Introduction to the Vedic Period

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- [Sal] First civilization
that we have evidence of

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around modern-day India and Pakistan

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is the Indus Valley Civilization,

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and it's right around the Indus River

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in modern-day Pakistan
and northwest India.

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In other videos we talk about how

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it really comes into being
in the Third Millennium BCE,

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and as we enter into the
Second Millennium BCE

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it starts to decline.

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We don't know exactly why it declined.

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Might have been climate
change, drying up of a river.

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Might have been a natural disaster.

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It might have been an
influence of other peoples.

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We're gonna talk about
in this video is the next

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significant period in the
history of South Asia,

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and it involves the
migration or the introduction

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of another group of people,

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we believe another group of people,

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and that's the Indo-Aryans.

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Write this down.

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Indo-Aryans, sometimes
referred to as just the Aryans,

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who we believe began to migrate

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into modern-day Pakistan
and northwest India

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at right about the same time that

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the Indus Valley
Civilization was declining.

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Some historians actually believe maybe

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Indus Valley Civilization
declined because of them.

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Maybe it was some type of an invasion.

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Although that theory is
not as widely held anymore.

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Some folks believe that the
Indus Valley Civilization

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and this Indo-Aryan
migration somehow merged.

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But this period that we're talking about,

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with the migration of these Indo-Aryans,

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this is called the Vedic
Period, or the Vedic Period.

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It's called the Vedic Period because

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we learn about it from a
collection of literary works

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that we get from that time,
most famously the Vedas.

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Veda comes from Sanskrit,

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and Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas.

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Vedas, in Sanskrit, means: knowledge.

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And they're the foundation of, one,

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what we know about the Vedic Period,

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but they're also the foundation

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of modern Indian culture and religion.

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The primary pieces of the Vedas

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are the Rigveda, the Yajurveda,

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the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda..

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The Rigveda in particular is considered

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the oldest of the Vedas.

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It's believed that it was composed around

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the early part of that Vedic Period,

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between maybe 1500 BCE
and around 1200 BCE.

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We're talking between
3,000 and 3500 years ago,

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while these three Vedas we
believe were composed later.

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Now, these Indo-Aryans, it's believed,

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were essentially pastoralists;

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they were cattle herders, perhaps nomadic.

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But as they began to settle not
just the Indus River Valley,

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they actually began to settle
the entire Gangetic Plain,

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which would include this area,

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which would be northeast India

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as well as countries like Bangladesh.

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The Indus and the Ganges are two

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of the most significant rivers in India.

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But as they started to
settle the Gangetic Plain

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they also became more traditional farmers.

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In this green here, I've highlighted

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when they became more farmers,

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and started to have more settled kingdoms,

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or we believe started to
have more settled kingdoms.

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Other significant Hindu epics,

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we believe the events of the them

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happened around that late Vedic Period.

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The events of the
Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

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Now, the Vedas and these epic poems

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were originally orally transmitted.

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But then, later, either
in the late Vedic Period

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or after the Vedic Period

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was when they were actually written down.

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Just so you have some context here,

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Sanskrit is considered one of the oldest

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Indo-European languages we have.

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I'll talk more about Indo-European

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languages in a little bit.

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Because it turns out
that Sanskrit is related

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to European languages like Greek and Latin

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and even Germanic languages.

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Sanskrit's one of the oldest,

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alongside Mycenaean Greek
and the Hittite Language.

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Those were all contemporary civilizations

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of around this period right over here,

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in the Second Millennium BCE.

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Just so have you context,
Siddhartha Gautama Buddha,

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his life was in one of
these Vedic kingdoms

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in the northeast of India.

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Now, as I mentioned, the
Vedas laid the foundation

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for much of what we consider
to be modern-day India.

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In fact, the first documented reference

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to the Indus River we have from the Vedas.

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The Indus Valley Civilization,

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we haven't been able to
decipher their writing.

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They didn't write down the word Indus.

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It was in the Vedas that
we have the word sindhu,

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and sindhu was later
changed or mispronounced

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or pronounced differently into other words

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that we now associate with India.

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Words like Hindu, Indus, and India,

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they all derived from Sindhu,

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which was the River
referred to in the Vedas,

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and then changed into Hindu,
Indus, and things like India.

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Now, also in the Vedas is the first time

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that we have reference to a
stratified social structure,

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and we see that with the
varnas that are referred to.

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You could view these as
social roles or classes.

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At the top you have the brahmins:

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the priests, the scholars,
and the teachers.

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Then the next you have
the kings and the warriors

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referred to as the kshatriyas.

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Then the vaishyas, who are the farmers,

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the merchants, the artisans.

