Welcome to the Bronze Age: an 11 part collaboration of historical YouTube channels.
Be sure to follow up with the video by Epimetheus by checking out the playlist in the description
As first up in this big bronze bonanza, I'll be taking you back to the very beginning.
Nope. No too far.
No, a little more.
Perfect. There we go. The history of Mesopotamia is, let's see to put it respectfully and professionally,
crazy f***ing old!
Herodotus could pick up a tablet inscribed with the Epic of Gilgamesh
or the Sumerian Kings list and it would describe things older to him than he even seems to us.
And, old as they were, they still lived in urbanized societies and experienced historical plot lines that may seem
eerily familiar to the later world.
So to find out why civilizations sprang up in the Fertile Crescent,
and how its history unfolded over the course of the Bronze Age,
let's do some history.
For the sake of our narrative, I'll tell you right off that
even though Mesopotamian history features a merry-go-round of different societies playing protagonist,
the underlying culture was consistent throughout.
The reason for all this shifting around was geography and ultimately water.
Mesopotamia is Greek for "the land between the rivers," in this case the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Much like the Nile in Egypt and the Indus further east,
Mesopotamian civilization arose specifically because of the sustenance these rivers provided.
But even this map doesn't do it justice because the alluvial Valley is
criss-crossed by several smaller waterways,
making the rivers more of a web than one highway.
Compared to Egypt where one guy with a few boats can control the entire Nile River,
the almost labyrinthine Mesopotamian rivers made it exceptionally difficult for any
one society to sustainably exercise power over the others.
And also unlike the Nile, what with its pleasantly regular flood patterns and such,
Mesopotamia flooded randomly and violently. We'll... We'll double back to Noah later.
But I also want to point out a crucial element of early Mesopotamian religion:
the Abzu. In contrast to the deity Tiamat,
the primordial embodiment of salt water,
Abzu was the primeval sea of creation that was believed to lie underneath the world,
and explain the presence of fresh water springs,
rivers, and lakes which became spiritually revered.
It's really not a stretch to give a healthy little sprinkling of divine reverence to the stuff that gives your entire civilization life, you know?
So enough preamble. Let's have us a city.
Arguably, the oldest urban settlement in history is the City of Eridu.
Established by the edge of a lake in the more fertile south during the 6th millennium BC.
But insanely old timescales and permanent dwellings were only part of the equation.
Just as important were a centralized government and a social hierarchy,
a division of labor and natural resources to work with,
religion and culture to give life that extra little pizzazz, and of course rules to follow.
It's all of these things first established here that have gone on to define the very concept of civilization for
millennia to follow. But there's also one last factor.
See, even as early as the 4th millennium BC the city already had layers of ruins
It seems that Eridu deliberately tore down and rebuilt itself layer by layer,
replacing old buildings with bigger, grander ones to accommodate a growing population,
and a deepening self awareness of what would become civilizations ultimate goal: progress.
We take it for granted now that things should get better with time as we build on what came before, but that idea
first took hold back in Eridu.
Eridu had a really great run but all things must come to an end at one point or another,
and in Mesopotamia that sometimes happened very suddenly and without much warning.
While historians have usually chalked it up to environmental changes making certain places less agriculturally viable,
there are also arguments for how the typically swampy lakes and slow-moving rivers served as disease vectors for stuff like malaria,
which could break enough links in the chain to completely cripple an entire city.
*Scoff*
Thanks, Malaria. Anyway, on the topic of things being abandoned and/or broken, it's time to talk about the flood.
Yes, THE flood
I mean should anyone really be shocked that a river basin known for volatile flooding is associated with tales of a literally world ending flood?
Archaeological evidence has definitively shown that entire cities got washed clean away by water
sometime in the mid to late 3000's BC.
Did the entire world flood over? No, that's... that's pretty clear
But, locally the Near East and Mesopotamia suffered really badly,
so it's no surprise when multiple different sources all point to tales of one big bad flood.
Noah and the character of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh are practivally identical.
In the epic, the gods wrecked humanity because their constant midnight partying interrupted their divine 7 to 8 hours of nightly sleep.
That's not very far off from Genesis.
So, with the world washed more or less clean, the 2000s BC saw new order of society developed during the so-called Early Dynastic period.
Here, as more players jump onto the game of life,
we see a linguistic split between the Sumerians in the South
and the Semitic Acadians to the North.
And, like ancient Greece, and medieval Spain ,and Renaissance Italy,
There's a proliferation of independent city-states vying for control of lands and waterways.
in addition to archaeological evidence,
we're lucky enough to have the sumerian king list, compiled several centuries down the line,
but nonetheless helpful in understanding the constant power struggle that defined the third millenium.
Cities fought over farmlands and grazing lands taking turns playing Hegemon,
while still nobody was able to establish any kind of permanent Dominion.
But, speaking of people kicking the crap out of each other,
let's talk Bronze Age warfare.
The central component of any Mesopotamian army would have been the spearmen infantry supported by highly skilled slingers.
Though a sling does resemble a child's toy, it doubles the effective length of a throwers arm,
and a capable slinger could launch a stone faster than an archers arrow and
unsurprisingly with a substantially heavier payload.
The whole David-and-Goliath dealio should show that the sling was no laughing matter.
In any case, a well trained and supplied army was a valuable commodity and in
a turbulent world a warlord could become a very powerful figure,
so it should be no surprise that they regularly made themselves into full-on kings.
Speaking of being better than everybody else,
the most prominent city to emerge in the early third millennium was Uruk.
Home city to the legendary hero-king Gilgamesh.
