Fall of Civilizations
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2020–2023
2:27:49 · 41M views · Aug 16, 2020
Episode 8 of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, a roughly two and a half hour history of the Sumerians. It covers their mysterious origins, invention of writing and mathematics, great early cities and eventual collapse, with myths, proverbs and recreated music.
HN commenters strongly recommend it as an audiobook-length, deeply informative introduction to Sumer and early Mesopotamian civilization.
12 comments from Hacker News
If you’re interested in the history of Lagash and the wider Sumerian civilization, I highly recommend the _Fall of Civilizations Podcast_ episode 8. this video At 2.5 hours it’s more like an audiobook. During the pandemic this was my gateway into learning a ton about this ancient civilization, when humanity first began to write and thus be able to communicate with us thousands of years later.
Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific topic as well - this video
Arizona is very hot, very arid, and also very favourable for agriculture, with significant production of lettuce and cotton. As long as you can make sure your crops get water through irrigation (which ancient Mesopotamians were very skilled at), your crops will thrive. In fact, the heat and sunlight actually provide a bit of an advantage. However, a number of factors eventually led to the collapse of the civilisations in the fertile crescent. One factor has been the region getting warmer and drier, which poses a challenge even with irrigation. As an example of how different the climate is now from what it was then, Uruk used to be on a channel of the Euphrates, but now that riverbed is completely dried up. Meanwhile, Ur was once a coastal city, but is now ten miles inland. Another factor for the collapse of these civilisations is that the process of irrigation accumulated salt in the soil. The very process that made complex civilisation possible in this part of the world eventually contributed to its end. I recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast for more on this and other societies: this video
> The producer of "civilization and culture"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it. Well, I recommend any history book about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt. If you have 1 hour, hear/listen to this podcast/video: this video
I went down the cuneiform rabbit hole last summer after listening to the excellent “Fall of Civilizations Podcast” episode about Sumer: this video This led to many of Finkel’s videos and the book mentioned in this post. (So far I’m not too impressed with the book, TBH.)