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Then the shudras: the laborers.

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Now, some historians and
Vedic scholars believe

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that these reference to the varnas

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were added after the Vedic Period

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to things like the Rigveda;

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and some believe that these
weren't traditional casts,

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as it's sometimes perceived today,

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but just a reference to
different social strata,

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that it wasn't necessarily inherited.

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We are not actually sure about that.

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But just to give you a feel
of what was in the Rigveda.

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I encourage you to go look
at the actual primary text,

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and there's a lot out there to read.

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It includes prayers; it
includes praise of the gods;

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it includes rituals; but it also has

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a lot of interesting philosophy.

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And, for example, this
is from the Rigveda.

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This is a hymn referred
to as Nasadiya Sukta,

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and it's in the 10th book, the 129th hymn.

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I find it really
interesting because it shows

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a fairly mature philosophical attitude.

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This is actually the origin hymn,

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and this is just a part of it.

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We're talking about the
origin of the universe.

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"Who really knows?

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"Who will here proclaim it?

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"Whence was it produced?

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"Whence is this creation?

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"Gods came afterward, with
the creation of this universe.

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"Who then knows whence it has arisen?

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"Whether God's will created
it, or whether He was mute.

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"Perhaps it formed itself,
or perhaps it did not.

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"Only He who is the overseer
in highest heaven knows.

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"Only He knows, or
perhaps He does not know."

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I just find it interesting
because it takes a very

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philosophical view towards
this very fundamental question

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of the origin of the actual universe.

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So the Vedic Period, very
important period in India.

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It really lays the foundation
for what we consider

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to be modern Hinduism, modern-day India.

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It starts as really a
Bronze-Age civilization,

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but as we get into the later Vedic Period,

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we see them smelting iron,
and creating iron tools,

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and things like that.

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And, as we'll see in the next video,

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the language of the Vedas, the Sanskrit,

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when Western scholars
started to discover it,

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it opened up their minds as to what were

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the roots of many of
the peoples who settle

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not just north India but also Europe.


Ancient China

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Language: en

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- [Instructor] We are
now going to go the east

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and explore Ancient China.

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And we're going to do that in
the second millennium B.C.E.,

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where we see some of the
first great dynasties

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of Ancient China emerging.

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So if we go to roughly
the 16th century, B.C.E.,

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so that would be about 3600 years ago,

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we have the emergence
of the Shang Dynasty,

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and what's significant
about the Shang Dynasty

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is it's the first dynasty
where we have significant

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archaeological evidence of its existence.

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We have a lot of evidence
in this area where,

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do you see, highlighted in
red, where the Shang Dynasty

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existed with its capital at Yin,

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near the modern-day city of Anyang.

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Now, we have accounts
of a Dynasty before it,

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the Xia or the Chia Dynasty,
although we do not have

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significant archaeological evidence of it.

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But the accounts say that the Xia Dynasty

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would have been around
for roughly 500 years

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before we get to this 16th century B.C.E.,

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with the emergence of the Shang Dynasty.

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Now just to get ourselves
acquainted in time and space,

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and think about, well
what else was happening

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around 1600 B.C.E., we
could remind ourselves

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that that was during the new
kingdom in Ancient Egypt,

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right around here, the
height of Ancient Egypt's

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power was right around that time.

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We could think about the Hittite Empire

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that we study in other videos,

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we could think about Mycenaean Greece.

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Around 1600 B.C.E. is
when you start having,

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or when you have the
decline of the Indus Valley

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civilization, also known as
the Harappan civilization,

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and you start to have the Vedic period,

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where you have these Indo-Aryan people

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start to migrate into Northern India.

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In Mesopotamia, you have
the Assyrian Middle Kingdom

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right around here, so
this is all happening

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in this mid- to late-second
millennium B.C.E.,

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which is roughly the time
of the Shang Dynasty.

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Now the Shang Dynasty was
known for many things,

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it was a Bronze Age culture,
and you can see depicted here,

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many examples of that and
this is pretty impressive

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work with bronze, this
is a bronze battle axe

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right over here, you can
imagine a handle for this axe,

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something like this, this
is nothing that you would

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want to deal with in a battle,
and you can see these other

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very significant, large,
bronze crafts, handiwork,

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that the Shang Dynasty
was able to produce.

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Now what the Shang Dynasty
is also well-known for

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is their writing, it's the first evidence

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of a fairly advanced writing form,

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and it's related to modern Chinese.

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And a lot of that writing,
the significant artifacts

00:03:12.494 --> 00:03:15.898
from that time are on what
are called oracle bones.

