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The Cura River descends from the imposing heights of the Central Caucasus Mountain Range,

flowing southwest across a lowland plain before emptying into the Caspian Sea.

The Oroxies River begins its journey in the Armenian highlands, a few miles from the source of the Euphrates,

before taking a more meandering path to join the course of the Kura.

In the 4th millennium BC, both rivers nourished a culture that, in modern times, was given

their names, the Kura Aroxies. The Kura Aroxies were mainly farmers and herdsmen,

but the farming they practiced in places like the Ararat Valley was fairly small scale,

and never required the high-level coordination or generated the types of surpluses that might open the door to social hierarchy.

Wealth remained moderate and evenly distributed, and warfare all but absent.

So the Kura Aroxie's archaeological signature is characterized by small villages of mud brick,

single-room family homes, of a fairly uniform stature.

Both the Great and Lesser Caucasus ranges were rich in metal deposits, particularly copper.

And artifacts show that the Kura Aroxis were skilled in metal production. Doing so required,

as Liam Neeson might say, a very particular set of skills. This included finding and extracting

metallic ores, smelting the metal from the ore, refining it to remove impurities, and casting or forging the metal into a final crafted object.

...