TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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Ancient Empires before Alexander is your opportunity to finally complete your knowledge of the ancient world with a comprehensive look at history's first empires. Professor Robert L. Dise Jr. of the University of Northern Iowa—an expert on the history of the ancient world—examines these fascinating kingdoms as their own unique subjects, ones that reflect the struggles, successes, and failures of establishing an empire. Over the course of 36 insightful lectures, follow the Egyptians, the Mycenaean Greeks, the Persians, the Carthaginians, and others as they rise to glory, create administrative and military structures, clash with one another, and eventually collapse.

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TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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Ponder the term "the ancient world" for just a moment. What personalities, images, and events come to mind? For most of us, the legacy of the ancient world is symbolized by the twin pillars of Western civilization: the empires of Greece and Rome. But what about the empires that came before them?

Although realms such as Akkad, Assyria, Babylon, Hatti, and Ur dwell on the fringes of recorded history, they nevertheless represent human civilization's first experiments in empire building. Their intriguing reigns

gave birth to the political, judicial, religious, and military systems that would influence the administration of subsequent empires;
steered earlier societies on a course that would eventually lead to our modern world's intricate system of nations, states, and countries; and
played key roles in episodes in ancient history, such as the Babylonian captivity, the Trojan and Peloponnesian wars, and the eventual rise of the Greek and Roman empires.

The fascinating stories behind these empires are required knowledge for you to develop a full understanding of the ancient world in its entirety.

Ancient Empires before Alexander is your opportunity to finally complete your knowledge of the ancient world with a comprehensive look at history's first empires. Professor Robert L. Dise Jr. of the University of Northern Iowa—an expert on the history of the ancient world—examines these fascinating kingdoms as their own unique subjects, ones that reflect the struggles, successes, and failures of establishing an empire. Over the course of 36 insightful lectures, follow the Egyptians, the Mycenaean Greeks, the Persians, the Carthaginians, and others as they rise to glory, create administrative and military structures, clash with one another, and eventually collapse.

How Do Empires Rise? Why Do They Fall?

Until 200 years ago, these empires were little more than names. Some had even been entirely forgotten. Recently, however, profound advances in archaeology and history have vastly improved our knowledge about the world's first empires—those that provided the foundation for future empires to follow.

As Ancient Empires before Alexander is a course on the rise and fall of history's earliest empires, you spend much of the course immersed in the political, administrative, and military details of these thrilling civilizations. While social and cultural issues are not unimportant to the rise and fall of empires, they often play secondary roles, according to Professor Dise; rather, the aim of his lectures is to place each of these empires within a larger exploration of empire building.

Employing a wealth of archaeological and archival evidence, Professor Dise brings the ancient world's diverse empires to life through an analysis of three basic questions:

How did this particular empire emerge?
How was it governed and defended?
How and why did it ultimately fall?

These three seemingly simple questions, you quickly discover, raise a host of profound issues on the growth, development, and failures of vast imperial systems. Their answers also provide you with invaluable insights into the similarities and differences between the course's rich offering of empires—how one empire's success could be another's undoing, how administrative and imperial practices evolved from one realm to the next, and how the creation of new forms of rule and defense adapted to challenges from both geography and neighboring empires.

Ancient History's Greatest Empires—Revealed!

Throughout Ancient Empires before Alexander, you immerse yourself in the details of the dozen empires that flourished in the 2,000 years before the conquests of Alexander the Great paved the way for the triumphs of the Roman Empire. Grounded in a chronological approach, the lectures begin in ancient Mesopotamia and span the river valleys, deserts, and mountain ranges of the Near East. You encounter these empires and others:

The Akkadian Empire, the first empire in human history established in the late 3rd millennium B.C. by Sargon the Great. Sargon and his successors pioneered the techniques of imperial rule and set a pattern on which later Mesopotamian empires would emulate and elaborate.
The Empire of Hatti, which dominated Asia Minor. The emergence of this empire in the early 2nd millennium B.C. presaged the downfall of Mesopotamia's power in the ancient world. Unlike strongly centralized Mesopotamian empires, Hatti—home to the Hittites—was very loosely structured and almost feudal in nature.
The Persian Empire, which would grow into the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen, stretching from Libya to India. This wealthy empire supported local autonomy within its imperial unity and displayed a tolerance for its bewildering diversity of peoples. Alexander the Great, however, would spell doom for this impressive civilization.
The Carthaginian Empire, a sea empire (thalassocracy) that consisted of Phoenician settlements along the coast of the western Mediterranean and possessed far-flung trading networks. Carthage would eventually be destroyed by Rome during the Punic Wars of the 3rd century B.C.

