than he could reasonably expect. If he stayed, he would die, along with all his sons. If he left, however, he had a chance, not just to survive, but to thrive.

24:59He wasn't the first chieftain to leave the familiar flat lands of his birth and venture far away into the little-known territories beyond the horizon. One of his cousins had gone far to the east, and he wondered what had become of the man and his followers. Dead, most likely, but perhaps not. Maybe they were building their own kurgan in fresh soil, far from the depleted, overgrazed pastures north of the Black Sea, places that would stand out like beacons of past greatness to all who saw them in the future. The chieftain wanted

25:29such a kurgan for himself. He knew that he would never grow powerful enough at home to get one. Maybe a modest construction with a timber burial chamber at the center and a few horses killed to accompany him on his journey into the afterlife. He had no chance of being important enough for the days-long celebrations and breathtaking sacrifices of dozens of animals and feasting and accounts of great deeds that accompanied the funerals of the truly great. Here, though, there were no cousins to compete with, no overgrazed pastures

26:00barely worth fighting over, and a legacy to be won. If he could fight hard enough, assemble enough followers, then he could have this land as his own. Someday, there would be more chieftains below him, assembling at the side of his freshly built kurgan to tell stories of his greatness. His sons and nephews and grandsons, all of them singing his praises and recounting his deeds. He would be the great ancestor from whom all future rulers of this land claimed descent. Once more, the bronze axe

26:31called out to him, and this time he grasped the haft. The weapon had a reassuring weight to it, the kind of heft that pleased their gods of war and blood. Soon, he thought. Soon.

26:51I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before the Jerry Springer show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew

27:22Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. Whether you're exploring

27:53your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting

28:24at £5.99. You'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

28:49Assyria, 614 BC. When the army of Medes appeared outside the walls of Ashur, Manuki Ashur knew it was time to run. He probably should have left before they ever arrived. It hadn't been a secret that the Medes would invade Assyria again this year. But the reality of the situation hadn't set in until Manuki Ashur had gone to the walls to see for himself. Only then, when his eyes drank in

29:19the sight of the tents and pavilions full of enemies, when he saw the spindly outlines of ladders and the thick logs that would serve as battering rams at Ashur's gates, did he realize that his city would fall.

29:34But how could Ashur fall? Manuki Ashur asked himself. Where was the king of Assyria and his great all-conquering armies? Wars were supposed to happen far away from the Assyrian heartland along the Tigris. When Manuki Ashur was a young man three decades earlier, he had marched off to Elam with the great king Ashurbanipal, part of a ten-man kisru, knot, of soldiers drawn from the people of Ashur. There were bakers and goldsmiths, day laborers and merchants, temple administrators and potters,

30:05and they had taken Elam in an orgy of fire and blood. That was how wars worked. The Assyrians marched out from their safe, secure homeland, wrought destruction far from home, and returned with the spoils in hand. Manuki Ashur had bought an Elamite woman and her daughter on his return with the profits of that campaign, like so many of Ashur's residents had done over the centuries. It never occurred to Manuki Ashur that the sword cut both ways. Until, that was,

30:35he saw the Median army encamped outside Ashur. Memories flooded back to him, things the Assyrian hadn't thought about in years. The screams ringing through the streets of Susa as Manuki Ashur and his thousands of comrades looted, burned, and defiled. The broken statues of the Elamite gods littering the streets. The bright red blood dripping from the blade of his spear after he'd gutted an old man trying to stab him with a knife. It was as if they'd happened to another person,

31:06or they were stories Manuki Ashur had heard rather than deeds he himself had carried out. It's not that he was ashamed of any of it. That was the way of war. It was ugly, as his father had told him, and he told his sons before they joined a Kisru for a short, glorious, and lucrative venture. But he had rarely thought about those deeds in the decades since his campaign, or considered that someday he might be the old man with the pathetically small knife rather than the soldier holding the spear.

31:36Now, looking out at the Medians preparing to storm his city, Manuki Ashur felt fear, hot and spiky, gripping his heart and lungs and closing his throat. He and the other soldiers had felt fear before they attacked Susa, of course, but not like this. They had weapons, helmets, and numbers on their side. This was something different altogether, a paralyzing well of despair. For the first time, Manuki Ashur understood what the Elamites had felt 30 years before.

32:06He forced himself to swallow,