8. The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities

in the year 1625 an Italian nobleman named Pietro della Valley went on a tour of the Middle East Della Valle was a prolific traveler he journeyed around Asia North Africa and even India he married an Assyrian Christian princess in Damascus and now the two of them traveled together journeying by horseback and camel accompanied by local guides at this time travel in this region couldn't have been more dangerous the Ottoman and Persian empires were at war fighting over who would rule in Baghdad and meanwhile local bandits took advantage of the chaos to prey on travelers in those days Lions even roamed in these hills due to these various dangers de la Falaise guides were constantly on edge it was June the 18th 1625 when they spotted a distant group of tribesmen on the horizon their guides decided that they might be in danger and began to search for a place to hide in the distance they spotted the looming mass of a series of enormous ruins as della valle later wrote in his memoirs being suspicious for some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds for more security we removed the mile further and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings which we saw from far away della valleys group stayed in those ruins for several nights while their guides negotiated with the local ruler asking for safe passage during the day under the baking Iraqi Sun della valle passed his time by walking among those monumental ruins our removal hence being still deferred I went in the forenoon to take a more diligent view of the ruins of the above said ancient building what had been I could not understand but I had found it have been built with very good bricks most of which were stamped with certain unknown letters which appeared very ancient I observed that they had been cemented together not was lying but with bitumen or pitch Della Valle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing that littered the ground of this ruined place he explored further and wrote down some of the symbols that he saw again and again stamped into the stones and pieces of clay brick surveying the ruins again I found on the ground some pieces of black marble hard and fine engraven with the same letters as the bricks which seemed to me to be a kind of seal amongst other symbols which I discovered in that short time too I found in many places one was like a pyramid and the other resembles a star of eight points Della Valle and his wife didn't know it but they had stumbled across the ruins of ward a city that had formed the center of one of mankind's first civilizations this society was known as Sumer and it was where so much of the world we know today first began eventually negotiations with the local leader fell apart and Della Valle A's guides no longer felt safe camped out there in the ruins they departed in the dead of night and fled to safety across the desert in dela valleys bags were a few of the clay tablets that he had found scattered around the ruins of or these would be the first examples ever seen in Europe of a language that had been dead and forgotten for thousands of years all the way home Della Valle a must have turned those tablets over in his hands gazed at them as serious ancient symbols he must have wondered to himself who had built those enormous mounds of brick and earth all alone out there in the middle of the desert what did the symbols on those broken pieces of clay mean and if such a great city had once stood there what in all the world could have happened to it [Music] you [Music] you my name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to the fall of civilizations podcast each episode I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history I want to ask what did they have in common what led to their fall and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world in this episode I want to go back to the very beginning and look at a society that is one of the candidates for the first ever technological human civilization these are the people of Sumer who we call the Sumerians I want to show how over the course of millennia the Sumerians would build a society that would form the blueprint for all the followed after I want to show how they rose to invent writing mathematics and the wheel and built the largest cities that humanity had ever seen and I want to explore what happened to cause their final and devastating collapse in the highlands of southeastern Turkey a range of snow tops limestone peaks rise over 3,000 meters above the flat plains beneath these are the Taurus Mountains the mountains of Turkey rise so sharply that rain clouds find it difficult to pass over them instead these clouds pool in their hollows and valleys and give these hills an exceptionally high rate of annual rainfall in spring and summer the warm air means that the clouds are even denser and violent thunderstorms rock these mountains to echoing of the stones of the valleys as a result this is a landscape shaped by water the steep sides of the Taurus Mountains have been eroded to form streams and waterfalls while underground rivers have cut into the rock and hollowed out some of the largest caves in Asia just as it has shaped the rocks water has also shaped the beliefs of this region's people the name of these mountains Taurus comes from the Latin word for bull and the reason for this isn't hard to see temples have been unearthed all across these mountains decorated with terracotta statues of bulls since ancient times the people who lived here worshipped the storm God - who they believed he rode on the back of a bull perhaps because the sound of the thunderstorms reminded them of the thumping of enormous hooves accompanied with the cracking and booming of these thunderstorms these heavy spring rains drain into streams and join rivers already flowing down from the snowy mountain passes of Armenia soon these small rivers join together and flow down from the mountains and out onto the wide flat plains beneath in too great majestic water courses that run together in near parallel for nearly 2,000 kilometers the vast floodplain of these rivers is today the land we call Iraq in Arabic this area is called be led lrf attain the land of the two rivers and in the West it has been known since ancient times by its Greek name combining the words mezzos or middle and Potamus or River Mesopotamia the land between the rivers these two great waterways are known as the Tigris and the Euphrates for millennia these rivers have brought life down into the flat floodplain of Iraq and the source of that life comes from some of the most lifeless things the rocks of the mountains themselves virtually all rocks are held together with tiny flecks of two different materials called quartz and feldspar quartz is a clear glittering crystal formed from oxygen and silicon while feldspar is a complex mineral derived from silicon together they make up over 60% of the Earth's crust and when rivers cut their roots through the mountain gullies and underground streams their waters wash over the rocks and dissolve the soluble parts but quartz and feldspar don't dissolve in water and so these tiny crystals are carried along by the river in cloud of glittering particles we call this substance silt silt is sometimes known by the more poetic name rock flower and it's particles are smaller than a grain of sand but these tiny specks can have an enormous impact soil with a high silt content tends to hold water better and promotes air circulation and for this reason silty soil forms the perfect habitat for most plants the rivers Tigris and Euphrates transport vast amounts of silt down into the lowlands of Iraq every year and as a consequence this flat stretch of otherwise arid desert has become exceptionally fertile for the history of this region and the history of all humanity these tiny particles would prove immensely significant other than its rich clay soil the desert plains of southern Iraq are an inhospitable landscape in fact this is perhaps the last place you might expect the first human civilizations to arise for one thing the climate of this region is extremely hot and dry summer temperatures can reach over 52 degrees centigrade or 126 degrees Fahrenheit and rainfall is rare especially in summer coupled with the strong winds that blow across these Plains this means that the soil is arid and windswept and although the seasonal flooding of the rivers brings life to the earth these floods are also unpredictable in Egypt the River Nile flows directly from the Great Lakes of Africa which act as a stabilizing and regulating force but the Tigris and Euphrates depend on the amount of rain that fell on the mountains of Turkey Armenia and Kurdistan a quantity that varies greatly from year to year years of drought can often be followed by years of devastating floods and during winter the whole plane is covered with a thick layer of mud the region of southern Iraq is also poor in Natural Resources the land is essentially nothing but a floodplain made of clay and silt there are no metals to be mined here and virtually no stone and because of all these challenges it took early humans a long time to reach this hostile environment in the far prehistoric archaic humans like Homo erectus vied for survival in the upper reaches of the rivers archaeologists have found stone axes and other artifacts dating back to nearly half a million years ago but the Riverlands of southern Iraq weren't suitable for this hunter-gatherer lifestyle but about 13,000 years ago things began to change the first nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down in permanent villages these early innovators had noticed something interesting they saw that when they threw away the discarded seeds of edible plants that same plant would later sprout out of their rubbish dumps and this gave them an idea they realized that if you buried plant seeds in the earth fed them and watered them more of the same plants would grow these were some of the first farmers and once they found a good patch of land they quite understandably didn't want to move they soon built houses nearby and storehouses to keep food through the winter they banded together into larger communities in order to divide the labour of farming and to protect their grain should anyone else try to take it they learned how to take the clay from the ground and shape it into pots but they were still limited to areas where the rains were plentiful to the mountains and the foothills from about the year 6500 BC these human settlements began to spread century by century millennium by millennium they worked their way down the courses of the two great rivers and into the inhospitable land of southern Iraq who these people were what language they spoke and what they called themselves we have no idea today we call this stretch of several thousand years the Umayyad period named quite arbitrarily after the site where their first artifacts were found as the Umayyad people moved down the rivers of Iraq they began to notice other things too they noticed that date-palms grew in some areas of the river providing them with a rich and delicious source of calories they soon found out that these two could be cultivated and planted in orchards and they also noticed that these palms could provide shade for other more fragile plants allowing them to be grown too beneath the harsh Iraqi Sun and they made another crucial discovery too they realized that they didn't have to grow their plants only on the banks of the river with a bit of hard work they could dig channels that diverted the life-giving water inland now they could grow crops just about anywhere so long as you could dig a canal long enough and the people of this region would soon become very good at digging canals worked properly in this manner this landscape could be immensely productive in their fields the people here grew wheat millet and sesame and in gardens beneath the shade of their date palms they also grew pomegranates grapes and figs as well as chickpeas lentils leeks garlic cucumbers and watercress but there was one noticeable patch of green in the midst of all this desert in the south of Iraq the rivers Tigris and Euphrates branched into deltas and shallow lakes before they meet the ocean creating an ancient Marsh landscape here dense thickets of reeds grow so tall you can't see over the tops of them populated with buffalo wild boar and marshland birds since ancient times the people here have built their houses out of reeds binding them together into incredibly strong beams of up to a metre thick and building large vaulted houses out of nothing but reeds and it's in this marshy southern landscape that the greatest Sumerian cities rose [Music] just as Mesopotamia was watered by two great rivers its lands were also populated by two great peoples these were the people of Sumer and the people of our card over the course of their history the Sumerians and the Acadians grew together in such a symbiotic way that it's impossible to tell the story of one without the other we know a decent amount about the