His epic poem goes into considerable detail about the splendor of the city itself,
calling attention to the walls, fields, canals,
gardens, and temple that would have made Uruk the envy of the Bronze Age.
As the biggest city in the world during its mid third millenium heyday,
Uruk was a hub of production and innovation.
Archaeological evidence suggests that someone had the bright idea to take the spinning discs of
pottery turntables, stands them upright, and jam an axle in there to whip up a simple,
but nonetheless ingenious wheeled chariot.
And I just think that's really cool!
Along those lines the development of new technologies and the expansion of trade relations to bring in goods
like that sweet, sweet lapis lazuli all contributed to the general well-being of Uruk.
But to keep track of all this productivity the Sumerians flexed with probably the most important innovation ever.
Writing
Cuneiform script, notable for its wedge-shaped markings and brain-melting complexity,
was used to account trade and production, to write out legal codes, and eventually to codify literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
There was also like taxes and stuff to worry about.
There was a lot of things, okay?
Writing was a big-ass deal and I'm not just saying that because it's like 50% of my current day job.
Big deal.
The next big change in Mesopotamia came from further north,
where a palace servant to his local ruler later became King.
And then he had the crazy idea of conquering absolutely everything.
So he went and did it, the absolute madman.
He first stretched down towards the Persian Gulf before following the rivers back Northwest to bring all of Mesopotamia under his Dominion.
Sargon, whose name means "legitimate King" in Akkadian,
effectively created the first empire in human history.
Although he obviously used force to bring the people of Samaria and Akkad under his wing,
evidence points to his reputation as a Unifier,
as his legacy was revered by Mesopotamians for over 1,500 years after his life.
The unfortunate reality is that we just don't know all that much about him,
but historians have made some insights.
For one, legit King Sargon was a strictly historical figure,
fighting other kingdoms rather than the monsters of the Gilgamesh epic.
He's also believed to have brought significant prosperity to his empire,
as more interconnected cities experienced sick gains to productivity,
and a little cross-pollination of culture to go along.
Perhaps the most topical aspect for our purposes here is the increased manufacture of bronze.
Whereas anyone can pick up a rock and make a stone tool,
forging metal was hard work. Raw materials must be mined and transported so that
metal workers with specialized equipment and years of training may fashion them into tools and weapons.
That's a complex and expensive process that is substantially easier
if every city has access to everyone else's resources as well.
A happy beneficiary of this was the military who could fight better with shiny new sword chopping action.
While Sargon's successors presided over a heavily militarized society, (and I mean to conquer Mesopotamia kinda had to you know?)
there was all manner of visual, architectural, and poetic art being created.
Cool dudes like Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, strengthened the bureaucracy to increase the efficiency
of that hot intercity trade
As such, it's here that we finally see trans-imperial standardization of weights and measurements.
And it's good that they changed it when they did because it's just so
Infuriating and primitive to have two different sets of units for the exact same measurements.
Gosh, could you imagine(!)
But like Eridu, in Uruk, and now with Akkad, the entire society collapsed mysteriously
almost as if overnight as entire cities vacated for centuries.
The Guti mountain people often bear the blame for coming in and sacking everything all willy-nilly,
but it doesn't quite make sense that some random
barbarians could overwhelm the highly advanced Akkadian army.
So what really happened?
A century long Dark Age that followed the collapse of Akkad is marked by famine from what we can tell,
as Mesopotamia effectively withered into a desert all 30s Dust Bowl style
Oh, no, don't tell me they're highly efficient yet terrifyingly fragile infrastructure
totally collapsed when changes to climate made it impossible to reliably provide resources
Mm-hmm. Well take away the Army's food and you might as well not have an army,
so makes sense that the Guti, desperate for what little farmland remained,
were able to overwhelm the Akkadians.
What followed was over a century of quiet, traditional living, a far cry from the glory of old, but much more
sustainable with fewer moving parts to get barbar-ized.
In the 21st century BC, three centuries after Sargon's conquests,
Utu-hengal of Ur finally rid Mesopotamia of the Guti and ordered the compilation of the Sumerian king list,
partially in order to trace his own legitimacy back to Sargon and well well beyond,
and partially because people were justifiably worried about losing all that information for good in the event of another sacking
This neo-Sumerian Empire carried out a true renaissance of the Akkadian civilization,
making as best of a return to form as can be imagined.
Though the seat of power was back down south in Ur,
the culture, urbanization, economics, bureaucracy, and overall way of life closely resembled their glorious past for a solid century.
But the time stamp doesn't lie and something or other has to collapse before this video ends.
This time, the culprit was taxes.
In 20 short years, the Imperial provinces just kind of stopped contributing
as everyone declared independence piece by piece.
The Sumerians attempted to build a wall to keep out Western barbarians
but that went about as well as it always does and they ended up getting invaded by the Elamite Easterners in the confusion.
And, just like that, we're back to a smattering of city-states.
The protagonists in the next chapter in the history of Mesopotamia will be the famed Babylonians,
but we'll pick that one up in another video soon.
And that's the history of Mesopotamia's Bronze Age.
Fair to say it was one slow burn. What amazes me most is the degree to which
geography and the simple layout of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys helped create a shared network of culture,
while making it actively difficult to establish and maintain one unified Kingdom.
The other moral of the story is that
complex societies are inherently more fragile and even the slightest change to the natural order of things can have catastrophic consequences!
Okay. Have fun. Bye, bye!
Thank you all so much for watching. If you want to learn more about this enigmatic period in world history,
please be sure to check out the Bronze Age playlist in the description.
Next up is Epimetheus with a video about the Chinese Bronze Age,
and if you like reading the last chapter first, hop on over to the Cynical Historian
for a video about Bronze Age archaeology.