Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World

This is episode 11 a summary of the ancient near east Just. If we go all the way back to 3,000 b.C. this is what the near East world looked like. City states that were agricultural, stratified, deity

worshipping, writing in cuneiform, metal producing, especially bronze, and using crucibles to create the intense

heats needed for such projects, using measuring equipment to measure weights and lengths, probably as a means for

jurisdiction. The best examples of flourishing cities from this period are Uruk and then all.

Uruk could be described as the powerhouse of the fourth millennium

B.C. before ore became large and opulent in the third millennium

B.C. E, thanks to its extensive trade links.

We don't have enough in terms of written accounts to know who the influential characters were at the time.

We only have the retrospectively created King Lists that have been found in cuneiform tablets which act as a historical list of kings

dating back in time.

We also have the mythological stories about these kings such as the wonderful epic of Gilgames.

It's not a lot to confidently hang our hat on at this stage, but historical written allusions to something at the very least.

We do believe that culture was developing more quickly in the area called Mesopotamia

than in other areas of the Near East during the 3rd millennium, B.C. E. Sumerians would congregate and settle around and in

between the two rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates, which would link the mountains of modern Turkey

to the open waters of the Persian Gulf.

We do believe that around this time Semitic speakers from the Arabian Peninsula

were living a much more nomadic style of life to the west of this area and those proto-Elamites were doing the same to the east.

We don't know as much about their day-to-day life either.

As mentioned... about their day-to-day life either.

...