Akkadian people in the north they spoke a language in the Semitic family meaning that it's in the same language family as the Aramaic of the Bible and later Hebrew and Arabic this language seems to have been indigenous to the region and it shares grammar and words with many other languages that surrounded it but the Sumerian people are much more mysterious in fact they are such a mystery that they've caused archaeologists to refer to what's called the Sumerian problem Sumerians spoke what we call a language isolate that is it has no relation to any of the languages around it and it's essentially in a language family all of its own Sumerian was so alien to the region that early scholars who discovered its first texts didn't believe it could be a real language at all they thought it must have been a kind of code used to communicate in secret this alone has led some historians to ask whether the Sumerians may have arrived in southern Iraq from somewhere else the Sumerian culture centered on the Sea coast of Iraq's far south and so some have suggested that they may have arrived by boat some backing for this theory may come in the writings of Roman historian Flavius Josephus who wrote down a Babylonian legend that he heard in the 1st century AD it relates the story of a half-man half-fish called Oh Anna's who walked out of the sea and taught the people of Mesopotamia the secrets of culture he brought them the knowledge of letters sciences and all kinds of techniques he also taught them how to found cities build temples create laws and measure plots of land he revealed to them how to work the land and gather fruits after teaching mankind all these secrets Oh Anna's leaps back into the sea and swims away it's possible that in this myth ancient storytellers have preserved some memory of the arrival of the Sumerians landing on masts by boat and bringing with them their advanced urban culture some have even argued that the Sumerians may have come from as far afield as India and more evidence for the migration theory seems to come from the words that the Sumerians used for their professions for more common jobs the ones that involved manual labor the Sumerians used old priests Sumerian words meanwhile they brought new words with them to describe more sophisticated and urban occupations for instance the words for scribe and wine maker are both distinctly Sumerian but others have proposed a more interesting theory which does seem to solve some of these contradictions although it does seem a little far-fetched I think it is worth mentioning here the clue to this theory comes once again from mythology the Sumerian version of history was dominated by a devastating event of apocalyptic proportions and if you were brought up reading Bible stories you may find it familiar the Sumerians believed that in a time long before in the time of their most distant ancestors a great flood had washed over the world this same story would later pass on into the legends of the Babylonian Empire and from there to the Hebrew poets who wrote the first books of the Bible for this reason the story of the flood is perhaps the oldest continuously told story and it's in this legend that the clue to the origin of the Sumerians might lie the story of the flood is so striking that many historians with varying degrees of credibility have tried to come up with some historical event that may have inspired it and history is actually full of great inundations when the last ice age ended around 10,000 BC global temperatures rose between 4 to 7 degrees over a period of about 5,000 years up until that point vast ice sheets had covered the land in the north of the planet reaching as far south as Berlin but as temperatures rose these ice caps melted and their water poured back into the oceans global sea levels rose an average of two and a half centimeters a year until by the end the sea had risen an incredible 120 metres or enough to completely swallow a 30-story building around the world the sea engulfed vast regions of the coast the land bridge that at once connected Russia and Alaska was submerged separating Asia and the Americas forever low-lying regions of what is now Europe's North Sea flooded turning Great Britain into an island and in the Middle East the effects were felt just as dramatically during the lows sea levels of the Ice Age the Tigris and Euphrates had flowed for a further 600 kilometers joining into a single River and meandering along a stretch of low-lying Valley wedged between what is now Iran and Saudi Arabia this Grand River would have met the Indian Ocean around the region of Dubai today and if you're having trouble visualizing this I'll post a map on patreon of how this region would have looked in those days some historians have argued that Neolithic humans may have made their home in this fertile valley having journeyed down from the mountains of Iran but as the glaciers melted the sea advanced slowly at first but with an increasing speed over the next five thousand years the coastline would have moved an average rate of 120 meters a year that's over a kilometer every 10 years or 1 meter every 3 days if there were humans living in this low-lying region at the time this event must have been utterly terrifying the next centuries would see these people driven north by the encroaching waves which swallowed whole forests and villages these people would have been pressed into ever denser populations forced to adapt as they went they would have been a roving band of refugees never able to settle anywhere for long before the sea made its next advance this Exodus would have continued until the planets temperature stabilized and the Seacoast reached its farthest point right around the Year 5000 BC at the time that Sumerian culture as we know it burst onto the historical stage so this is a theory that I think deserves some consideration that as the waves of semitic speaking farmers moved down the rivers from the mountains to the north they met another population coming up from the south a ravaged and devastated people speaking a language that had evolved independently and telling tales of a flood that had drowned the whole world this theory could be supported by that legend of the amphibious fish man awareness is it possible that the Sumerians came to southern Iraq not by boat but actually walking out of a land that was now at the bottom of the sea another legend called the myth of Enki an inner thug relates a creation story in which the god Enki creates man in a land called dill moon like the Garden of Eden dill moon is an earthly paradise in dill moon the crow does not utter its cry the lion does not kill the wolf does not seize the lamb the wild dog devourer of kids is unknown dill moon is thought to have been what is now Bahrain an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf that body of water there was once a fertile river valley all we have on this subject is speculation and until any further evidence is found this will remain just a theory but as a storyteller I can't help but be drawn to this colorful explanation when we try to work out the truth of what happened in this incredibly distant past we are reminded that history is not a rigid set of dates and facts but a continuing process of inquiry and two bay it can sometimes feel like mapping the surface of a planet in another solar system or like exploring the dark depths of the deep sea and all we have to work with are the small spots of light that history provides we may never know the truth about where the Sumerians came from but there is plenty that we do know the Sumerians refer to themselves as oak saga Giga or the black headed people and the Acadians called them - salamati Accardi which meant the same thing in their own language from carvings that depict Sumerians we can see how they wore their hair curly on top and cut short on the sides common men wore sheepskin kilts while the richer people would have worn colored fabrics spun from wool decorated with tassels and beads among the wealthy both men and women wore jewelry anklets bracelets necklaces and ear ornaments made of copper and sometimes gold remarkably we also have a great deal of evidence about Sumerian music like everything else the Sumerians wrote their music down on clay tablets and we've also discovered other texts that explain how to play it including how to tune the instruments today the musicians gail and philip newman have actually been able to recreate the sounds of ancient Sumer using authentic instruments of the day early forms of liars and lutes reed pipes and bells made of clay philip and gail agreed to let me share some of their music which you'll hear a few times throughout this episode and so today we're able to hear the sounds of the music that once played in the temples and courtyards of cities like era do or and or rook I'll put detailed notes on patreon about each of these pieces of music so you can learn more about them and their history these two great peoples the Semitic accordions and the Sumerians formed a symbiosis over the next centuries that would see their cultures run in parallel just like their two great rivers they shared their successes and advances they shared the cities that were even now growing to become the largest ever seen but they also shared their failures and as a result their fates became inextricably intertwined the Sumerians believed that the world was a roughly circular landmass surrounded on all sides by a huge body of water they believed that another ocean also lay above their heads held in place by the solid structure of the sky which occasionally let some of this water through as rain they divided water into two types that of the rain and rivers sweet water and that of the sea bitter water Sumerians called their homeland key and gear which means the land of the noble Lords to describe the settled societies of the Sumerians and accordions they used the word Kalam meaning civilized while they used the word cool to describe the mountainous zones bordering the plains core in the Sumerian language meant Mountain but it also came to mean rebellious barbarous and wild and at this time that's how the outside world must have looked to them to their south and west the vast desert of Arabia yawned a rolling sea of sand dunes when nothing grew home to fierce nomadic tribes to the north the rocky Taurus Mountains of Turkey and Kurdistan hemmed the men full of Hardy mountain people while the Zagros Mountains of Iran formed the edge of their world to the east today the Arabic word for the region of Upper Mesopotamia still holds within it a sense of this feeling of isolation they call it al Jazeera meaning the island I'll post some maps on Twitter and patreon for you to picture this region yourself but despite the challenges of their landscape the Sumerians flourished they had no stone to build with so instead they learned to make bricks from the river mud mixing them with straw gravel and broken pottery and baking them with clay they made everything from pots and plates to sickles and writing tablets they had no wood so instead they harvested vast numbers of reeds tying them together into bundles and plaiting them together into mats the Sumerians invented or adopted the pottery wheel the wagon wheel the plow and the sailboat their buildings used complex arches and domes they worked out how to cast metals such as copper and later bronze and the Sumerians were all so avid mathematicians they developed complex systems of measurement as well as methods for dividing multiplying and calculating angles even writing down the first ever multiplication tables on clay tablets we actually used Sumerian mathematics every day it was the Sumerians who divided time into the minutes and seconds we still use and since their number system worked on a base of 60 rather than our system of 10 that's why we have 60 minutes in an hour the reason for using 60 as the base of a number system is actually quite simple and it's rooted in the design of our bodies if you hold your hand out in front of you right now you'll notice that each of your four fingers is divided into three segments it's thought that ancient people would use the thumb of their right hand to tap each segment of the finger counting up to 12 when they reach 12 they would raise a finger on their left hand counting up the 12s and when you had five fingers raised on your left hand you had 60 and you had to start again the fact that there were 12 cycles of the moon in each year would have confirmed for the Sumerians that this was the number system intended by the gods the 360 degrees we still use in angle measurement is another relic of this system due to this spark of ingenuity Sumerian society grooved at a slow but steady pace they dug vast networks of irrigation canals that extended the agricultural zone around the rivers and also allowed them to transport goods in canal boats they built dams to regulate the flow of the rivers and ensure that the spring floods came in a more controlled way in fact the Sumerian language has a vast array of words to describe the different kinds of canals reservoirs dams and lock gates