Audiobooks narrated by Victoria Woodson

The Dead Sea and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of the Unique Lake and Its Ancient Jewish Manuscr

"If the world had a navel, it would be the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth where one can still stand on dry land. The photographs of this unique lake seem to be taken from a science fiction movie, or a land devastated after a nuclear holocaust. To others, the fluffy shores could remind them of Antarctica although it is in one of the warmest spots on the planet. Its white, creamy masses, scattered along golden beaches, are not ice floes or frozen water, but effervescent salt formations. The famous Jordan River, where the Hebrew people entered the Promised Land and Jesus was baptized, flows into the lake, but the basin is so deeply sunk into the face of the planet that the waters never leave, as if they had fallen into a small black hole where nothing can escape. The Dead Sea is also an archaeological site loaded with history. Known among the first civilizations in the region as 'Sea of Asphalt' and “Salt Sea,” innumerable myths and legends lend it an air of mystery, as if it attracted sterility and misfortune while eradicating all life from its waters. It was perhaps the inhospitable feel of the place, the almost total desolation surrounding it, which led the writer of the Pentateuch to imagine that many years ago, a cataclysm sent to annihilate perverted people had taken place there. In the mid-20th century, one of the most important religious discoveries of all time was made in a series of caves near the Dead Sea, which had hidden remnants of nearly 1,000 texts, some of which were included in the Hebrew Bible and others which were extra-biblical. In addition to being the oldest surviving copies of such documents, the mixture of languages and different kinds of papers helped shed light on the people in the region at the time, making the Dead Sea Scrolls vitally important to the world’s major religions. "

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Rome and the Near East: The History of the Different Kingdoms that Fought the Roman Empire in the Re

"Rome faced many formidable enemies over the course of nearly 1,000 years, but perhaps none were as enigmatic and forgotten as King Mithridates VI of Pontus. Despite numerous ancient sources detailing the life of the foreign monarch and his wars with Rome, and despite being an interesting character who endured years as a fugitive in his youth, enjoyed a fascination with poisons, and held mercy and pragmatic ruthlessness in a delicate balance, very few scholarly books and works have been produced about the king. It may be that his largely unsuccessful military campaigns have contributed to his disappearance from active historical examination, but despite his poor record in engagements against the Romans, the Kingdom of Pontus dominated much of Asia Minor in the 1st century BCE, and the Romans themselves considered the kingdom one of its most dangerous enemies. According to Plutarch, when Mithridates died, the Roman soldiers felt that “in the person of Mithridates ten thousand enemies had died.” By then, it had required three of Rome’s most famous generals - Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey - to finally subdue his kingdom. Among all the periods in ancient Egyptian history, the Ptolemaic Kingdom and its most famous ruler, Cleopatra, may be the most well-known today. By the 4th century BCE, it appeared as though ancient Egypt was in its final death throes. It had long ceased to be an influential kingdom in the Near East and Mediterranean regions, and it had been ruled over by a succession of foreign peoples including Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians. But just when Egypt seemed doomed to pass forever into obscurity, it was reinvigorated by outsiders, most notably Alexander the Great. While in the process of campaigning to destroy the Achaemenid Persian Empire and conquer the world in 331 BCE, he made a pit stop in Egypt that forever changed the course of Egyptian history."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Wars of Classical Greece: The History of the Conflicts that Led to the Rise and Fall of the Gree

"The ancient Greeks have long been considered the forefathers of modern Western Civilization, but the Golden Age of Athens and the spread of Greek influence across much of the known world only occurred due to one of the most crucial battles of antiquity: the Battle of Marathon. In 491 B.C., following a successful invasion of Thrace over the Hellespont, the Persian emperor Darius sent envoys to the main Greek city-states, including Sparta and Athens, demanding tokens of earth and water as symbols of submission, but Darius didn’t exactly get the reply he sought. The Peloponnesian War, as the great historian Thucydides wrote in the introduction to his eponymous book, which has become one of the greatest historical treatises of antiquity, was an event of such calamitous magnitude that Greece had never witnessed its like in all of recorded history. Not the Trojan War, not the Dorian Invasion, not even the recent Persian invasions – which had devastated mainland Greece and seen Athens herself evacuated and put to the flame, the buildings on her Acropolis razed into dust – could compare to the scale of the devastation that engulfed all of Greece for almost three decades, causing the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Entire populations were displaced, whole cities destroyed, and mountainous sums of money spent, all in order for Greece’s two most famous city-states to establish who had dominion over Greece. Sparta, whose invincible armies had recently led the Greeks to victory against Xerxes’s hordes at Plataea was at the head of the Peloponnesian League. Their opponents were led by proud Athens, possessor of a fleet that virtually dominated the entire Mediterranean and decimated the Persian navy at Salamis and Mycale, at the head of the Delian League. Sparta was insular and old-fashioned, while Athens was dynamic and democratic, but both were bent on imperialistic expansion."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Brothers of Olympus: The History of the Ancient Greek Pantheon’s Most Powerful Gods

