The Price of Civilization: The Complete CollectionA boy crawls through a tunnel a thousand feet beneath the hills of Laurium, hauling silver ore in the dark. He will not see daylight again. The silver he mines will fund Athens's navy. The navy will win the war. The war will be called the birth of Western democracy.His name is not recorded.The Price of Civilization is a six-volume history of the ancient world told from the bottom — from the ...

A Bronze Age sword is dropped into the Thames as an offering to powers beneath the water. A Roman citizen scratches a curse onto lead and casts it into a sacred spring. A medieval monk copies a spell for summoning angels into the margins of a psalter. A seventeenth-century farmer buries a bottle of nails and urine beneath his hearth to break a witch's curse. A modern Druid raises her arms to greet the solstice sunrise at Stonehenge.Five moments separated by thousands of years. One ...

In February 1978, electrical workers digging beneath downtown Mexico City struck a stone disk three meters across, carved with the dismembered body of a Mexica goddess. The stone had lain face-up under the colonial plaza for four and a half centuries.Her name was Coyolxauhqui, "Bells-Her-Cheeks." She was the daughter of the earth mother Coatlicue, the sister of the war god Huitzilopochtli, and the defeated leader of an army of four hundred southern stars destroyed by her brother at...

Everyone knows 1066. The Norman Conquest. The Domesday Book. Medieval England.But while England was being conquered, Wales was fighting back. And winning.For two centuries after the Normans took England, Wales remained independent. Welsh kings united the country, created legal codes more progressive than England's, and forced English kings to recognize Welsh sovereignty. For 900 years, Wales survived every threat—Irish raiders, Anglo-Saxon expansion, Viking invasions, Norma...

In 1210, King John had Maud de St Valéry and her eldest son walled up in a royal castle and left to starve. Offered the chance to buy her family's peace by surrendering her son as a hostage, she had refused, sending word that she would not entrust her child to a king who had murdered his own nephew. Her husband William de Braose — once the most powerful Marcher lord in Wales — died in exile in France. Within a generation, the Braose lordships from the Severn to the sea were broken up among...

Why did Wales stay Welsh?Rome conquered the region in brutal campaigns that lasted decades. Rome occupied it with more soldiers per square mile than almost anywhere else in the empire. Rome ruled it for more than three hundred years.And yet Wales never became Roman.No villas. No towns. No Latin. Just forts, roads, and a population that outlasted the empire by staying exactly who they'd always been.This is the story of what happens when an unstoppable force m...

The civilisation that made the most coveted ceramic of the medieval world, the celadon its Chinese rivals ranked first under heaven, fired it in a kingdom that owned a third of its people. For close to a thousand years it ranked people by birth and bound the lowest to the foulest work, and the art and learning the world still admires could not have stood a day without them.Celadon and Chains tells Korea's story with the unfree at its centre: the potters whose celadon a museum keeps...

The greatest empire medieval Africa produced sent its king to Mecca in 1324 with sixty thousand attendants, five hundred enslaved men walking before him each carrying a staff of gold. The world still talks about Mansa Musa's pilgrimage. It does not often talk about who carried the gold.Gold and Chains tells the story of Africa's great civilisations — Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Benin, the Swahili cities, the forest kingdoms — with the unfree at their centre: the salt-cutters of ...

At the height of the Roman Republic, perhaps one person in five in Italy was a slave. Rome's roads, its grain, its silver, and its law all ran on people it owned — and the civilization we still admire could not have lasted a day without them.Bread and Chains tells Rome's story from the bottom up. It follows the enslaved into the wheat fields and the silver mines, the kitchens and the bedrooms, the gladiator schools and the law courts that defined a living person as property to be s...

Chains and Laurels: Slavery and the Making of Ancient GreeceThe civilisation that gave the world the word "freedom" was built and sustained by people who had none. At the height of classical Athens, perhaps one person in three was a slave — and the democracy, the philosophy, and the Parthenon itself could not have lasted a day without them.Chains and Laurels tells Greece's story with the enslaved at its centre. It follows them into the silver mines that pai...

She waits at the threshold with a torch and a pair of great dark wings — and almost no one remembers her name.Across the painted tombs and carved urns of ancient Etruria, one figure appears again and again at the moment of death: a winged woman named Vanth. She does not judge. She does not punish. She meets the dying, and she stays with them, and she sees them safely on their way.The Etruscans left no literature of their own, so Vanth survives only in image...

The civilisation that taught the world that a single self looks out of every pair of eyes was built and sustained by people it placed below the reach of touch. For more than two thousand years it ranked human beings by birth and bound the lowest to the foulest work — and the philosophy, the temples, and the empires the world still admires could not have stood a day without them.Lotus and Chain tells India's story with the unfree at its centre. It follows them into the quarries that...