required to control their water gradually the landscape of southern Iraq transformed from dusty salt flats and marshy swamps to a green patchwork of farmland many historians have argued that it was the digging of these canals and watercourses that originally led to the greatest social organization we see during the Sumerian period these extensive systems of water management needed careful planning engineering expertise and mathematical calculations work team needed to be organized and paid in food and beer foremen and overseers needed be appointed and all of this led to a kind of early bureaucracy that gave rise to the first true States in the 1930s historian Arnold Toynbee famously argued that it was just these environmental challenges in southern Iraq that created the conditions in which civilization could be created the desiccation of the region impelled the fathers of the Samara civilization to come to grips with the jungle swamp of the Lower Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and to transform it the ordeal through which the fathers of this numeric civilization passed is commemorated in Sioux Merrick legend the slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk and the creation of the world out of her mortal remains signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness and the creation of the land by the canalization of the waters in the draining of the soil the tough semi desert landscape created what he called a stimulus and response effect in these early people join B argues that in conditions that are too comfortable people have little need of increased social organization or technological development and in conditions that are too harsh society finds it impossible to develop he argues that it's in environments such as southern Iraq where the challenges are numerous but not overwhelming that a cradle of civilization can occur [Music] according to Sumerian texts the first city in the region was the city of era do one controversial document known as the Sumerian king list describes era do as the place where the god Enki first decided that a king should rule when kingship from heaven was lowered the kingship was in error do in era do Allah limb became king he ruled for twenty eight thousand eight hundred years a langar ruled for 36,000 years for obvious reasons many historians have questioned the reliability of this source some have even gone so far as to call it a piece of utter fiction or a later piece of propaganda designed to legitimize a usurper to the throne but the King list does tell us how the Sumerians of at least one point thought of their history and many have argued that era too may well have been the world's first City era do was founded around the Year 5400 BC that's nearly seven and a half millennia ago at this time populations of woolly mammoths survivors of the end of the Ice Age still roamed in remote parts of the world era do was populated by Sumerian speakers and soon it would make up just one of a whole constellation of small cities that dotted the landscape of southern Iraq these independent city-states were centered around their temples and ruled by priests kings known as the NC records show that these NC were often assisted by a council of elders which included both men and women most of the largest cities in this period were probably no bigger than about 10,000 people the borders of these city-states were defined by the courses of canals and specially created boundary stones carved monuments left jutting out of the earth to mark the line between one territory and another slowly these cities began to eclipse the old who biood culture that had preceded them art and architecture began to take on the form that we would truly call Sumerian and technology also began to take huge leaps forward this first period seems to have been a time of relative peace there's little evidence of organized warfare or the keeping of professional soldiers in these early cities most towns during this period went without walls one exceptionally ancient sumerian myth called the gifts of Inanna seems to capture some of the spirit of this period of transition it describes technology and the refinements of civilization being handed down by Enki the king of the gods to his daughter the goddess and Nana she later passes them down to the people of Sumer holy Anana received the craft of the carpenter the craft of the coppersmith the craft of the scribe the craft of the Smith the craft of the leather worker the craft of the Builder the craft of the reed worker holy Anana received wisdom the shepherd's hut the knowledge to pile up glowing charcoals the sheepfold Enki teaches a nana about family the proper laws of inheritance and the art of good judgment but he also goes on to give her other gifts so of which show that the darker side of civilization was already beginning to make itself known wholly Inanna received deceit and the rebel lands holier Nana received heroism power wickedness the plundering of cities and the making of lamentations it may be that the ancient Sumerians already recognized right at the dawn of settled human society what the scholar Volta benjamine would one day write that there is no record of civilization that is not at the same time a record of barbarism and it's true that during this period the Sumerians began practices that would begin a sorrowful phase of human history among them is the use of slave labor they captured men and women from the hill countries outside their borders and used their labor to fuel the growth of their own economy in the last episode I used the metaphor of the death of stars to talk about the life cycle that empires often pass through but we might also think about the birth of civilizations in this way the first stars were born from gas clouds compacted together under the weight of their own gravity into a spinning ball of matter under enough pressure the temperature of the Stars core increased and finally nuclear fusion began the first stars burst into light when enough people gather together in one place that settlement obtains a kind of gravity it draws other people towards it and as the size of the settlement increases so does pressure on its various systems in some cases this pressure results in those people being fused together into more complex forms of organization sometime around the Year 3200 BC the first star of these human settlements began to burst into light and that light was the invention of writing [Music] one Sumerian epic poem called and marker and the Lord of errata gives the first known story about the invention of writing this poem attributes the invention to a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can't remember them all because the messengers mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message the Lord of Calibur patted sin play and put words on it like a tablet until then there had been no putting words on play the Sumerians had two things around them in virtually limitless abundance that's the clay beneath their feet and the reeds that grew in the marshes and along the banks of the rivers and it's these two resources that combined to form the first human writing Sumerian scribes would pick up a lump of clay big enough to fit in their hand in fact about the size of a modern smartphone they would take a piece of reeds cut into the shape of a wedge and print it over and over into the clay to form symbols the distinctive wedge shapes of the reeds give this form of writing its name we call it cuneiform the oldest cuneiform clay tablets come from the city of Uruk and date to the late 4th millennium probably around the 30 second or 31st centuries this script originally consisted of pictographs small pictures designed to depict objects so everyone could understand what they represented these were first used to keep track of everyday things like rations and supplies and on some of these very early tablets you can still see very clearly what they mean a bowl of food is depicted with an eating mouth next to six impressions and a sheaf of wheat next to five this indicates that a worker can exchange this tablet for six bowls of food and five sheaves of wheat I'll post some examples of these on patreon for you to see scribes would have had to work fast copying hundreds of documents throughout their day and slowly this pressure meant that the signs had to become simpler and more abstract before long they no longer looks like the objects they described after the year 3000 the number of symbols was reduced from around 1500 to about 600 and someone else had the bright idea that each symbol could stand for a certain sound instead of a whole idea this was the beginning of the first alphabet but it meant that now only an educated few could understand writing and soon a separate class of scribes emerged the human brain would never be the same again people could now read the words of Kings and scribes who had died hundreds of years before and they could also begin to write down everything that they had learned so it could be remembered and more importantly it could be built upon [Music] partly due to this ability to record knowledge the technology of Sumer around this time began to take even greater leaps forward this next period of history would be known as the period of aruch the period is named after the city of Uruk which by the middle of the 4th millennium BC had grown into the largest and most powerful city in southern Mesopotamia one of the key ways that historians mark the shift into the ORAC period is by observing a dramatic change that occurred around this time in the region's pottery if you're thinking that the pottery must have got more sophisticated and ornate as technology improved then you're mistaken in fact the ancient pottery of the Umayyad period was exceptionally beautiful it was made on a device known as a slow wheel and painted with distinctive geometrical designs in brown or black it was a luxury item for the select few the shift to the Uruk period saw a great increase in the amount of pottery produced but the quality fell dramatically thanks to a technology known as the fast wheel clay jars and pots could now be made in great numbers by workmen in intensive workshops this was the first era of mass production the booming economy of the Sumerian cities comes to life in their documents the clay tablets tell us that in the city of gira so for instance fifteen thousand women were employed in the textile industry one factory produced eleven hundred tons of flour a year as well as bread beer and linseed oil this factory employed 134 specialists and 858 skilled workers of which the vast majority were women since there was no currency at this time workers were paid directly in food and other goods the minimum ration of an unskilled factory worker consisted of 20 litres of BA a month along with two liters of oil and two kilos of wool per year meanwhile their supervisor would earn roughly twice this ration the poor in sumerian society were downtrodden and were probably pretty miserable they often had to borrow food or silver from predatory moneylenders at crushing interest rates of as high as thirty percent but despite this rising inequality by the middle of the fourth millennium BC economic advancement meant that the city of Uruk had grown into the largest and most powerful city in southern Mesopotamia this was around the Year 3500 BC or over 5000 years ago [Music] by this time nearly two thousand years had already passed since the original founding of the first city at era - that's enough time to take us from the present moment to the age of Julius Caesar by this time Sumerian civilization was already ancient but the very earliest of the pyramids of Egypt would still not be built for another 900 years in Britain the Neolithic monuments Stonehenge was at this time just a series of barrows and earthworks and its large stones would not be moved into place for another thirteen hundred years when writing was invented in a rook in the 32nd century BC the last population of wooly mammoths to survive the end of the Ice Age were still clinging to life on a rocky outcrop in the East Siberian sea known as Wrangel Island by this time Brooke would have had about 50,000 inhabitants that's only enough to fill a modern medium-sized football stadium but at this time it was the largest city that the earth had ever seen the world's earliest surviving piece of literature known as the Epic of Gilgamesh begins in this city it is the story of a king of Uruk named Gilgamesh who likely ruled some time in the third millenium whatever the historical facts of his reign are Gilgamesh made enough of an impression as a ruler that he went down into legend as a mythical hero two-thirds God and one-third man and although there's much more myth than fact in this ancient tale the Gilgamesh epic does tell us a little about how Sumerian society changed in the early centuries of a third millennium for one thing it's clear that warfare had begun to increase in the region the tale opens in the powerful city of Uruk and one feature of the city is mentioned as a great source of pride that's a ring of enormous