"Zeus is a god of apparent paradox: sublimely regal yet ridiculously fickle, a giver of laws but a slave to his own passions, a being of incredible power who is desperate to possess that which he cannot have. As the leader of the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus, Zeus was the god of kingship (and the associated elements of law, oaths, the state and the protection of property) and the god of storms, controlling lightning, wind and thunder. In many ways, one of ancient Greece’s most complex gods is also the most understandable, since he seems so human, and because there is plenty of information about him that survived, including the original legends about his birth, his early deeds and his many relationships with other gods, lovers, and humans. Furthermore, scholars have been able to analyze the historical roots of 'Zeus' as a concept, identifying what gods he is related to among other cultures, where the legends of Zeus originated, and what this information says about the ancient Greeks. One of the reasons Zeus remains one of the most recognizable gods in history is because of the spread of his influence. Due to the conquests of Alexander the Great, Zeus was brought along with other elements of Hellenization to Egypt and the Near East, and a few centuries later, Rome all but adopted him as their own chief god, Jupiter. From there, he was exported around the Roman Empire and fused with numerous other local gods in the process. Ultimately, Zeus was a prominent god from the period of pre-recorded history until the Christianization of Greece, which was complete by the early 7th century A.D. "

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Ancient World’s Most Mysterious Religious Cults: The History of the Cult of the Apis Bull, the E

"To the ancient Egyptians, the gods and goddesses were all around them and could be seen daily in nature. Nearly every animal found in ancient Egypt, both domestic and wild, were associated with a god or goddess, which can be seen in Egyptian art where deities are often depicted with human bodies and animal heads. Or sometimes the deities are portrayed as complete animals. Since deities were associated with certain animals, all animals of a specific species were given divine and protected status. The reverence that ancient Egyptians had for certain animals evolved during the long duration of Pharaonic history until by the Late Period animals of specific species were mummified by the thousands as offerings for their associated deities. Ancient Greece and its mythology has fascinated people for thousands of years, and few elements have intrigued people quite like the Eleusinian Mysteries, which the Greeks believed transformed the initiates and gave them knowledge that eased both the living of life on earth and allayed fears of death, allowing an acceptance of their ultimate fate. The influence of the Eleusinian Mysteries was also far reaching; for example, the Telesterion is reminiscent of the labyrinthine, symbolic structures that can be found all over pre-historic Europe, ranging from those in Ireland to Malta and Crete to the Shetlands. The larger precinct of Eleusis, combining as it did caves, terraces and buildings carved into the rock again, all echo that ancient past. The cult of Mithras was not a creation of the Romans, although they would eventually add their own rituals and mysteries to the ancient religion. In fact, the Mithraic religion was an Indo-Persian creation, a theology which managed to travel from India and back into the Hellenic and Roman world by way of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire. Eventually, the cult of Mithras would spread across the ancient world."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson: The Lives and Works of 19th Century England’s Most Famous Poets

"Lord Byron’s very name conjures up visions of the Romantic movement and outlandishly dressed bohemians, for if Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the poetic darling of the masses, Byron was the hero of the hedonists. While the traditional English literary hero was a nobleman rescuing a damsel in distress, Byron created the anti-hero, a man plagued by self-doubt and hidden sorrow. At the same time, his hero was also capable of facing reality once he had wrestled through his own angst, and even of occasionally acting nobly in the great tradition of the author’s Puritan forebears. Whereas poets like Wordsworth and Browning were easy to love, Lord Byron inspired a certain amount of fear among the upper classes, and pious mothers were reluctant to let their daughters read his work. In a manner more appropriate to the 21st century than the 19th, Lord Byron was a man true to his own beliefs, supporting the rights of the oppressed even while enjoying all the benefits offered to him as a member of the British aristocracy. Born to a father plagued by bouts of drinking and depression, and surrounded by siblings with similar ailments, Alfred Tennyson grew up believing that he must be a victim of hereditary illness, to the point that he believed he must never marry or father children less he perpetuate the suffering on future generations. With these thoughts always in his head, he turned his mind towards a near worship of romantic love, while at the same time repeatedly painting a tragic ending for his most cherished characters, many of whom seemed to die of a broken heart or some illness or accident related to it. In fact, by the time Tennyson began to prosper, he was so accustomed to sorrow that he felt compelled to seek it out, focusing his attention in his middle years not on the comfortable home and growing family he had been blessed with, but instead on the tragic losses experienced by his country during the Crimean War."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Elizabethan Eras: The Lives and Legacies of England’s Two Most Famous Queens