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That's an oracle bone right over here,

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this is actually the scapula,
the shoulder blade of an ox,

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and what they would do is
they would write questions

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in this oracle bone script on
top of that scapula of an ox

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and then they would heat it up in a flame

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or some type of source
of heat until it cracks

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and then they would interpret the cracks

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to see what was the answer
to their actual questions.

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And you can actually see
how this oracle bone script

00:03:42.966 --> 00:03:45.643
is related to modern Chinese script.

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So this is Shang written
in oracle bone script

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and you can see how it evolved over time

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to the modern-day Chinese script.

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Even though if you go
straight from that to that,

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they look reasonably different,

00:04:00.625 --> 00:04:02.961
but when you look at the evolution,

00:04:02.961 --> 00:04:06.017
you can see that they
have lot of commonality.

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You also see it in words, right over here,

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shows you evolution of the word tiger,

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and once again, this is
the oracle bone script

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and you can see it looks
right here like a picture

00:04:17.732 --> 00:04:20.372
of a tiger, but then it evolved over time

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to the modern form right over here.

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Now, this Shang civilization,
it's no coincidence

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that first the Xia and then the Shang,

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that they develop over
here in the yellow river

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and the Yangtze River valleys,
we've talked about it,

00:04:34.478 --> 00:04:36.451
the Ancient Egyptians, the Mesopotamians,

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all of the Indus Valley civilization,

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they all started where
agriculture first emerged,

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which tended to be in these
river valley civilizations.

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Now the Shang in particular,
not only were they known

00:04:47.644 --> 00:04:49.144
for their bronze work,

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they were known for their large cities,

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they were known for their
complex social structures,

00:04:53.833 --> 00:04:57.950
they were known especially near
the end of the Shang period,

00:04:57.950 --> 00:04:59.714
for having chariots, and some people think

00:04:59.714 --> 00:05:01.395
that because they had chariots,

00:05:01.395 --> 00:05:05.294
there might have been contacts
with folks further west.

00:05:05.294 --> 00:05:08.992
Now the Shang Dynasty, I said
how the Xia Dynasty lasted

00:05:08.992 --> 00:05:12.767
for over 500 years, and the
Shang Dynasty also lasts

00:05:12.767 --> 00:05:15.579
for on the order of 500 years,

00:05:15.579 --> 00:05:18.425
which is a very very very very long time.

00:05:18.425 --> 00:05:22.631
But as we get to the middle
of the 11th century B.C.E.,

00:05:22.631 --> 00:05:25.228
it would reach its end.

00:05:25.228 --> 00:05:29.837
The last king of the Shang
Dynasty is this gentleman

00:05:29.837 --> 00:05:34.174
right over here, this
would be Dix Xin or Di Shin

00:05:34.174 --> 00:05:36.896
and the accounts have
him initially in his rule

00:05:36.896 --> 00:05:40.739
as being a very capable
ruler, but later in his rule,

00:05:40.739 --> 00:05:44.661
he seems to get more corrupt,
becomes less competent

00:05:44.661 --> 00:05:48.828
of a ruler, his favorite
consort Daji, right over here,

00:05:50.503 --> 00:05:54.255
she's a bit of a not-so-popular
figure in Chinese history,

00:05:54.255 --> 00:05:55.762
a lot of people think that she helped,

00:05:55.762 --> 00:05:59.073
or they blame her for corrupting Di Xin,

00:05:59.073 --> 00:06:02.049
and so he eventually faces his end

00:06:02.049 --> 00:06:06.553
in the Battle of Muye,
against King Wu of Zhou

00:06:06.553 --> 00:06:10.137
or Joe is actually the correct
pronouncing, King Wu of Zhou,

00:06:10.137 --> 00:06:13.955
and King Wu of Zhou is
able to defeat Di Xin

00:06:13.955 --> 00:06:18.122
at the Battle of Muye, and that
is the end of Shang Dynasty

00:06:19.803 --> 00:06:23.023
and it begins the Zhou
Dynasty, which will go on

00:06:23.023 --> 00:06:26.595
for another 800 years,
that's pretty impressive,

00:06:26.595 --> 00:06:30.046
how continuous these
dynasties actually are,

00:06:30.046 --> 00:06:33.516
and after that battle, Di Xin
goes off and commits suicide,

00:06:33.516 --> 00:06:35.134
and this right over here is a depiction

00:06:35.134 --> 00:06:39.561
of King Wu of Zhou, who
starts the Zhou Dynasty.