fortified walls as these lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh show behold the outer walls which gleam like copper see the inner wall which none can rival touch the threshold stone it is from ancient days go up and walk on the wall of Erik inspect the cornerstone and examine its brickwork is it not built of baked brick it's clear that city walls were now a necessity but we can tell from the great pride shown in Europe's fortifications that they may have also been quite rare in fact throughout the story the city is referred to repeatedly as strong walled Brook we also get a sense of how the city was divided during this time suggesting some level of urban planning from its rulers these parts comprised baroque one-third for city one-third for garden one-third for field and a precinct for the temple of Ishtar at the height of the Uruk period the city covered an area of two and a half square kilometres it had a port on the river along with workshops and cluttered houses at the center of the city was Eric's famous white temple it was elevated 21 metres and covered in white gypsum plaster that reflected the sunlight and would have caused the temple to glow during the day if you walked the streets of Uruk during this time you would have seen markets for a produce like beans and lentils pomegranates and dates jars of date syrup and oil in the richer parts of town houses would be built from baked bricks but elsewhere they would be mud and clay dried in the Sun the houses would likely be arranged in a chaotic way creating a labyrinth of alleys and Warren's covered by reed matting to keep them cool in the heat of the day farmers will be carrying large bundles of reeds and wheat on their backs and herders would bring their long-haired sheep and oxen into the city here and there you would see men sitting in circles in shaded courtyards sharing a large jar of beer in the center all sipping it through long straws made of hollow reeds while the Sumerians did import some wines from the northern regions it was beer that they loved most of all they had over 30 different varieties with names like white dark cloudy and sweetened with honey some of their beer was flavored with herbs it was brewed directly from the wheat and barley of the fields and if he bought the cheapest kind it would often still have seeds of grain floating at the bottom one cuneiform text has even preserved a kind of drinking song I will summon Brewers and cupbearers to service floods of beer and pass it around what pleasure what delight blissfully to take it in to sing jubilantly of this noble liquor our hearts enchanted and our souls radiant we can imagine the conversations that these ancient people would have had around their jars of beer probably not that different to the conversations you'd find in any bar or pub today some of these everyday concerns have been preserved in lists of ancient Sumerian proverbs these groups of beer drinkers would doubtless have complained that they were not appreciated at work I am a thoroughbred steed but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a card and carry reeds and stubble others would have commiserated about one of the oldest human concerns not having enough money the poor man is better dead than alive if he has bread he has no soul if he has sold he has no bread and as with drinkers in all parts of history they would have fallen out and shouted insults at each other in the streets if you were put in water the water would become foul if you were put in a garden the fruit would have brought at night people usually slept on their rooftops since the heat inside the houses would have been too much for them the city would have been a pungent mixture of smells pottery kilns and brick works would have belched smoke throughout the day there were no drainage systems in the roads and people would have throwing their waste out into the street in the houses people laid down layers of clay crushed gypsum dust and reed mats to create a soft carpet like effect from the epicenter of this great metropolis the Arak civilization sent out ripples across the world and eventually a number of similarly great cities rose up around it but as the 4th millennium drew to a close another Sumerian city was rising in power and soon it would take Eric's place as the new center of Sumerian culture it would flourish into realms of untold wealth and pushed the boundaries of what humanity thought possible in the realms of art and architecture it's the city whose ruins we opened this episode with and the name of that city was all who was situated right at the point whether Euphrates River met the sea it was a trading port and fishing town where seagulls would have circled and fishermen came in with their caches of fish oysters and turtles its position both on the sea and the river would have made it a booming hub of the region's trade as we've already seen if you needed clay or reeds southern Iraq was the place to be but for virtually everything else they needed the Sumerians had to import from other lands but luckily for them they always had something to trade they were alone among almost all the nations of the ancient Middle East in that they produced a large surplus and variety of food archaeology shows that due to their farming abilities the Mesopotamians of antiquity enjoyed a far more rich and varied diet than their neighbors in either Turkey or Iran we have even uncovered some ancient Sumerian recipes written down on clay tablets this is the recipe for a dish they called tofu and it gives you a sense of the variety they enjoyed get the water ready add fat salt beer onion rocket coriander semolina cumin and beetroot add them to the cooking pot then pound leek and garlic together and add but all blend and reduced to a pulp then sprinkle with coriander and carrot I'll post some more of these ancient recipes on Twitter and patreon in case you'd like to try to cook some Sumerian delicacies yourself boats full of wheat and grains dried reeds and figs were now forging up the rivers bringing food to all the neighboring lands and in return other resources flowed back copper came down from the mountains of northwestern Iran and later by ship from the island of Cyprus tin traveled through the long mountain passes from Afghanistan as it would throughout the later Bronze Age silver came down the Euphrates on barges from turkey's taurus mountains while gold came overland from egypt and by ship from india ordinary wood for everyday building could be chopped in the Zagros Mountains of Iran to the east but for finer constructions for palaces and ornate city gates only the prized wood of the cedar tree would do this was brought by ship from Lebanon where it grew among the high mountain passes in fact one episode in the epic of gilgamesh relates the Kings quest to slay a monster in the mountains of Lebanon and steal this beautiful wood from its forests the ancient sumerians traded in what we would consider a truly globalized way from their tiny coast on the Persian Gulf their ships sailed out trading ports in modern Bahrain and Oman and from there they sailed along the coast to trade with another of the world's most ancient and mysterious cultures the people we know today as the Indus Valley Civilisation from there the Sumerians got all kinds of spices and gemstones like carnelian as well as the brilliant blue lapis lazuli that the Sumerians adored they used it to make jewelry and amulets inlays in gaming boards musical instruments and sculptures of astonishing beauty I'll post an image of some of these amazing artifacts on patreon for you to see all of this trade would have passed through all and swelled the city to a wealth that likely no other human habitation had ever achieved grave goods uncovered in all show not only the incredible wealth of its rulers but also magnificent craftsmanship that suggests an advanced community of artists one such artifact found in a royal tomb in or has given us an incredible insight into the lives and manners of the ancient Sumerians it's an ornate decorative piece of furniture inlaid with a mosaic of shale red limestone and lapis lazuli and it's images showed detailed scenes from everyday life around 4600 years ago today it is called the standard of all on one side the artifact shows images of the Sumerians at war the chariots pulled by donkeys the soldiers wearing leather capes and helmets the men carrying Spears and axes on the other side it depicts the Sumerians of peace farmers and herders working on one level and above them the scribes with their shaved heads sitting at their desks of course I put a number of these images and details of this artifact up on patreon for you to see at this time urbanism in the Sumerian world was reaching its peak by the end of the third millennium a majority of the region's population would live in cities and in this newly urbanized world the economic power of or remained king over the next centuries its power expanded and contracted and at one point some of its kings wrote inscriptions calling themselves both the king of or and the king of Kish another city that lay nearby this suggests that or may have subdued some of its neighbors under its political control but by the mid 3rd millennium it seems the influence of or began to wane this was a new militarized age when the power of trade and diplomacy seems to have no longer been enough and one city called Lagash truly came into its own in this era of violence [Music] lagash was a slaving City it had grown rich by raiding villages in the hills kidnapping people and selling them across the region sometime around the Year 2500 BC lagash fell out with its neighbor a city called oma the dispute seems to have been over stretch of farmland along the river and it caused the two cities to go to war one carved stone monument from this time known as a stelae captures something of the spirit of this age it is known as the stelae of the vultures the upper part of the stone is normal enough it shows the king of lagash a man named Ian autumn leading his soldiers into battle they wear leather helmets and skirts made of reeds shouldering their Spears these Spears would have likely been topped with blades of copper or bronze and would have flashed red in the Sun as they marched the king is riding ahead of them in an early chariot wearing an animal skin slung across his chest with a spear and a container of javelins beside him when the armies met the stelae shows King a anuttam' of lagash dismounting from his chariot and proceeding to lead his men on foot they advance in a phalanx a tight square of men with broad shields protecting their front and a porcupine of short Spears jutting out ahead the fighting was bitter Ian autumn was struck in the eye by an arrow but he lived on to see his army to victory as the inscription on the stelae records a Anathem struck at uma the bodies were soon 3,600 in number I a Anathem like a fierce storm wind I unleashed the tempest as the soldiers of OMA tried to flee the bloody battlefield the stelae shows the soldiers of lagash cutting them down and trampling them beneath their feet there's something to this carving that to me embodies something of a change in the spirit of sumerian warfare it's a particular kind of nastiness that revels in the suffering of your enemies and this is shown most clearly in the part of the carving that gives it its name these are the vultures flying overhead carrying the severed heads of the soldiers of umar in their beaks picking at their tongues and eyes it clearly shows a kind of massacre perpetrated by the city of lagash and it does so with relish due to military victories of this kind the slaving city of lagash went on to conquer much of southern mesopotamia Lagash established what some historians have called the first true empire in the world but its rule was short-lived in these ancient times administrating even one city was difficult and the Empire of lagash despite its military success was soon critically overstretched to make matters worse King a anuttam' seems to have ruled through what amounts to a campaign of terror unsurprisingly his rule was unpopular and revolts rose up against him as the hated Empire of lagash fractured and collapsed the ruler of one of its subjugated cities seized his chance he was the king of boomer the city whose defeat and humiliation is depicted with such relish on the stelae of the vultures and his name was lugol's Agassi it's not clear exactly what made lugol's Agassi so successful but it's clear he was animated by an ardent desire for revenge against the Empire of lagash perhaps he had even been at the battle when King a Anatomy had slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens heroes in rebellion against Lagash and quickly toppled Kings that were still loyal to the Empire in the cities of Kish and Larsa then he marched on the great city of or itself and the mighty walled fortress of a rook these both fell in turn and the rebel lugol's Agassi moved his capital to a rock finally he marched on the city of lagash itself the heart of the Empire and it's here that that fiery vengeance in his heart