CivilisationEpisodes Episode guide
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The 20th Century
Will the disparity between rich and poor prevent the emergence of a global civilisation?
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The 20th Century
The descent of European civilisation into dictatorship, war, and unprecedented genocide
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The Victorian Age
How cotton, coal, iron, steam, and sweat, gave birth of the industrial revolution
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Judaism and Christianity
Christianity's intellectual and spiritual debt to Judaism
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The Enlightenment
The rise of reason, science, tolerance, and liberty in 18th Century France
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The Colonial Experience
Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez, and the arrogance of conquest
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The Golden Age of Islam
The poetry, learning, and science of the 7th Century civilisation that grew out of Islam
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The Renaissance
The Italian artistic achievement and intellectual innovation that started the Renaissance
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Ancient Rome
How Rome grew from a shanty town to the centre of the world's largest empire
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Ancient Athens
Athens' extraordinary creative outburst in politics drama philosophy and the visual arts
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The Greeks and Persians
How the clash between Greeks and Persians in 5BC was recorded in stories and poems
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Ancient China
Remarkable for its organisation, written language, and great thinkers such as Confucius
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Ancient India
Was the concept of dharma - religious duty - essential to ancient India's stability?
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Ancient Egypt
How Ancient Egypt adopted ideas and made them more stylish, human, and sophisticated
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Mesopotomia
The invention of writing. Sumerian's revolutionary representation of the sounds of words