"Until the implementation of new legislation on March 26, 2015, men were given preference to women in the British royal line. This system of male primogeniture meant that women seldom inherited the throne, and even when they did, they were often dominated by male councillors. Those women who married British kings gained the title of Queen, but they were queen consorts, holding the title with no power. This meant only a select few women ruled in their own right. When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, many commentators heralded the beginning of her reign as the second Elizabethan age. The first one, of course, concerned the reign of Henry VIII’s second surviving daughter and middle surviving child, Queen Elizabeth I, one of England’s most famous and influential rulers. It was an age when the arts, commerce and trade flourished. It was the epoch of gallantry and great, enduring literature. It was also an age of wars and military conflicts in which men were the primary drivers and women often were pawns. Elizabeth I changed the rules of the game and indeed she herself was changed by the game. She was a female monarch of England, a kingdom that had unceremoniously broken with the Catholic Church, and the Vatican and the rest of Christendom was baying for her blood. She had had commercial and militaristic enemies galore. In the end, she helped change the entire structure of female leadership. Queen Elizabeth II has become so much a part of British society and culture that her presence is taken almost for granted, setting the standard people now expect of a British monarch. The longest lived and second longest reigning monarch in British history, Elizabeth II has overseen her country during a time of incredible turmoil and ever-accelerating change, providing a stable figure at the heart of a nation going through seemingly endless upheavals."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Jewish-Roman Wars: The History and Legacy of the Conflicts Between the Romans and Jews

"Judea is one of the most important regions in the modern world. It is the center of two of the world’s great religions and extremely important to a 3rd. Politically, the whole area is the focus of conflict between Jews and Arabs, as well as different Muslim sects. Its history is littered with wars, insurrections, and religious revolutions. To say that it has had a turbulent past is to understate the case in the extreme. The history of Judea is, of course, inextricably linked to the history of the Jewish people, their dispersal throughout the Mediterranean world, and their reestablishment of the modern state of Israel in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust. And among all the tumultuous events associated with Jewish history, few can rival the period of Roman rule during the 1st century A.D., when Roman attempts to suppress Jewish nationalism met with violent resistance. Ultimately, the Romans forcibly removed much of the Jewish population from the region, setting the scene for later events that have impacted so directly on world history. Events in the region during the 1st century A.D. also brought about the birth of Christianity, a religious movement that has been at the forefront of European history ever since. The small area around Jerusalem was originally known to the ancient Greeks as Ioudaioi, hence the name Judea. An Iron Age kingdom is said, in the Bible, to have existed as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, which, it is claimed, existed from approximately 1010-930 B.C.. Two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, co-existed uneasily, with frequent outbreaks of war between them in the following years. Judah was invaded by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Shishak, in the 5th year of Rehoboam’s reign, and Jerusalem was sacked. Rehoboam gave the Egyptians all of the nation’s treasure and became an Egyptian vassal. "

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Mythology across the Ancient World: The History of Mythological Stories and Rituals in Antiquity

"Although the Egyptians may not have passed their civilization directly on to later peoples, the key elements that comprised Egyptian civilization, including their religion, early ideas of state, and art and architecture, can be found among other civilizations. For instance, civilizations far separated in time and space, such as China and Mesoamerica, possessed key elements that were similar to those found in ancient Egypt. Indeed, since Egyptian civilization represented some fundamental human concepts, a study of their culture can be useful when trying to understand many other pre-modern cultures. Today the Mesopotamians and their religion are sources of curiosity, but thousands of years ago, the religion was an integral part of their lives. From their birth to their death, deities surrounded them, and whether their social interactions were on the level of a smaller city or that of a larger nation-state, deities played key roles in the social fabric of their society. Whereas the Israelites were one people who worshipped a single god, Babylon had a succession of different dynasties derived from many ethnic groups, and since Babylonian religion originated from a plethora of sources, there were very few elements that maintained primacy throughout the city’s history. For example, the Sumerian influence resulted in citizens worshipping many deities in the city, but those numbers were reduced after the Amorites came to power. One of the reasons Zeus remains one of the most recognizable gods in history is because of the spread of his influence. Due to the conquests of Alexander the Great, Zeus was brought along with other elements of Hellenization to Egypt and the Near East, and a few centuries later, Rome all but adopted him as their own chief god, Jupiter. From there, he was exported around the Roman Empire and fused with numerous other local gods in the process."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Archaic Humans: The History of the Different Prehistoric Species in the Genus Homo