burst out the city didn't hold out for long lugol's Agassi burst over its walls sacked the city and burned it to the ground even by the standards of the time this seems to have been a shocking act as one piece of Sumerian poetry recalls with sorrow because the man of Amma destroyed the bricks of lagash he committed a sin against the city's God the God will cut off any hand raised against him Meena dhaba the personal goddess of lugol's egusi make him bear all these sins after sacking Lagash look how's our gaze ease momentum seems to have been unstoppable he worked his way north up the course of the two rivers and soon he had conquered all the regions that Lagash had once claimed one inscription written by him even claims to have conquered all the lands between what he calls the upper and the lower seas meaning from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast the great god Enlil gave kingship of the land to him the region from the lowest see through the Tigris and Euphrates to the upper c-32 Kings gathered against him but he defeated them and smote their cities and prostrated their Lords and destroyed the whole countryside as far as the silver mines admittedly this is probably something of an exaggeration the Sumerians had never been able to maintain distant colonies or occupy far-off lands for very long it's more likely that lugar Ghazi pulled off something like a successful raiding party on the coast perhaps looting some towns and cities and bringing treasure back to look but this was the first time that a Sumerian prince had ever made this claim for them this uh Percy was the western edge of their entire world and the idea of a king who might conquer all the land between the Seas began to possess the imaginations of all the kings who came after but king lugol's Agassi like the rulers of lagash before him had made the critical mistake of over stretching his resources this Empire was simply too big before long civil wars and rebellions broke out between the various Sumerian cities in this time of chaos the other great people of Mesopotamia began to fancy their chances at ruling these were the people who up until this moment had been something of a junior partner in the civilization of southern Iraq these were the people of our card one man would soon lead them in an outright rebellion against the Sumerian Empire he would go down in history with a name that in a Cardian means the one true king that name was Sargon and he ushered in the twilight of the Sumerian Age [Music] like many episodes in Sumerian history the origins story of Sargon of Akkad is one you might find familiar if you were brought up on the stories of the Bible he was born sometime in the middle of the 24th century BC and legend has it that as a baby he was found in a reed basket on the banks of the Tigris he was found by a gardener who worked in the palace in the city of Kish and who brought him up as his son but like the biblical Moses this foundling child had big ambitions there seems to have been something special about him something about his charming manners meant that he was soon taken on as a cup bearer in the palace bringing wine to the lords and royalty of the kingdom this was a position of high honor and a way for a young man to gain influence at court the young Sargon must have proven himself in other ways too that's because he was soon entrusted with a mission of the utmost secrecy and importance at this time Kish was still part of a lagarza Ghazis Sumerian Empire stretching over all the lands between the two seas the Sumerian king lugol's Agassi was away on a distant campaign possibly fighting in the lands of Syria or putting down a rebellion in a far-flung province the young Sargon was given a small band of fighting men and told to travel to the city of Uruk where Lucas Agassi kept his royal court their plan was to strike the city in a surprise attack to knock out the capital of this new empire and free the City of Kish from Imperial control it was a daring plan the tall city walls of a rook immortalized in legend must have looked daunting to the young Sargon and his men as they readied for their attack but lugar Ghazi had taken much of his army with him on campaign and left few behind to defend his capital the attack came as a complete surprise Sargon's men overcame their defenses pored over their walls and the defenders fled Sargon captured the city and before reinforcements could arrive he broke down several sections of those famous city walls it was a deeply symbolic act and a strike against the might of liu gaza Ghazis empire king la Gazza Ghazi must have been enraged he swung around from his distant war-making and marched back home gathering all his subject Kings to him as he went inscriptions record that as many as 50 Kings may have marched under his banner and their task was easy enough to crush the forces of one small city-state but Sargon seems to have been one of those characters from history one of those geniuses like Hannibal or Napoleon who are able to turn battles in their favor no matter the odds we don't know how he did it but in a pitched battle with the whole amassed force of the Empire it was Sargon's army that emerged victorious [Music] look Elsa Ghazi was captured and Sargon marched him through the gates of the holy city of Nepal wearing a neck stock a heavy piece of wood clapped around his neck and shoulders like an oxen this would have been humiliating of course but here again is where Sargon sets himself apart from other rulers of the time that's because he seems to have had something of a merciful streak the old king lagarza Ghazi wasn't killed incredibly he was allowed to continue on as the governor of Uruk so long as he swore an oath to the High King Sargon Sargon founded a new city to act as his Empire's capital and he named it a card from there he would go on to conquer much of what the preceding empires had before as one inscription beneath a statue in the city of Nepal claims Sargon the king of Kish triumphed in 34 battles over the cities up to the edge of the sea and destroyed their walls he bowed down to the gods and the gods gave him the upper land up to the cedar forest and up to the silver mountain and Sargon didn't make the mistakes of his predecessors at each city he conquered he made a point of destroying the city's walls reducing its ability to defend itself and therefore reducing the likelihood of it rebelling against his rule he conducted a ceremony to symbolize his mastery over the whole land he washed his weapons in the waters of both the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea but once the dust of war had settled his achievements went on he made efforts to centralize the Empire's administration and even reformed the dating system his reforms strengthened the central state and increased the stability of the empire in many ways he was something of a progressive and enlightened ruler but Sargon was also a Cardian and he was what we today might call a nationalist until now Sumerian had been the official language of royal inscriptions on palaces and temples but during Sargon's reign a Cardian began to be used in official inscriptions for the first time the cuneiform alphabet was now reengineered to write a Cardian and Sargon also gave himself the new title king of our card he appointed only his fellow Acadians to key positions in the government and Garrison's Sumerian cities with a Cardian troops to ensure their loyalty the two people of Mesopotamia who had lived and grown together for millennia were now beginning to drift apart resentment in the southern Sumerian speaking cities began to reach a boiling point Sargon ruled for 55 years and towards the end of his reign this resentment bubbled over as one later Babylonian text recalls in his old age all the lands revolted against him and they besieged him in a Cod the city but he went forth to battle and defeated them he knocked them over and destroyed their vast army for the mean time it's clear that Sargon's flair for battle kept his empire together but as the old king weakened virtually all the southern cities burst out in open rebellion when Sargon of Akkad died around the Year 2284 his two sons had to take over and try to fix the mess he had left behind the first of these sons was called Ramesh he ruled for nine years and spent most of them in bitter battles to reconquer the rebellious Sumerian cities of the south he crushed rebellions in or umma Lagash and a DAB and one of the years in which he ruled is even known as the year that our dobbed was destroyed when ramesh died Sargon's other son managed to shoe took over he seems to have resorted to the kinds of terror tactics that at once made the kings of lagash so hated it was Sargon's grandson a man named norm sin who had returned the Empire to its former greatness he managed to quell the Sumerian rebellion in its southern heartlands and returned the Empire of a cart to stability and na roms sin didn't rule only by force it seems he made some effort to reconcile the two intertwined peoples of Mesopotamia breaking from his grandfather's title king of Akkad and ruling under the more diplomatic title king of Sumer and Akkad but this didn't entirely heal the rift there was even now continuing to grow between these two peoples part of the problem was that the Sumerian people were no longer the primary cultural force in the region for centuries Akkadian had been gradually replacing Sumerian as a spoken language some of this may have been down to the official policies of the Akkadian Empire discouraging the use of Sumerian in official documents but it was also affected by the increasingly cosmopolitan makeup of the Empire Sumerian as we've seen was a language isolate with a different structure and sound to all the languages around it but the people who lived in all the surrounding lands spoke languages that were linguistic cousins of a Cardian all in a semitic family of languages they had the same grammar and even shared sounds and words with a Cardian Learning accordion for them would have been like an English speaker learning French or Spanish while Sumerian would have been like learning Korean accordion was just easier to learn for these people and so it would naturally become the language of trade and commerce the people of Mesopotamia had been largely bilingual for centuries but gradually all Sumerians would have learned to speak a Cardian and fewer and fewer accordions would have needed to learn Sumerian slowly the Sumerian language began to fade but the days of the Akkadian Empire were also numbered and the Sumerians would get one more chance to leave their mark on the world's history when the great accordion King NARM sin died his son Shah Kali Shari took over he was sargon of akkad great-grandson and four years into his reign a great celestial sign would have appeared in the skies overhead far out in the depths of space nearly 200 million kilometres away from Earth a giant ball of ice and dust 40 kilometers across flew past sometime around the year 2000 213 BC this was the comet hale-bopp it would spend the next four millennia or so flying through our solar system on a deep elliptical orbit until it flew past the earth again as a blazing streak of light in the year 1997 it was the brightest comet with the longest tail that has ever been observed in our night skies it remained visible with the naked eye for 18 months in 1997 the sight of the comet in San Diego California caused 39 members of an apocalyptic cult called Heaven's Gate to commit suicide by drinking a lethal mixture of vodka and phenobarbital they believed that their souls would be carried away on a spaceship that was hidden behind the iridescent tail of the comet and we can only imagine what effect the site of this comet may have had on ancient people some may have looked up and seen the blessings of the Gods smiling on the lands of Sumer and Akkad others may have stared up at that lonely cosmic traveler and seen a sign of doom ultimately it was these latter who would prove correct during the reign of King Shaka Lashari the world's climate underwent a mysterious and sudden shift this change is known only by the cryptic name the four point two kilo year event it has been tentatively linked to changes that took place in the sea ice of the North Atlantic causing ripples throughout the world's delicate and intimately interlinked climate systems but whatever the causes its effects were dramatic in various places around the world it coincided with periods of reduced rainfall studies of dust layers in Iraq and the Middle East have shown that around this time annual rainfall dropped dramatically and the climate became much more arid the annual floods of the rivers on which so much of the agriculture of the region depended would now routinely fail and famine would set in and this dry period wasn't brief in fact it would last for well over a century and some think it may have even lasted for the next 300 years this period of drought and the famines that caused were mentioned in Egyptian texts of the time - as it affected cultures all around the globe it's been linked to civilizational