In addition, you discover fresh new perspectives on more familiar ancient empires, including Israel, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as the interactions—both friendly and antagonistic—between these and other kingdoms.

These thrilling empires, you learn, owe much to the leaders who ruled them and the warriors who protected them. As you explore each empire, you also meet some of the ancient world's most captivating figures and place their lives and deeds in the context of their respective kingdoms. Throughout the lectures, you come across awe-inspiring individuals such as

Hammurabi, famed for his code of laws and renowned for being a hands-on administrator of his empire;
Solomon, who succeeded his father David as king of Israel and centralized royal power;
Xerxes, who led a massive Persian invasion of the Greek city-states, only to leave the empire weakened and vulnerable to foreign attack; and
Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general who engineered a series of stunning defeats of the Roman army yet failed to stop Rome's rise to imperial power.

An Invaluable Guide through the Ancient World

You'll find no better guide through the palatial halls, administrative offices, war-torn battlefields, and sacred temples of these diverse empires than Professor Dise. A passionate teacher and military historian who has spent his career immersed in this historical era, he packs each lecture of Ancient Empires before Alexander with a range of rich historical sources on which our current understanding of the ancient Near East rests, including

more than a million cuneiform tablets from imperial and municipal archives;
colorful narratives written by Greek, Roman, and Hebrew sources; and
archaeological remains excavated from once-lost cities and kingdoms.

With Professor Dise, you learn how to comb through these intriguing records, dodging pitfalls of misinterpretation and bias while teaching yourself how to examine historical documents and archaeological findings with a seasoned eye. You'll quickly become a more trained observer of human history and more informed about the ways the past is recorded and passed down to subsequent generations.

Spanning thousands of years of human history and encompassing regions both familiar and forgotten, Ancient Empires before Alexander is a remarkable tour through the unfamiliar reaches of the ancient world. It's an exciting way to explore the legacies of the world's earliest empires and an unforgettable opportunity to complete your grasp of the ancient world—in all its marvelous diversity.

About Your Professor

Dr. Robert L. Dise Jr. is Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa, where he teaches highly popular courses on the history of the ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and classical civilization. He earned his B.A. in History from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa, Professor Dise taught at Clinch Valley College—now the University of Virginia's College at Wise.

Course Lecture Titles

36 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture

01 A Meditation on Empire
02 Lands, Seas, and Sources
03 Sargon and the Dawn of Empire
04 The Third Dynasty of Ur
05 The Empire of Hammurabi
06 Mitanni and the Kassites
07 The Rise of Hatti
08 The Government of Hatti
09 Hatti at War
10 The Climax and Collapse of Hatti
11 The Rise of the Egyptian Empire
12 The Imperial Army and Administration
13 The End of the Egyptian Empire
14 The Minoan Thalassocracy
15 Mycenae and the Dawn of Greece
16 The Collapse of the Mycenaean World
17 The Birth of Israel
18 The Empire of David and Solomon
19 The Dawn of Assyria
20 The Rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
21 The Government of Assyria
22 Assyria at War
23 The Climax and Collapse of Assyria
24 The Neo-Babylonian Empire
25 The Rise of the Persian Empire
26 The Outbreak of the Greek Wars
27 Xerxes and the Invasion of Greece
28 From Plataea to the Peace of Callias
29 The Persian Empire from 450 to 334
30 The Government and Army of Persia
31 Alexander and the Fall of Persia
32 The Origins of Carthage and Its Empire
33 Ruling and Defending Carthage's Empire
34 The First War with Rome
35 Hannibal and the Fall of Carthage
36 Ancient Empires before Alexander, and After

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TTC VIDEO - Ancient Empires Before Alexander (2011)

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