This is John Batchelor, conversation with the author and historian Peter Francopad.

His new book The Earth transformed in Untold's History.

Here the professor looks at 4,000 years ago, 2000 b.C.E. and the trade routes that connected the

city states and the empires for transfer of ideas, of trade goods, yes, inventions, wisdom, philosophy, and what clearly

exhibits globalization 2000 B.C. in the Bronze Age.

Professor Peter Francopan, more of this tonight.

Thank you. No, I think some of my colleagues will get get very

over-excited about the world globalization because it clearly means something in the

modern world that is different to the past. In the past connecting the Americas to each other

and also to the other great continents of the world

is obviously a different story.

But one can talk about long-range connections linking Europe,

Africa, and Asia going back thousands of years.

And I think that if one is willing to be relatively generous with the idea about what

globalization means in terms of exchange.

We can chart that through the exchange of goods.

We can change that through the exchange of ideas,

which a little bit more tricky to always pin

how they're moving and how they're being spread. But we can also test through linguistics and genetics. And those kinds of things tell us a wholly different picture of what is going on around about 4,000 years ago, those rise of those cities in competition

with each other, often in conjunction with each other.

But one of the things that's most interesting

is that the glue between these cities

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