Hittites, Trojans, and the Late Bronze Age World: Interview with Professor Trevor Bryce

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The late Bronze Age world of the Near East was an incredibly rich and complex place, full of long-distance trade, the exchange of ideas, bickering kings, and empires rising and falling. Among those empires, one of the most powerful and enigmatic was that of the Hittites, whose ruling dynasty survived more than five centuries of intrigue and war to build a state stretching across the region. Professor Trevor Bryce literally wrote the books on the Hittites, and I ask him about the Hittites, the people of Troy, and the world they inhabited.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:14.9	I'm Patrick Weimann, thanks for joining me.
0:17.0	The world of the late Bronze Age is incredibly distant from us in time.
0:20.5	We're talking about more than 3,000 years, but it also reflects our own world in ways
0:25.6	that echo across all those millennia.
0:28.2	We've read goods, people, and ideas passed over exceptionally long distances, kings
0:32.6	bickered and fought with one another over prestige, territory, and commerce.
0:37.5	And we know about all this thanks to the exceptional records they've left behind, enormous
0:41.5	quantities and varieties of written texts that put a lot of more recent periods to shame.
0:46.7	It is an incredibly rich and complicated world, so full of places and people, and we have
0:51.1	only just begun to scratch the surface of understanding it.
0:54.8	Even that late Bronze Age period with all of its competing kingdoms and imperial dreams,
0:59.2	one state retains an enigmatic and fascinating pull, that of the Hittites.
1:03.7	Today, we've got a fantastic guest to help us understand more about these long lost people
1:08.2	and the kingdom they built and the broader world around them.
1:11.5	Professor Trevor Bryce is one of the world's leading experts on the Hittites in particular
1:14.9	and the Ancient Near East more generally.
1:16.8	He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, honorary professor of classics
1:21.6	and ancient history at the University of Queensland in Australia, and a meritus professor of classics
1:27.0	and ancient history at the University of New England in New South Wales.
1:30.9	He's written more than a dozen books, including the two, the Kingdom of the Hittites and
1:34.7	Life and Society in the Hittite World that are the best English language introductions
	...

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