The Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Iron Age Mediterranean

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age, the economy of the Mediterranean shifted dramatically. It expanded to encompass the entire sea for the first time, everywhere from the Levant to Iberia, and laid the foundations for what would eventually become the Roman Empire.

Patrick's new book - Lost Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age - is now available for preorder, and will be released on May 5th! Preorder in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWLostWorlds. And don't forget, you can still Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge.

Also Patrick is launching a brand-new history show on December 3rd! It’s called Past Lives, and every episode explores the life of a real person who lived in the past. He'll have a lot more to say about it very soon, so keep your eyes and ears peeled.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:18.0	Ithabelle hated getting wet.
0:20.7	That was an inconvenience in his line of work, which required him to spend much of his time on the Ithabale hated getting wet.
0:21.0	That was an inconvenience in his line of work, which required him to spend much of his
0:24.4	time on the decks of rain-lashed ships or sloshing through the surf as he stepped onto
0:28.9	yet another beach in search of profits.
0:31.8	He had done so dozens of times over his years plying the sea lanes of the Mediterranean,
0:36.6	ever since his first short hop up the
0:38.2	coast from Tyre to Sidon when he was a boy. His father, Ithabale recalled, had acquired a small
0:44.1	farm in the hills inland from the coast of Phoenicia. The old man said it was perfect for vines,
0:49.2	and that it would produce the finest wine this side of Judea. He was wrong about that.
0:54.0	The wine had been terrible,
0:55.3	at least to Ithabale's taste, so bad that nobody in Tyre would pay a sliver of silver for a jar
1:00.2	of it. Then his father had an idea. They would sell the wine in Egypt, using a friend's ship to
1:06.3	transport the ceramic storage containers from Tyre to the Great Rivers Delta. His only son,
1:12.1	a not yet 12-year-old Ethabel, would go with the cargo as surety. That first trip away
1:19.8	from home terrified and electrified Ithabale at the same time. The rolling sea during a sudden
1:25.0	summer storm, the strange reed boats in the Egyptian harbor,
1:28.3	the thrill of success when he'd haggled with the buyer for a better price and fine linen,
1:33.3	the way his head had spun from the strong wine he drank to celebrate, far better than the stuff he'd just sold.
1:39.3	From that trip onward, Ithabel knew that his future would be at sea.
	...

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