00:06:39.561 --> 00:06:41.374
But the big picture here
is we're talking about huge

00:06:41.374 --> 00:06:45.033
swaths of time and we have a significant,

00:06:45.033 --> 00:06:47.691
I guess you could say,
civilization, that started

00:06:47.691 --> 00:06:50.122
with the river valleys
in China but it's amazing

00:06:50.122 --> 00:06:52.487
how continuous these civilizations were

00:06:52.487 --> 00:06:56.712
and it's almost amazing how
modern their writing was

00:06:56.712 --> 00:06:59.147
relative to modern Chinese script

00:06:59.147 --> 00:07:02.303
and that's why historians
believe that writing of this form

00:07:02.303 --> 00:07:04.942
was, because of how advanced it was,

00:07:04.942 --> 00:07:08.236
was probably in place
for a long time before

00:07:08.236 --> 00:07:10.817
we see these oracle bones,
so even though we don't have

00:07:10.817 --> 00:07:13.691
the strong archaeological evidence yet

00:07:13.691 --> 00:07:16.585
for the Xia Dynasty,
there's a lot of evidence

00:07:16.585 --> 00:07:18.703
that by the time the Shang came about,

00:07:18.703 --> 00:07:22.809
the Chinese civilization was
already quite well-developed

00:07:22.809 --> 00:07:26.226
around the Yellow River and the Yangtze.


The Hittite Empire and the Battle of Kadesh

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.229 --> 00:00:01.597
- [Instructor] Now going
to talk about a people

00:00:01.597 --> 00:00:03.901
that began to settle
and eventually conquer

00:00:03.901 --> 00:00:07.526
much of Anatolia, modern-day Turkey

00:00:07.526 --> 00:00:11.359
at the beginning of the
second millennium BCE,

00:00:12.873 --> 00:00:15.415
and these people are
known as the Hittites,

00:00:15.415 --> 00:00:18.268
and the word Hittite is referred to

00:00:18.268 --> 00:00:21.466
in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament,

00:00:21.466 --> 00:00:24.448
and it's worth dissecting
that word a little bit

00:00:24.448 --> 00:00:26.309
because the word comes from the idea

00:00:26.309 --> 00:00:28.019
that this region that they conquer

00:00:28.019 --> 00:00:31.303
in modern-day Turkey was
referred to as Hatti,

00:00:31.303 --> 00:00:33.739
and Hatti had original inhabitants

00:00:33.739 --> 00:00:37.405
known as the Hattians,
but the Hittites conquer

00:00:37.405 --> 00:00:39.642
and displace these Hattians,

00:00:39.642 --> 00:00:41.758
but they are referred to as the Hittites

00:00:41.758 --> 00:00:44.175
because they settle in Hatti.

00:00:45.032 --> 00:00:49.035
Now they're considered to
be Indo-European people.

00:00:49.035 --> 00:00:51.638
This is a word that you will hear often

00:00:51.638 --> 00:00:53.775
in World History, and that's because

00:00:53.775 --> 00:00:58.596
what linguists have found is
that many modern languages

00:00:58.596 --> 00:01:01.144
seem to have a root in what's called

00:01:01.144 --> 00:01:03.771
proto-Indo-European language,

00:01:03.771 --> 00:01:05.658
and I'll do a whole video on it,

00:01:05.658 --> 00:01:07.616
but looking at linguistic structures,

00:01:07.616 --> 00:01:10.246
we believe or one model is is that

00:01:10.246 --> 00:01:13.201
many of the people who speak
these Indo-European languages

00:01:13.201 --> 00:01:14.626
or these ones that are derived

00:01:14.626 --> 00:01:17.484
from the proto-Indo-European,
and that includes

00:01:17.484 --> 00:01:20.523
languages related to Greek.

00:01:20.523 --> 00:01:21.586
We're talking about Latin,

00:01:21.586 --> 00:01:23.199
we're talking about
the Germanic languages,

00:01:23.199 --> 00:01:24.745
including what I'm speaking right now

00:01:24.745 --> 00:01:26.787
which is English, which is fundamentally

00:01:26.787 --> 00:01:29.602
a Germanic language with
a lot of Latin influence,

00:01:29.602 --> 00:01:31.939
we're talking about Celtic,
but we're also talking

00:01:31.939 --> 00:01:34.211
about more eastern languages like Persian,

00:01:34.211 --> 00:01:35.665
and Hindi, and Bengali.

00:01:35.665 --> 00:01:38.751
All of these have a lot
of commonalities to them

00:01:38.751 --> 00:01:42.441
which we believe gives
evidence that, at one point,

00:01:42.441 --> 00:01:45.512
it was a very closely
related group of people

00:01:45.512 --> 00:01:48.285
who are coming from this Caucasus region,

00:01:48.285 --> 00:01:49.887
and this map that you see here,

00:01:49.887 --> 00:01:53.252
this shows one model for
how those people spread

00:01:53.252 --> 00:01:55.613
and eventually broke
off into various tribes

00:01:55.613 --> 00:01:59.717
speaking different, but
very related, languages.

