- [Instructor] What I wanna do now
is start thinking about ancient civilizations.
And we're gonna start with Mesopotamia.
And Mesopotamia, the word is literally referring to
the fact that this region is,
for the most part, between two rivers.
You have the Tigris River and the Euphrates River.
And, when we talk about ancient Mesopotamia,
most people are referring to the period
between around 3000 BCE, or maybe even
going a little bit before that,
so 3000 Before the Common Era.
And then, going up to about the time of Christ
or a little bit before that.
So we might go to 1000 BCE or maybe a little bit later.
Maybe around 500 BCE.
And, what I've done here, is
we clearly have a map of the region.
I also have timelines for different geographies.
So, this timeline that I have right here in blue,
this is my timeline for Mesopotamia.
Right over here.
And you can see that I have different colors
along this timeline.
You can also see what other civilizations
were around at the same time in history.
This is not a comprehensive list here.
So, what we have in this yellow, this is ancient Egypt.
And you can see that them sprouting out around the Nile.
It's no coincidence that these are around rivers.
The rivers flood and provide fertile ground
where you can have agriculture.
Where you can support population centers.
So, it's no coincidence that you have
a civilization around the Nile.
You have a civilization in Mesopotamia
between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
So, this is the Egyptians right over here.
This is ancient Mesopotamia.
Right over here, I have the Indus Valley civilization.
And then we have China.
Once again, not comprehensive.
We have other civilizations going on.
But these are ones you will often hear being spoken about.
Now, in Mesopotamia, especially when we are
talking about ancient Mesopotamia,
you will hear about different groups
and different languages.
And so, you'll hear about the Sumerians.
Oftentimes, they are most famous, today,
for their cuneiform writing.
And we'll do probably a whole series of videos...
It's one of the original ways
of symbolic writing that the Sumerians developed.
You might also hear about the Akkadians.
And the Akkadians were both...
Akkadian could be referring to an actual empire
or it could be referring to the Akkadian language.
And same thing about Sumerian.
You might hear about the Assyrians.
You might hear about the Babylonians.
And all of these groups are associated with Mesopotamia.
The Sumerians lived generally
in this area right around here.
In a future video, we might talk about
Abraham from the Old Testament is from Ur,
which is a Sumerian city.
And Sumerian is also a language.
It's a language that's not related
to the languages that we now associate with the region
or the languages that were spoken by the Akkadians.
The Akkadians...
So, if we're talking about languages
that are similar to modern spoken languages,
Akkadian was a Semitic language.
Let me write that down.
It was Semitic.
So, Akkadian is related to Arabic and Hebrew and,
if we think about more ancient times, Aramaic.
So, all of these things were related.
And the Assyrians and Babylonians,
they spoke the Akkadian language.
Or, if we go later on, they spoke Aramaic.
But they were in constant contact with the Sumerians.
So they even have Akkadian
being written with a cuneiform-type script.
And the general geographies where
these different civilizations,
these different empires, sprung up from...
So, you have Nineveh right over here.
That is the historical capital of the Assyrian Empire.
And, on my little line here, and this isn't exact....
We're learning more and more about
this time period all of the time.
You have to realize we're talking about 3000 BCE.
That's over 5000 years ago.
So, we're still trying to
put all the puzzle pieces together.
But we believe around 3000 BCE
there was a somewhat unified Akkadian Empire.
Then it started to break up and split up.
At some points, you had the Assyrians
more or less in control of the region.
At other points, you had the Babylonians
with the capital at Babylon.
And we'll talk about famous Babylonian kings,
like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.
And, actually, Babylon gets referred to a lot more.
But, for most of this time period we're talking about,
the Assyrians were actually the dominant empire
with their capital at Nineveh.
Sumer, you see that here.
Ur where Abraham is from.
That was more often part of these other empires.
And so, this is just a start to get us acquainted
with this region of the world, with Mesopotamia.
As we go off into the next two videos,
we'll continue to dig deeper.
We'll talk a little bit about...
We'll talk more about the cuneiform writing.
We'll talk more about Hammurabi
and his famous code of laws
that seems to have influenced the Old Testament.
We'll talk more about Nebuchadnezzar and his role.
And he actually has a role in the Old Testament, as well.
And the interactions between these different civilizations.
It gets quite interesting.