History Summarized: Mesopotamia — The Bronze Age

Beard fashion peaked in ancient Mesopotamia. Everything after was a mistake.

Did the ancient Mesopotamians do 11 part clay tablet collabs about even more ancient Mesopotamia? We can only wonder.

slaps soil in mesopotamia This bad boy can fit so much empires in it!

I want a whole mess of potamia

Mesopotamia: *River start to change* *land start to drought* Citzen: Here we go again...

In a university course I took on this topic, my professor said the environmental factors you refer to included rivers spontaneously diverting. The two rivers are quite different. The Euphrates in the south is slow and meandering. It's shallow and sits on top of the flood plains. When it flooded, a very wide area would be inundated, and when the flood waters receded, the river may have changed course by many kilometers. A city that was once built on the river's edge may now be a day's walk from the river's new location. Understandably, this made it very difficult to keep the city going, and some would be abandoned. The Tigris river is different, but comes with its own problems. The Tirgis runs straight and quickly. It cuts a deep channel into the plains, which means it doesn't change course or flood as much. The floods are what make lands fertile, so you have use the water differently. Springy wood was used to make water-lifting cranes, since the actual water level was much lower than the surrounding farm land. Water would be poured into channels to flood fields in order to water them. All throughout mesopotamia, huge channels and canals were dug to funnel water onto farmland. Building and maintaining these canals was back breaking work, as they silted up very quickly. Some mesopotamian religious myths even focus around desilting these canals, and how humans were created by the gods in order to do it for them. Anyway, the land in Mesopotamia held a terrible secret though: deep underground, it was quite salty. Every time they flooded their crops, the water would percolate down through the soil. The salt would be brought a bit higher each time. Over the course of years, this makes the earth saltier and saltier. Some crops handle salt better than others. The first crop to succumb is wheat, which couldn't handle salt very well. So they switched to growing barley in fields which wouldn't grow wheat. But eventually, barley would struggle to survive, and they would switch to date palms, which handle the salt better than barley (though you can't make bread out of dates). Eventually, the soil would be too salty for the dates as well. At that point, the land wasn't suitable for any crops. She showed us photos she'd taken on site at her digs of all the salt that can be found. It almost looked like snow. The water lifting cranes are still used today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof

My favorite story about ancient Sumeria is the room full of tablets from a sumerian merchant conman who, for some reason, kept all of his reciepts and complaints in a single room of what was believed to be his home. Most of what we know about Sumeria at that time period is thanks to this one merchant's hoarding lol

I've always wondered...why is the bookshelf to the left of the fire in the background a foot out from the wall? Does something lurk there?

9:44 "History doesn't explicitly repeat, but it sure does like to rhyme." Can we all just appreciate that quote for a moment?

An eleven part collaboration of historical YouTube channels?? That’s an even more ambitious crossover than Jump Force

In the first place I wanted to speak about Mesopotamia but the Subject was taken by you, and it seems I couldn't have present it better! Nice job man ! :)

Egyptians: I’m bored. builds pyramids Mesopotamians: well... another flood invents kayaking

Bronze, water, Writing & Sweet sweet lapis lazuli. What's not to love :D Awesome video!

Bill Wurtz: Society! Coming soon to a dank river valley near you.

Oh hey! Mesopotamia! Home of Ishtar. You know what that reminds me of? Of needing a T-shirt or Mug that says: "I'm Magic, Ishtar loves me, and even the Queen of Hell thinks I'm hot."

Gilgamesh: You mongrels just grow soft over the years.

"If only there was an easier way to carry stuff around! Darn it!" kicks over turntable on its side "...Oh my Marduk, THAT'S IT!" guys stands amongst crowd of people wearing sunglasses and headphones with turntables "ARE Y'ALL READY TO GET CRUNK?!" "The last time we did that, the gods tried to kill us with all their water! Also, records haven't been invented yet! Ya schmuck." "...Oh. Oh yeah. Fiiiiiiine. I guess we could use these as wheels, then."

8:28 That's a really fascinating composition for ancient art. I've never seen something that makes such use of the vertical dimension until well after the middle ages.

When I deployed to Iraq, I was stationed at COB Adder. It is a mile away from the Ziggurat of Ur. We got to go on a tour of the site lead by the grandson of the archaeologist who first dug at the site.

History Sumerized this was a horrible pun