collapses in Egypt's Old Kingdom the Indus Valley Civilisation in India and the language culture in China in Mesopotamia around this time still ruled by the Akkadian Empire it's clear that resources became suddenly scarce the days of a booming surplus of food were over and it's around this time that the first towns and cities began to be abandoned in the drier zones of the north after the death of King Shaka Lashari around the Year 2193 BC a period of chaos and bitter Civil War descended on the Empire of a card the Sumerian king list records this period with an almost sarcastic tone then who was king who was not the king four of them ruled in only three years all this chaos did not go unnoticed in the mountains overlooking the plains of Mesopotamia a nomadic tribal people known as the Guti were watching who the Guti were what language they spoke and which gods they worshiped we don't know they seemed to have been an unsophisticated nomadic people and the ancient Sumerian texts reserved particular contempt for them the Guti were unhappy people unaware of how to revere the gods and ignorant of the right religious practices the Guti had raided and plundered along the borders of the Akkadian Empire for years burning villages and stealing cattle one remarkable letter dating from the reign of king shark Ali Shari was written by an Akkadian Lord who owned land on the borders of the Kuti territory he tells his workers to ignore the Guti attacks and keep working although it's clear he does this while keeping himself at a safe distance cultivate the field and watch over the cattle do not tell me the Guti enemies are around I could not cultivate the field post sentries at one mile intervals and if the Guti try to attack you take all the cattle into the village now I swear on the life of King Shaka Lashari that if the booty men drive off the cattle and you cannot pay for them yourself I won't pay you any silver when I come to town for years now these hill people had watched as drought ravaged the settled societies of the River Valley they watched as the city dwellers fought over the increasingly scarce farm and it's in this moment of weakness that they chose to strike the guty gathered their forces and marched down from the hills into the lands of Sumer this time not to raid but to invade and take these lands for themselves one remarkable literary text relates the tragic events of those days it was written a few centuries later and is called the curse of a card in this version of the story the great god Enlil is angry at the king of a card for disrespecting the gods and he summons the guty as a punishment the hill people are imagined as monstrous creatures half animal with a language that sounded to the Sumerians like the barking of dogs and lyl what destruction he wrought he raised his eyes to the mountain and mustered the whole mountain as one the rebellious people the land whose people is without number GU tiem that land that Brooks no control whose understanding is human but whose appearance and stuttering words are that of a dog and nil brought them down from the mountain in vast numbers like locusts they covered the earth nothing escaped their arm no one escaped their arm all the lands raised a bitter cry on their city walls it's not clear how many men were in the Guti army but they were enough to quickly overwhelm the weakened forces of a card it seems the Guti practiced hit-and-run tactics raiding supply lines and leaving scorched earth behind them their attacks devastated the economy of a card and the already drought ridden and war-torn society began to fall apart for the first time since cities were built and founded the great agricultural tracks produced no grain the inundated tracts produced no fish the irrigated orchards produce nevis syrup nor wine the gathered clouds did not rain the plants did not grow he who slept on the roof died on the roof he who slept in the house had no burial people were flailing at themselves from hunger the weakened a Cardian society folded completely beneath the pressure of the Gucci attacks the demoralized a Cardian army went out to meet this fearsome enemy and battle and was defeated soon after the bootys swept down on the city of a cart and burned it to the ground they destroyed sargon city so utterly that its ruins have never been found the guty attempted to set up their own dynasty and rule over the lands of Sumer but for a number of reasons they were not successful after all as empires in our own day have found out it's much easier to conquer a country than it is to rule it cuneiform sources suggests that the guty administration showed little concern for maintaining agriculture written records or public safety the guty were not literate and would have struggled to administrate an empire but for over a millennium had relied on the power of the written word for reasons known only to them and perhaps relating to their nomadic lifestyle they didn't believe in keeping animals in pens they released all of the lands livestock to roam about the countryside freely their policies soon brought even further famine and caused a massive increase in the price of grain under neglect and lack of investment the lands infrastructure again to crumble the poetry of the curse of a card shows how the roads of the kingdom began to fall apart and become overgrown with weeds while long grass grew on the toe paths where oxen used to pull barges the grass grows long on your canal bank toe paths the grass of mourning grows on your highways laid for wagons wild Rams and snakes of the mountains allow no one to pass on your toe paths built up with canal sediment the destruction of the central authority of the Akkadian Empire meant that during this time a number of Sumerian city-states reasserted their independence and it seems the guty weakened by their failing attempt to hold an empire together don't seem to have been able to do much to stop them the guty occupied southern Iraq for more than 150 years and this period was by all accounts a time of suffering it was a miniature dark age where written records are unsophisticated as well as few and far between but as resentment to their rule grew rebellions rose around the country and one Sumerian man would see the opportunity this period of crisis provided he was filled with a desire to return the lands of Sumer to the rule of a Sumerian king and his name was ooh - Hangul little is known about the life of go to Hangang he was a Sumerian and may have been the governor of Uruk during the final years of the GU thien period he must have watched as the ongoing famine ravaged his people and the arrogant Guti Kings refused to do anything about it violently punishing any resistance to them at this time a new Guti King had just ascended to the throne of Sumer and Akkad his name was tiragon and he seems to have been typical of agouti rulers he cared little for maintaining the land's infrastructure and even destroyed elements of it to punish populations who rebelled against him as recalled in the sumerian king list tarragon's troops established themselves everywhere nobody would leave their cities to face him in the south in Sumer he blocked the water from the fields in the uplands he closed off the roads because of him the grass grew high on the highways of the land tiragon had been on the throne for only 40 days and he was still in the middle of consolidating his rule it's clear that o - Han gal the governor of Warwick thought that this was the time to make his move his plan may have been in place for years perhaps he sent out secret envoy's to the other Sumerian cities of the south telling them to prepare for war the moment a new king ascended to the throne and then when everything was in place and his moment came he struck when tiragon heard of this rebellion he must have been enraged but he doesn't seem to have been the bravest of kings he sent two of his generals men named Onan azu and Nabi and Leo to lead his armies in his place while he stayed back home in the palace meanwhile the rebel leader you to Hangang masked his forces and marched to meet the two guty generals on the field on his way to the decisive battle he stopped at the temple of ICH cooled the Sumerian god of storms and made an offering he may have sacrificed a lamb or goat and sang an ancient prayer in the Sumerian tongue before the altar of the god then he marched out to meet tarragon's armies after departing from the temple of ishka on the fourth day he set up camp in nag zu on the Suren gaol canal he captured the generals of tiragon sent as M voice to Sumer and put chains on their hands who to Hengel was victorious and here again we see that the GU T King tiragon wasn't the courageous sought after getting the news that his generals had been defeated he fled north to a city called dub room the Sumerian king list records what happened next then tiragon the king of the Guti ran away alone on foot he thought himself safe in debryn where he fled to save his life but since the people of dabber knew that who to hang gar was a king endowed with power by Enlil they did not let tiragon go and an envy of who to hang gyrl arrested tiragon together with his wife and children in de broom he put handcuffs and a blindfold on him after centuries the Sumerians finally rejected both Guti and a Cardian rule for the first time since the reign of Sargon a Sumerian king would once again rule over the lands of Sumer due to Hangul made the Guti the fang snakes of the mountains go back to drink again from the rocky crevices he brought back the kingship of Sumer Oh two hen girls successful rebellion assured in an era known today as the third dynasty of all and sometimes called the Neo Sumerian Empire others have even called this the Sumerian Renaissance it was the final flourishing of Sumerian culture but it was a flourishing that would leave an indelible mark on human history despite bringing the kingship back to Sumer the rebel King Oh to Hangul didn't rule for long he died in unusual circumstances after only seven years apparently killed when a river dam that he was inspecting burst sweeping him away in a flood if you think this sounds suspicious it's because it probably is one of two Han girls more ambitious governors a man named or namu came to the throne soon after and some historians have certainly raised questions about whether he had a hand in that dam bursting if indeed any dam burst at all regardless of the way he rose to power Buda namu proved to be an effective ruler and an outstanding administrator he standardized bronze weights that merchants used in the market and created a standardized weight that would lay down the foundations for the first currencies he divided silver into a unit known as the miner which was made up of sixty shekels Wu namu also wrote down a code of laws that today is the earliest surviving example of a legal code three centuries older than the more famous Code of Hammurabi here are a few examples of the laws contained within number 17 if a slave escapes from the city limits and someone returns him the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him number 18 if a man knocks out the eye of another man he shall weigh out half a minha of silver number 19 if a man has cut off another man's foot he is to pay ten shekels among all his other achievements or namu was also a prodigious builder he constructed buildings of the cities of Nepal Lhasa Kish Adar and OMA he rebuilt the kingdoms roads and irrigation ditches after the long decades of neglect under the booty rule but more than anything or namu loved to build ziggurats these are the distinctive stepped towers that were the hallmarks and pinnacle of sumerian architecture each one rose in three layers like a wedding cake with steps leading up to the top they would have been painted with white chips and paint the priests who kept them may have grown plants and trees on the terraces that lined them and birds would have roosted high up in these tall towers under or namu soon every Sumerian city would have a ziggurat and they formed the focal point of the city's the greatest of these was the ziggurat that enamel built in his home city of all the ziggurat of ore is enormous in its day it would have soared up to a height of 30 meters or nearly ten stories towering of all the other low-lying buildings in the city it was built purely from baked clay bricks and held together with the Terry's substance bitumen it's thought that it would have taken at least 1,500 workers more than five years just to build its base farmers up to 20 kilometers away would have been able to see this enormous shape rising on the horizon to them it would have testified to the power of the city of all and the God who lived there but despite this late flourishing the age of the Sumerians was passing and part of the reason for this lay in the soil beneath their feet [Music] all river water contains small amounts of salts and other minerals and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowing over the limestone rocks of the Taurus Mountains contain more than most when ancient farmers diverted this water into their fields to feed