Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think learning from mistakes would be taking it too far.
You know, the people of the past didn't have a sense of history as we do, as a body of knowledge that can be debated and analyzed.
They viewed history as the exploits of great men and great stories, societies contending for victory in great contests.
But that isn't to say they didn't have an awareness of the societies that had passed before.
One example is the Sumerians and Assyrians and all these people who lived in the plains of Mesopotamia, who looked around them and saw the ruins of even more ancient civilizations crumbling around them.
You know, that part of the world has been occupied for at least 10,000 years with some kind of city building societies.
And they came up with stories like the Great Flood, which, you know, survives in the Bible in Genesis.
To explain how these societies had been destroyed, you know, for their pride.
Stories like the Tower of Babel, which is probably written in response to the site of the ruin of the Ziggurat of Ur.
All of these are ways that people have responded to the ruins of the past.
Yeah.
And, you know, things like Homer's Iliad, which is the story really of a war that probably did take place in some way, a clash between the Mycenaean Greeks in the late Bronze Age with the Trojans, who are kind of a peripheral subject of the Hittite Empire.
And there seems to have been some kind of war in which the city of Troy was burned.
But there's a period that follows it called the Bronze Age Collapse, the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that sees the collapse near simultaneously of multiple powerful civilizations around the Near East.
And it's followed by a period called the Greek Dark Ages, which is...
Contested term, but basically means there's no written sources about this period of history.
And this story is kind of repeated again and again by poets, singers, you know, passed on by word of mouth and is elevated to the level of this apocalyptic clash between civilizations.
full of great heroes and marvelous duels of single combat and so on that we know today.
And it's when the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, many centuries later, is looking at the besieged city of Carthage as his own Roman forces sweep into it, burning it and sacking it.
Scipio is said to quote a line from the Iliad about how he fears that one day Troy will be destroyed, to have shed a tear and begun weeping because he has this moment of historical realisation that his great city of Rome will one day face the same fate, that history is this cyclical series of patterns.
Showing 221–240 of 254 · page 12 of 13
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