00:01:59.717 --> 00:02:02.134
So the fourth millennium BCE,

00:02:03.130 --> 00:02:06.045
they were in this region right over here

00:02:06.045 --> 00:02:08.155
which would be southern Russia,

00:02:08.155 --> 00:02:09.717
the Caucasus right around there,

00:02:09.717 --> 00:02:14.321
and then by 2500 BCE,
that's this orange area,

00:02:14.321 --> 00:02:16.041
they had spread even further.

00:02:16.041 --> 00:02:19.255
And then by 1000 BCE, they
had spread even further

00:02:19.255 --> 00:02:21.372
and the Hittites would have
been one of those people

00:02:21.372 --> 00:02:25.227
because they settle in
Anatolia right over here.

00:02:25.227 --> 00:02:28.625
Now we don't know as
much about the Hittites

00:02:28.625 --> 00:02:31.939
as we know about, say,
the ancient Egyptians

00:02:31.939 --> 00:02:34.475
or the Mesopotamians, but we know that

00:02:34.475 --> 00:02:37.326
they were a significant civilization.

00:02:37.326 --> 00:02:40.213
Now if you look at this timeline here,

00:02:40.213 --> 00:02:42.221
it shows the various civilizations

00:02:42.221 --> 00:02:44.382
that were emerging around this time.

00:02:44.382 --> 00:02:47.597
We're now talking about the mid

00:02:47.597 --> 00:02:51.514
to late second millennium,
so this is 1700 BCE,

00:02:52.756 --> 00:02:54.490
let me write that down just to make sure,

00:02:54.490 --> 00:02:59.015
we know that's BCE, 1600
BCE, so on and so forth,

00:02:59.015 --> 00:03:01.055
and I show these various civilizations

00:03:01.055 --> 00:03:03.555
that existed around that time,

00:03:05.329 --> 00:03:08.751
and they correspond to this map here.

00:03:08.751 --> 00:03:13.271
So you have Mycenaean Greece
which emerges around 1600 BCE

00:03:13.271 --> 00:03:16.331
all the way to about 1100 BCE.

00:03:16.331 --> 00:03:18.936
You have the New kingdom of Egypt,

00:03:18.936 --> 00:03:21.551
which is from about 1550 BCE

00:03:21.551 --> 00:03:24.134
to a little bit after 1100 BCE,

00:03:25.399 --> 00:03:26.665
and we do a whole series of videos

00:03:26.665 --> 00:03:29.082
on ancient Egypt, and then we talk about

00:03:29.082 --> 00:03:30.569
the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom,

00:03:30.569 --> 00:03:32.357
and of course, the New Kingdom.

00:03:32.357 --> 00:03:33.690
And the New Kingdom of Egypt is important

00:03:33.690 --> 00:03:36.149
because they're going to
be one of the key rivals

00:03:36.149 --> 00:03:38.395
for the Hittites in this period.

00:03:38.395 --> 00:03:40.545
The New Kingdom of Egypt
is often referred to

00:03:40.545 --> 00:03:42.815
as the Egyptian Empire because it was

00:03:42.815 --> 00:03:46.270
the most powerful time of ancient Egypt,

00:03:46.270 --> 00:03:50.041
and you see that right over
here in this brown color.

00:03:50.041 --> 00:03:51.952
Now in this purplish-blue color,

00:03:51.952 --> 00:03:54.326
that is the Hittite civilization,

00:03:54.326 --> 00:03:56.799
and this map right over here,

00:03:56.799 --> 00:03:58.271
you can see that they started to

00:03:58.271 --> 00:04:00.663
really settle and conquer that area

00:04:00.663 --> 00:04:02.758
at the beginning of the second millennium,

00:04:02.758 --> 00:04:06.478
and by 1600, you have
the Old Hittite kingdom,

00:04:06.478 --> 00:04:09.561
and then as we get to about 1400 BCE,

00:04:11.105 --> 00:04:12.971
you have the New Hittite Kingdom,

00:04:12.971 --> 00:04:14.862
often known as the Hittite Empire,

00:04:14.862 --> 00:04:17.150
and this is where they really
start to flex their muscle.

00:04:17.150 --> 00:04:18.799
And notice, they're flexing their muscles

00:04:18.799 --> 00:04:22.491
at roughly the same time as the Egyptians,

00:04:22.491 --> 00:04:24.027
and so this map right over here,

00:04:24.027 --> 00:04:26.429
this is in roughly the 14th century,

00:04:26.429 --> 00:04:28.808
what this area looked like.