"The evolutionary path from the original primates to modern man is a long one and has taken many twists and turns, but naturally, as the fossil record grows, scientists gain a more complete understanding of our own mental and physical history in terms of genetics and anatomy. However, the correct order and relationships of the various specimen types are difficult to pin down. Many representative samples have been found in such minute amounts as to not preclude anomalies. They have been discovered in various stages of wear. Modern features did not occur simultaneously or uniformly, taking millions of years to become manifest in later types. Up to the present day’s Homo sapiens, examples of the main types have been hybrids of older and more modern features. One of the earliest species of the genus Homo to be discovered is Homo habilis, which basically means “handy man.” The name comes from the belief at the time of its discovery that this species was the first to start using stone tools. The first fossils to be uncovered in Olduvai Gorge were from the same stratigraphic layer as simple stone tools. Fossils of the crania and postcranial skeleton for this species have been found in both eastern and southern Africa and date to around 2.5–1.6 million years ago. Features of Homo erectus suggest an evolution toward modern humans, and the features which separate Homo erectus from the other Homo species are found in the skull. The size of the brain was approximately 900 cc, making it larger than the brain size of Homo habilis. Homo erectus would not have the largest brain capacity of the Homo genus during its existence, with the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis approximately 800,000 years ago. The larger brain size may not matter much when the size of the brain is considered with the size of the body, which also increased. "

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Homo habilis and Homo erectus: The History and Legacy of Modern Humans’ Direct Ancestors

"The evolutionary path from the original primates to modern man is a long one and has taken many twists and turns, but naturally, as the fossil record grows, scientists gain a more complete understanding of our own mental and physical history in terms of genetics and anatomy. However, the correct order and relationships of the various specimen types are difficult to pin down. Many representative samples have been found in such minute amounts as to not preclude anomalies. They have been discovered in various stages of wear. Modern features did not occur simultaneously or uniformly, taking millions of years to become manifest in later types. Up to the present day’s Homo sapiens, examples of the main types have been hybrids of older and more modern features. One of the earliest species of the genus Homo to be discovered is Homo habilis, which basically means “handy man.” The name comes from the belief at the time of its discovery that this species was the first to start using stone tools. The first fossils to be uncovered in Olduvai Gorge were from the same stratigraphic layer as simple stone tools. Fossils of the crania and postcranial skeleton for this species have been found in both eastern and southern Africa and date to around 2.5–1.6 million years ago. Given the gradual changes that take place in evolution, Homo habilis shares a number of characteristics that are similar to the genus Australopithecus, such as in the postcranial elements. That said, the size and shape of the Homo habilis skull are markedly different. The size of the brain is much larger relative to the size of the body, being around 680 cc. In order to house a larger brain, the skull features a more vertical frontal bone, creating a more vertical forehead. The brow ridges that sit on the lower portion of the frontal bone are also reduced in size."

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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The Languages of the Ancient Near East: The History of the Languages and Scripts Developed across th

"Perhaps not surprisingly given how advanced they were in comparison to contemporaries, the Egyptians invented one of the first writing systems ever, and for centuries, people thought these ancient texts held some sort of secret, be it aliens, advanced technology lost to the world, or mystical cures for all of the world’s ills. Even the ancient Egyptians saw their writing systems as full of mystery and hidden knowledge - according to Egyptian mythology, writing was invented by the ibis-headed god Thoth, the most intellectual of the gods. Along with Egypt, the cultural and geographic region known as Mesopotamia was home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations and also the first known form of writing, cuneiform. Many different ethnic groups vied for power in ancient Mesopotamia over the course of antiquity, spanning about 3,000 years, and many of them spoke different languages. Despite these differences, the people in Mesopotamia shared many cultural attributes, including similar religious practices, a common art and architecture style, and a shared use of the cuneiform script. The languages spoken by the peoples of Mesopotamia were as diverse as the many ethnic groups, but as those groups asserted their military, economic, and cultural power over the other groups, two languages became dominant in the region: Sumerian and Akkadian. The greatest irony of the lack of primary source information about the Phoenicians is that their language and writing happened to be the most influential in antiquity, a byproduct of their voyages and colonization, which spread their language across the Mediterranean. It was the forerunner to the Greek alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet was directly derived, and thus most of the written languages of the modern West. "

Charles River Editors (Author), Victoria Woodson (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Victoria Woodson