their crops the hot Sun would evaporate this water and traces of salt would be left behind in places with a reasonable amount of rainfall the rain would wash this salt away but in the arid conditions of Iraq the salt stays right where it is over time this small amount builds up on the surface of the soil and eventually plants find it difficult to grow [Music] the records of the Sumerian scribes paint a bleak picture they kept meticulous notes of crop yields year-on-year and from around 2,350 bc their texts show the gradual reduction of crops across the region one telltale detail shows us that the salt content of the soil might have been to blame while their main crop of wheat gradually reduced over the centuries the rates of barley production remained constant barley as we know today is particularly resistant to salt rich soil texts uncovered from the city of gear sue show that around the year 3000 550 BC wheat and barley were being produced in equal amounts but after a thousand years of irrigation wheat accounted for only one sixth of the crop and only a few centuries later in the 21st century BC wheat was less than 2 percent of the annual harvest this all points to a sharp increase in the salt content of the soil you can sometimes hear very simplistic narratives surrounding soil salination in the south of Iraq the Sumerians are sometimes portrayed as stupid or greedy damaging the land in their ignorance but that's not entirely fair although they didn't have our modern understanding they did know that soil needed to be rested for several seasons if it was to remain fertile and they did take steps to adapt to the changing condition of the soil switching almost exclusively to barley and replacing the role of wheat in their diet they also developed methods for draining the soil and reducing the rate of salination but soil salinity is a challenge that still causes problems for farmers in Iraq today despite all our technology and scientific knowledge while the ancient people worked hard to mitigate the decline the overall trend as the centuries wore on was slow but unstoppable the soil was gradually failing and with the population of Sumerian cities growing and the long drought dragging on the demands on this farmland were only increasing eventually a thick layer of salt would encrust the topsoil and little would grow at all today when you walk around the deserts of Iraq the soil in some areas has a crumbly crust that cracks underfoot peeling like old varnish this is the salt that slowly began to choke the life from the earth and in turn choke the life from the civilization of Sumer but the end of Sumerian culture would come not from the soil but at the tip of a spear as the Sumerians struggled to eat ever decreasing barley crops from the salty soil it seems that once again hostile outside forces began to sense weakness in this once-great Empire after their failed attempt at empire building the nomadic Duty had retreated to their mountains and returned to their nomadic ways but they still posed a threat to Sumerian lands just as they always had raiding towns and making away with cattle putting a stop to these raids was the focus of much of the king or now whose reign he raised an army and marched into the Guti lands with the aim of putting a stop to the threat forever it's unclear whether he actually met them in battle or whether he was struck by one of their characteristic ambushes either way bounnam who was killed in the mountains far from home the death of this King which would begin the final death spiral of Sumerian culture was commemorated in a lengthy epic poem known as the death of Ora namu he who was beloved by the troops could not raise his neck anymore the wise one lay down silence descended as he who was the vigor of the land had fallen the land became demolished like a mountain like a Cypress forest it was stripped its appearance changed the poem tells the story of guru namu descending into the underworld and giving his offerings to the gods who lived there and in the afterlife the poem gives or namo himself this final lament now just as the rain pouring down from heaven cannot turn back I can never return to see the beautiful bricks of or for Sumerian Kings would follow or namu some like the King shulkie enjoyed successes on the battlefield and developed and reformed the economy as much as they could but their rains were characterized by ongoing threats from the wild mountain regions the drought was still biting the soil was becoming increasingly choked by salt and as food got scarce more and more nomadic people were driven to raiding and plundering to feed themselves by now the guty were far from the only people who threatened the border of Sumer and Akkad one tribe in particular known as the Marr to a particular threat the motto were Semitic sheep herding people from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon like the Guti the Sumerians considered them to be wild and barbarous and tended to describe them in contemptuous but also fearful terms the Marty the powerful Southwind who from the remote past has not known cities the Marty who know no grain the Maher - no no house or town the savages of the mountains the Maher - it's raw meat who were not buried after their death another text describes them in similar animalistic terms as the Guti the hostile March you have entered the plains the Mahr to revision people with canine instincts like wolves and it's clear that around this time of drought and famine the motto was finding their way of life in Syria increasingly impossible environmental pressures were pushing them further south into the rich farmland of the River Valley into the lands of the Sumerians [Music] despite the weakened power of the Sumerian state the later kings of Sumer were determined to stop the Marty incursions one king named shoe sin even ordered the construction of a wall that stretched almost 300 kilometers between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers it would be called the Mar - wall and sometimes the wall facing the high lands what form exactly this wall took is unknown since its remains have never been found but it was likely an earthwork rampart dotted with forts and perhaps fronted with a moat fed by canals it was more than twice the length of Hadrian's Wall and essentially turned the rich farmland between the Tigris and Euphrates into an island fortress with the rivers on either side the sea to the south and the wall to the north it would have been an enormous engineering work and shows that even in its final years the Sumerian state still commanded considerable manpower and energy but ultimately the wall would prove useless like all walls it was only effective with a constant garrison Manning it soon it would become clear that the building of this wall was not an act of strength but the last resort of an empire falling in on itself the last Sumerian king was a man named I be sin who took the throne in the year 2028 virtually as soon as he was crowned the Empire began to fall apart in his first year of ruling the eastern city of Hashanah broke free from the Empire and souza a city in the region of alarm in the Iranian lowlands successfully rebelled in the third year these Allah mites were ambitious people they were rivals for the later Assyrian and Babylonian empires but at this stage were only just beginning to flex their muscles their rise would spell the end of the Sumerian Age the fracturing Sumerian Empire could no longer maintain its defenses along the 300 kilometers of the great martu wall and so in the fifth year of his reign the wall that a B sins father had built failed the motto for Dover the defenses and over and the rich farmlands that lay behind the effects of this loss were immediate and devastating food shortages ran rampant in years seven and eight of a B sins kingship the price of grain increased to 60 times the usual cost people would have starved in the streets the famine was hitting the capital city of or especially hard and it's clear that at this point the king Abby's in really began to panic desperate to feed his people King EB sins summoned one of his generals and told him to travel north to the city of his sin to buy grain and pay many times its usual cost this general was a man called HP era and it's clear that he wasn't the most trusted of the Kings generals in another letter the king had even complained that HP era was a Cardian not Sumerian inferring that his loyalty may have been in question but at this point it's clear the king didn't have much choice one remarkable letter from this moment has survived it was sent to the king he sinned by this general ish B era once he reached the city of his sin it paints a vivid picture of sumerian societies collapsed you ordered me to travel to Essen and cazilou to purchase grain with grain reaching the exchange rate of one shekel of silver per Gert twenty talents of silver have been invested in the purchase but I heard news that the hostile Mar to have entered inside your territories I entered with the entire amount of grain now I have let them are - all of them penetrate inside the land because of the Mar - I am unable to hand over this grain for threshing they are stronger than me while I am condemned to sitting around this letter shows that the twin pressures of the Mar - invasions coupled with the famine at home were beginning to tear the very fabric of the kingdom apart the accordion general HB era urges the king to send a fleet of 600 boats up the river to transport the grain he also kindly offers to stay behind in his sin and help to defend it against the invasion that I should guard for you the cities of issen and Naboo let it be my responsibility my lord should know this it's possible that ish Piero knew that the request for 600 boats was impossible in fact he had no intention of ever heading back to the starving city of or he stayed in his sin with all the grain and soon declared himself its king this is just one story out of many that shows the Sumerian state truly beginning to come apart facing threats on multiple sides the King IB sin entered into a frantic series of last-ditch measures he ordered fortifications built at the important cities of ore and Nepal but these efforts were in vain ultimately the Sumerian Empire fell apart one city at a time until only the capital of war remained surrounded by hostile forces soon the elamite people those former subjects of the Sumerians in the foothills of Iran marched down along the hill paths gathering with them an army of tribesmen and laid siege to the great city of or King abby's in tried one last attempt to beat them back and it's clear at this point how desperate he was he tried to enlist the help of his great enemy the wild Martu over his father's wall he offered to pay them in exchange for their help he even swallowed his pride and begged for the help of HP era the general who had stabbed him in the back on that journey for grain and was now ruling as the king of his sin but it was all useless the elamite s-- broke through the walls of wood and set the city on fire they poured into its sacred precinct and looted it of all its valuables we can imagine them storming up the steps of war's great ziggurat killing priests and plundering its treasures as they went the surrounding fields were burned and the waterways became contaminated with disease the armies of alarm stormed the royal palace and captured the king a beasts in they took him away in Chains marched him back to their homeland and imprisoned him there this was the last king of Sumer a civilization that had endured for millennia and he would die in Chains imprisoned by his enemies in a foreign land the ancient Sumerians who saw the destruction of their cities reacted to their sorrow in the same way that humans always have they wrote poetry in fact for each of their great ruined cities they wrote a lament [Music] one of these poems called the lament for or relates with tangible anguish the horror of that time the gods have abandoned us like migrating birds they have gone or is destroyed bitter is its lament the country's blood now fills its holes like hot bronze in a mold bodies dissolve like fat in the Sun our temple is destroyed smoke lies on our city like a shroud blood flows as the river does the lamenting of men and women sadness abounds aura is no more the fall of or was one of the great turning points in ancient history it marked the end of the unified Sumerian state and the region entered a small dark age in which individual city-states once again vied for control over the ruins of the former Empire the Wars of this period turned Sumerian cities to blackened heaps of burnt brick the people mourn its people like broken pot shards littering the approaches the walls were gaping the high gates the roads were piled with dead in all the streets and roadways bodies lay in open fields that used to fill the dances the people lay in heaps and meanwhile the drought dragged on and the salt ridden fields were no longer producing enough barley faced with these problems the Sumerian people began to flock out of the region in huge numbers