00:04:28.808 --> 00:04:32.291
So we're talking roughly this zone,

00:04:32.291 --> 00:04:34.094
and you can see there are
several civilizations,

00:04:34.094 --> 00:04:36.014
many of them that were in their peak.

00:04:36.014 --> 00:04:38.991
You see the Mitanni
Kingdom right over here.

00:04:38.991 --> 00:04:41.011
You see the Middle Assyrian Empire.

00:04:41.011 --> 00:04:43.475
We talk about them when
we talk about Mesopotamia,

00:04:43.475 --> 00:04:46.953
and you see Kassite
Babylonia right over here.

00:04:46.953 --> 00:04:49.882
The Kassites took over after the Amorites

00:04:49.882 --> 00:04:52.640
under Hammurabi and his dynasty,

00:04:52.640 --> 00:04:54.735
and we'll see that they
also have a connection

00:04:54.735 --> 00:04:56.813
to the Hittites.

00:04:56.813 --> 00:04:59.468
So this will hopefully
acquaint you with time.

00:04:59.468 --> 00:05:01.839
These are Bronze Age civilizations.

00:05:01.839 --> 00:05:04.425
The state of the art
technology for most of them

00:05:04.425 --> 00:05:07.066
was bronze, which is
combining copper and tin,

00:05:07.066 --> 00:05:08.585
and you can make weapons, and tools,

00:05:08.585 --> 00:05:09.806
and jewelry with it.

00:05:09.806 --> 00:05:11.388
Now what's interesting about the Hittites

00:05:11.388 --> 00:05:13.258
is that they were one of the first

00:05:13.258 --> 00:05:15.121
to start to use iron.

00:05:15.121 --> 00:05:17.134
Iron required a little
bit more technology.

00:05:17.134 --> 00:05:20.723
In order to smelt iron,
you have to get the furnace

00:05:20.723 --> 00:05:23.234
to be even hotter, and
the Hittites, we know,

00:05:23.234 --> 00:05:24.984
did make use of iron.

00:05:26.677 --> 00:05:30.708
Now they are also known
as great charioteers.

00:05:30.708 --> 00:05:34.130
This is an image of what a
Hittite chariot would look like,

00:05:34.130 --> 00:05:36.921
and so with a combination
of iron chariots,

00:05:36.921 --> 00:05:39.704
that's one of the things that helped them

00:05:39.704 --> 00:05:42.454
establish something of an empire.

00:05:43.660 --> 00:05:46.025
Now I mentioned that
they come into conflict

00:05:46.025 --> 00:05:47.160
with many other peoples.

00:05:47.160 --> 00:05:48.988
In fact, they come into
conflict with most of

00:05:48.988 --> 00:05:52.329
the folks that you see on
this picture over here.

00:05:52.329 --> 00:05:54.104
The first time that you really see them

00:05:54.104 --> 00:05:57.267
in a significant way conquering things

00:05:57.267 --> 00:06:00.017
is in 1595 BCE, and this would be

00:06:01.072 --> 00:06:03.786
the Old Hittite Kingdom, but this is

00:06:03.786 --> 00:06:06.666
what famously ends Hammurabi's dynasty,

00:06:06.666 --> 00:06:09.789
the Amorite dynasty in
Babylon right over here.

00:06:09.789 --> 00:06:12.440
They go to Babylon in 1595 BCE

00:06:12.440 --> 00:06:14.342
and they overthrow it.

00:06:14.342 --> 00:06:16.338
They're not able to maintain rule,

00:06:16.338 --> 00:06:17.381
they have to go back.

00:06:17.381 --> 00:06:20.872
There start to be fragmentation
dissension at home,

00:06:20.872 --> 00:06:24.152
but it's the end of the
Amorites, and then eventually,

00:06:24.152 --> 00:06:26.812
another group, the Kassites,
take over this region,

00:06:26.812 --> 00:06:30.338
and you can see them in
gray right over here.

00:06:30.338 --> 00:06:34.501
Now what's also interesting
in this timeline

00:06:34.501 --> 00:06:35.670
that we have, and we're talking about

00:06:35.670 --> 00:06:37.696
hundreds of years, it's important to keep

00:06:37.696 --> 00:06:40.177
things in perspective, is that you see

00:06:40.177 --> 00:06:42.966
that a lot of these
civilizations in the Middle East

00:06:42.966 --> 00:06:45.466
and Mesopotamia, this
area's often referred to

00:06:45.466 --> 00:06:46.746
as the Levant.

