Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

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In this week's programme, Edward Sturtin asks whether the borders of the Middle East are disintegrating in the one of the great epics of the silver screen.

And bear with me, I'm going to try to persuade you that Lawrence of Arabia might just

might have saved Syria from its civil war. There are villains in the story too,

British and French officials.

They played guard with the modern Middle East constructed what I call artificial frontiers,

artificial entities, mutilated entities, and that's why what exists in the region,

neither natural nor viable, and it does not have the ability to basically survive on the long term.

I'm in the invigulation room of the National Archives in Kew,

and in front of me is a pre-First World War map.

It's a beautiful thing, really, very finely drawn drawn and this outlines the deal that was done between

France and Britain in 1916 known as the Sykes Pico Agreement.

This map has more or less dictated the shape of the Middle East ever since.

Until now that is, there's a growing body of opinion that believes that this settlement,

the settlement sketched out here on this map is dissolving in the heat of the civil war in Syria.

James Barr is the author of a book called A Line in the Sand.

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