refugees carrying with them their meager belongings and weeping for the home they had left behind over the next centuries a vast population movement took place from the south of Mesopotamia to the north some of these Sumerian speakers would settle in the Akkadian lands but with their connection to their homeland severed their cultural identity went with it they learned the Akkadian language of the northerners and left theirs behind in the smoking ruins of their cities the Mahr to the state by the Sumerians would themselves settle down in the cities they conquered along the river valley the migrating motto the fleeing Sumerians and the native Acadians would mix together they would blend their cultures as the people of this region always had the foundations they laid would give rise to the next chapter of Mesopotamian and human history and forge the region's next superpowers these would rise as the legendary empires of Babylon and Assyria but those are stories that I will save for another time Sumerian was now a dead language it would never again be heard spoken in the streets and the markets but it did remain in use for at least another 2,000 years preserved in the temples and scriptures of later empires just as Latin once survived in the churches of medieval Europe after the fall of Rome for these later people Sumerian became the language of the gods the language of myth and magic the kings of all those great Sumerian rulers themselves passed into legend and some of them would later be revered as gods themselves and all the kings of Mesopotamia in Babylon and Assyria for the next 2,000 years would rule under a title that gave them a kind of ancient legitimacy reaching right back to the first age to the dawn of mankind's journey into civilization king of Ord king of Sumer and Akkad even after the fall of the Sumerian Empire many of its great cities would continue as population centers into the post Sumerian era among these was the great coastal city of or situated at the mouth of the Euphrates which would rise and fall a number of times over its history but ultimately it was the landscape that had given birth to all and it was the landscape that would bring about its demise today if you stand in the ruins of or to see that one slapped its shores is nowhere to be seen in fact early archaeologists were astonished to see the remains of millions of seashells scattered in the sand here on this lonely stretch of desert as the millennia passed the continued depositing of silt along with changes in global sea levels have combined to push Iraq's Gulf Coast back to its present position about 150 kilometers to the south the Euphrates River that once brought the rich bounties of trade down from the north has also disappeared its course having changed over the centuries in fact around the barren mounds of Earth where the city of Ur once stood there's nothing at all but the lone and level sands of the Iraqi desert boundless and bare for miles around [Music] water had always been this city's lifeblood and the loss of the river and the sea meant the slow death of all people soon left its houses and its streets they stopped working its fields and maintaining its irrigation canals and soon the land dried up and the topsoil blew away in the wind the priests extinguished the fires that burned in the top chamber of horrors great ziggurat and stops leaving their offerings there to the moon God's in the markets closed and the mud brick buildings of the city began to crumble the wooden beams of the roofs rotted and fell in the sands and desert winds rolled through its streets and the dunes buried its fallen walls before long the greatest city the world had ever known was just a mound of ruins where the occasional desert traveller would pass by and where the Italian traveler Pietro della valle would one day shelter with his wife from a threatening group of bandits and discover the scattered fragments of writing that the Sumerians had left behind in their forgotten language somewhere buried in the ruins lay the clay tablets on which the lament for the city's destruction was written may that storm swoop down no more on your city may the door be closed on it like the great city gate at night time until distant days other days future days in your city reduced to ruin mounds may Allah meant to be made to you Oh Nana may your restored city be resplendent before you following the sacking of all around the year 2000 BC the city of Uruk went into a steep decline and much of its population fled Brooke did have another period of flourishing when the later Assyrian Empire rebuilt it as a regional capital but as the Euphrates River changed its course Arouca too would be completely abandoned today the walls of a rock the same walls that are boasted about in the epic of gilgamesh are still visible heaps of ancient brickwork lining the flat lunar landscape of the desert but they are still 15 meters tall encircling the whole city now washed by a tide of broken pottery and bones the English archaeologist William Loftus was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Uruk he was impressed with the haunting sight of the vast mounds rising out of the desert and he later wrote about how the site affected him of all the desolate sites I ever beheld that of Uruk in comparably surpasses all the process of decay in all the cities of ancient Sumer in Nepal era do Lagash food and her rook would have been gradual but unstoppable wind-borne sand and earth would pile up against the walls that still stood and filled in the streets meanwhile rain water and wind wore down any remaining structures the sight of these ruins amazed travelers who like the Italian Della Valle passed by them and saw their lonely shapes on the horizon people told stories about what must have happened to those people who built such enormous constructions and then disappeared forever echoes of these stories still survive in tales like the Tower of Babel about a people who built a tower that would reach to the heavens and who were struck down by God on account of their pride with their cities lost the Sumerian people passed out of history the civilizations who replaced them who kept their language alive in their temples and still told stories of their kings with themselves pass into ruin the knowledge of how to read Sumerian was forgotten entirely and his history turned to dust only their clay tablets remained buried in the sands of Iraq fragments containing the voices of a whole people waiting for archaeologists to discover them and through arduous and painstaking work to find out how to read them these fragments give us little bursts of light illuminating the dark ocean floor of this most distant past giving us the records on recipes of the Sumerian people their music and their prayers their loves and grief their triumphs and their beautiful sorrowful lamentations for the loss of the world's first cities and it gives us to the wistful philosophies of these ancient people as these lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh show nobody sees death nobody sees the face of death nobody hears the voice of death savage death just cuts mankind down sometimes we build a house sometimes we make a nest but then brothers divide it upon inheritance sometimes there is hostility in the land but then the river rises and brings flood water dragonflies drift on the river their faces look upon the face of the Sun but then suddenly there is nothing sometime around the Year 1700 BC when the last kings of or were already a distant memory somewhere on the other side of the world on a small rocky island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean the last wooly mammoth to ever live on earth lay down and died sumerian society in its imperial form rose lived out its golden age and died out lived by the woolly mammoth I want to end the episode with an excerpt from that great Sumerian poem the epic of gilgamesh this section relates an episode but I think is one of the most incredible sequences in any piece of ancient literature it shows the King Gilgamesh weeping over the loss of his dying friend and his friend reaches up to him and tells him that he has dreamed of the afterlife that he has seen what awaits him after death this passage is a melancholy meditation on loss it shows all the kings of the earth who have ever ruled living on in this dark and silent place their crowns put away forever as you listen imagine what it would have felt like to live in the great cities of war and Hook watching the Twilight begin to fall over the Sumerian Age imagine what it would feel like to see the crops grow weaker every year as the white crust of salt begins to fall on the ground and the city's people go hungry in the streets whaling year after year for the gods to help them imagine how it would have felt to see the armies of the mountain people gathering on the horizon having to flee the city with your possessions on your back leaving your home behind forever as the wind rustles through the dying reeds and the chanting of the priests still goes on in the ziggurats tall tower as the Sun begins to set over the desert listen my friend this is the dream I dreamed last night I stood before an awful being the sombre faced man bird he turned his stare towards me and he led me away to the palace of Acala the queen of darkness to the house from which none who enters ever returns down the road from which there is no coming back there is the house whose people sit in darkness dust is their food and clay their meat they are clothed like birds with wings for covering they see no lights they sit in darkness I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth their crowns put away forever rulers and princes all who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old they who had stood in the place of the gods stood now like servants in the house of dust were high priests and acolytes priests of the incantation and of ecstasy and there was a rescue girl the queen of the underworld she who keeps the books of the dead she raised her head she saw me and spoke who has brought this one here then I awoke like a man drained of blood who wanders alone in a waist thank you once again for listening to the fall of civilizations podcast I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode re Brignole Jake Barrett Mills Shem Jacobs Nick Bradley and Emily Johnson special thanks go once again to the wonderful musicians Gail and Philip Newman from the group ensemble to organ or graffia who agreed to let me use some of their reconstructions of ancient Sumerian music during this episode their CD titled music of the ancient sumerians Egyptians and Greeks is available to buy from North Pacific music calm this episode has touched a number of times on the power and necessity of the written word a gift that ancient Iraq once gave to the world and I thought it would be fitting to take a moment here to promote a charity that really needs your help today it's name is book aid in 2015 the terrorist group Isis burned over 1 million books in the library of Iraq's Mosul University today the book aid team is trying to rebuild that library and give the students of Mosul some hope for their future if you think you can spare anything please head on to bukit org and see how you can help today for every 2 pounds you give they can send another book to Mosul's university library and there's also a list of other ways you can help to provide resources equipment and even training to bring the gift of the written word back to the place word first began I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter so please come and tell me what you thought you can follow me at Paul mmm Cooper and if you'd like updates about the podcast announcements about new episodes as well as images maps and reading suggestions you can follow the podcast at fall of save part with underscores separating the words a full bibliography and reading list will be available for free on patreon this podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on patreon you keep me running you help me cover my costs and you help keep the podcast ad free you also let me dedicate more time to researching writing recording and editing to get the episodes out to you faster to make them longer and bring as much life and detail to them as possible I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen if you enjoyed this podcast please consider heading on to patreon.com/scishow score podcast or just google fall of civilizations patreon as PA TR e om for now goodbye and thanks for listening [Music]

Channel: Fall of Civilizations

Views: 1,287,796

Rating: 4.6422262 out of 5

Keywords: sumer, sumerians, history, historical documentary, documentary, podcast, history podcast, historical, iraq, akkad, akkadians, sargon of akkad, sargon, mesopotamia, why the sumerians disappeared, sumerian history, ancient, ur, uruk, first cities, nippur, eridu, tigris, euphrates, what happened to the sumerians, sumeria, fall of civilizations, fall of civilizations podcast

Id: cq1g8czIBJY

Length: 149min 20sec (8960 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019