00:06:46.746 --> 00:06:49.890
It's related to the word levante

00:06:49.890 --> 00:06:52.069
from Italian for "to rise,"

00:06:52.069 --> 00:06:55.740
because for the Romans, for the Europeans,

00:06:55.740 --> 00:06:58.707
for those in the West, this
was where the sun rose,

00:06:58.707 --> 00:07:01.662
this was the East, it was
the Eastern Mediterranean.

00:07:01.662 --> 00:07:03.321
And so you have all of these civilizations

00:07:03.321 --> 00:07:07.515
that are in the Levant
in the 14th century BCE,

00:07:07.515 --> 00:07:10.908
in the 13th century BCE, but
then they start to decline,

00:07:10.908 --> 00:07:13.770
and that general period after or around

00:07:13.770 --> 00:07:18.344
the 12th century BCE is known
as the Bronze Age Collapse

00:07:18.344 --> 00:07:20.038
when a lot of these civilizations become

00:07:20.038 --> 00:07:22.484
a lot more fragmented.

00:07:22.484 --> 00:07:24.000
Now I've already alluded to the fact,

00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:25.422
and I talk about this in a lot of detail

00:07:25.422 --> 00:07:28.459
in the Ancient Egypt video,
that the chief rivals

00:07:28.459 --> 00:07:31.227
of the Hittites were the Egyptians,

00:07:31.227 --> 00:07:34.961
and vice versa, and it's
particularly the case

00:07:34.961 --> 00:07:37.885
in the 14th and 13th
centuries where both of them

00:07:37.885 --> 00:07:40.871
were quite powerful empires.

00:07:40.871 --> 00:07:44.409
You have the Egyptians
moving up into this area

00:07:44.409 --> 00:07:47.787
right over here, modern-day
Israel and Lebanon,

00:07:47.787 --> 00:07:50.709
and you have the Hittites moving down

00:07:50.709 --> 00:07:54.756
from the north, from Anatolia
into modern-day Syria.

00:07:54.756 --> 00:07:57.000
And there's a whole series of conflicts

00:07:57.000 --> 00:08:01.193
that emerge in this area,
and one of the most famous

00:08:01.193 --> 00:08:06.163
and one of the most significant
happens in 1274 BCE,

00:08:06.163 --> 00:08:08.748
and that is the Battle of Kadesh.

00:08:08.748 --> 00:08:12.303
Kadesh is an area that has switched hands

00:08:12.303 --> 00:08:15.520
multiple times between the
Egyptians and the Hittites.

00:08:15.520 --> 00:08:18.538
At this time, you have Ramses II,

00:08:18.538 --> 00:08:20.495
considered the greatest Egyptian Pharaoh,

00:08:20.495 --> 00:08:23.659
he is the Pharaoh, he
is the ruler of Egypt,

00:08:23.659 --> 00:08:25.857
and he wants to recapture Kadesh.

00:08:25.857 --> 00:08:27.771
And what's significant
about the Battle of Kadesh,

00:08:27.771 --> 00:08:30.087
it's the earliest battle where we have

00:08:30.087 --> 00:08:32.880
a significant account of the tactics,

00:08:32.880 --> 00:08:35.578
of the strategy, of the
formation of the troops.

00:08:35.578 --> 00:08:38.853
We know that there were over
50,000 soldiers involved.

00:08:38.853 --> 00:08:40.544
It's currently believed it might be

00:08:40.544 --> 00:08:44.119
the largest chariot battle
in all of world history

00:08:44.119 --> 00:08:48.214
that we at least know about,
and the actual outcome

00:08:48.214 --> 00:08:51.112
of the Battle of Kadesh
seems to be a stalemate.

00:08:51.112 --> 00:08:54.422
Our accounts of it come
primarily from the Egyptians.

00:08:54.422 --> 00:08:57.505
We don't have any significant Hittite

00:08:58.883 --> 00:09:01.125
surviving accounts of
the Battle of Kadesh,

00:09:01.125 --> 00:09:03.363
but it gave us a lot of information.

00:09:03.363 --> 00:09:07.112
But beyond just the battle
itself being significant,

00:09:07.112 --> 00:09:08.679
because we have this detail about

00:09:08.679 --> 00:09:10.413
what battles were like at that time period

00:09:10.413 --> 00:09:13.397
with chariots and the type
of tactics that were used,

00:09:13.397 --> 00:09:15.713
what's also significant is 16 years after

00:09:15.713 --> 00:09:17.037
the Battle of Kadesh,

00:09:17.037 --> 00:09:21.204
you have the Egyptian-Hittite
Peace Treaty in 1258 BCE.

