The Ancients - Podcast Rankings and reviews

The Production: A. The sound quality is exceptional. The sound is engineered nicely. Most interviews are of high technical quality. B. Tristan Hughes has an amazing voice. He is easy to listen to. The Program: A. The scholarship is top notch. Every episode is fact-filled. The interviews are scholar-grade without being overly pretentious. B. The themes covered on the podcast are produced for the curious mind. If you are an archeologist at heart, who missed your life’s calling, then this is a podcast for you. C. The only podcast in my library that I can repeat episodes and still learn something. An amazing podcast. In my top-3 all time.

This is one of my favourite podcasts - every episode gets in-depth into a fascinating aspect of ancient history, and the guests are always hugely knowledgeable experts in their field. It’s well-produced and the host keeps the show light enough to be entertaining and asks really interesting questions. The topics covered are as diverse as dinosaurs & Ancient Rome so It’s great listening for all those even a little bit interested in history. Definitely recommend!

Thank you Tristan for your dedication to making a top tier history podcast. The depth of sources, the expertise of the guests, the range of topics…everything is purposeful, well curated and exceptional.

On a personal note, I started listening to this after my uncle passed and my father fell into deep dementia. They are the two men I used to be able to sit and talk about history with for countless hours. They taught me from an early age about how the dates and facts may change but that human nature changes very little over great expanses of human history. I miss those talks deeply and this show playing in my ear as I go about my work makes me feel like they’re not quite so absent.

I felt it necessary to share this to demonstrate how profoundly important I’ve found this show. I hope everyone working on it gets to read this review and that it helps them to feel the impact of their work on individual lives.

Best to all of you and I hope you can keep doing what you’re doing for my whole life.

The Ancients covers a wide variety of topics and eras via interviews of excellent scholars who have interesting, and sometimes controversial, points of view. It's one of my go-to podcasts and I'm rarely disappointed. I just wish the tech team would stop interrupting the conversation. Ads are fine, but not in the middle of a sentence!

This show does a wonderful job with reinterpreting our historical past. Just because ancient and classical history had a different culture and social climate doesn’t mean that we can’t add our modern geopolitical culture to it. I love your reimagining of a gay Achilles!! I look forward to the episode for a black Cleopatra, lesbian Artemis, and first nation Genghis Khan!! Also for a fact check. Tell your expert that the “Achilles Heel” story wasn’t a part of the myth until much later, written by Statius. Achilles gets cut in the Iliad, at the fight at the river. I wouldn’t want you to mislead your audience. Happy Pride month!!

Was quickly becoming my favorite prehistory podcast, and I’ve tried all I can find, though now it’s reverted to extensively covered topics of Greece and Rome. I hope Tristan makes more of an effort to explore non European topics, and for me those are far and away the best; his episodes on the Olmec and Aboriginal Australians are superb while the mini series on Sparta and Pompeii are—in my opinion—tired. These are some episodes I’d love to hear; Monte Albán, the role and impact of pottery across the globe, the mesoamerican ball game, and other recent non sapien people like the Denisovans and hobbits of SE Asia. I hope you’ll continue to pursue subjects left out of most elementary educations, cheers!

UPDATE: the episodes have become almost exclusively about Rome or Alexander the Great. The only recent episode on the Americas is behind a paywall. Going in the wrong direction, unfollowed.