00:09:24.140 --> 00:09:26.033
And the reason why this is significant

00:09:26.033 --> 00:09:28.168
is this is sometimes referred to as

00:09:28.168 --> 00:09:30.565
the first peace treaty in history.

00:09:30.565 --> 00:09:32.191
I would qualify a little bit as saying

00:09:32.191 --> 00:09:34.620
it's the first peace
treaty that we know about

00:09:34.620 --> 00:09:37.110
in this part of the world,
and this right over here

00:09:37.110 --> 00:09:38.830
is the Hittite version of it,

00:09:38.830 --> 00:09:40.982
and what's especially cool
about this peace treaty,

00:09:40.982 --> 00:09:42.572
and just so you know what
these other pictures are,

00:09:42.572 --> 00:09:44.963
this is a Hittite ramp discovered at

00:09:44.963 --> 00:09:46.990
the Hittite capital of Hattusa.

00:09:46.990 --> 00:09:48.692
This is some pictures of the Hittite

00:09:48.692 --> 00:09:50.044
gods of the underworld.

00:09:50.044 --> 00:09:51.409
But once again, we don't have as complete

00:09:51.409 --> 00:09:54.052
of a picture of the Hittite versus, say,

00:09:54.052 --> 00:09:57.331
the Egyptians, but what's also neat

00:09:57.331 --> 00:09:59.019
about this treaty, it's sometimes called

00:09:59.019 --> 00:10:00.770
the Treaty of Kadesh, but it doesn't refer

00:10:00.770 --> 00:10:01.988
directly to Kadesh.

00:10:01.988 --> 00:10:04.324
These folks have been in
conflict with each other

00:10:04.324 --> 00:10:07.824
for nearly over 100 years right over here,

00:10:09.638 --> 00:10:11.091
so this treaty is really to talk about

00:10:11.091 --> 00:10:12.685
not just Kadesh, and this treaty happened

00:10:12.685 --> 00:10:14.599
16 years after the Battle of Kadesh,

00:10:14.599 --> 00:10:16.876
but to talk about, "Let's
just have a permanent peace

00:10:16.876 --> 00:10:20.093
"between our two great empires,"

00:10:20.093 --> 00:10:22.732
and what's cool about it is
we have surviving accounts

00:10:22.732 --> 00:10:25.990
from the Hittites that
were discovered in Hattusa,

00:10:25.990 --> 00:10:28.056
and we also have a symmetric account

00:10:28.056 --> 00:10:30.837
that we get from the Egyptians,

00:10:30.837 --> 00:10:33.567
and so this is the one from the Hittites

00:10:33.567 --> 00:10:35.180
and this is from the Egyptians.

00:10:35.180 --> 00:10:37.855
It's written in Acadian,
which wasn't their language.

00:10:37.855 --> 00:10:40.687
Acadian, we talked about,
was a Semitic language,

00:10:40.687 --> 00:10:42.622
and they used cuneiform
script, which remember,

00:10:42.622 --> 00:10:45.938
we get from the Sumerians,
but it's cool to get

00:10:45.938 --> 00:10:47.992
the same treaty written
in different scripts

00:10:47.992 --> 00:10:50.548
from both sides of the conflict.

00:10:50.548 --> 00:10:51.822
And I'll just read a little bit of it

00:10:51.822 --> 00:10:53.350
because it's neat to just think about it,

00:10:53.350 --> 00:10:55.663
and of course they didn't
write it in this language,

00:10:55.663 --> 00:10:57.900
modern English wouldn't show up for many,

00:10:57.900 --> 00:10:59.934
actually thousands of
years from this point,

00:10:59.934 --> 00:11:02.030
but this is a translation.

00:11:02.030 --> 00:11:04.696
"Now from the beginning
of the limits of eternity,

00:11:04.696 --> 00:11:07.218
"as for the situation of
the Great ruler of Egypt

00:11:07.218 --> 00:11:10.053
"with the Great Prince
of Hatti, the god did not

00:11:10.053 --> 00:11:12.064
"permit hostility to occur between them,

00:11:12.064 --> 00:11:13.581
"through a regulation.

00:11:13.581 --> 00:11:17.762
"But in the time of Muwatallis,
the Great Prince of Hatti,

00:11:17.762 --> 00:11:20.103
"my brother," so this is
from the point of view

00:11:20.103 --> 00:11:22.468
of Hattusilis, who is the Hittite king

00:11:22.468 --> 00:11:24.540
at the time of the treaty, "he fought with

00:11:24.540 --> 00:11:27.412
"Ramses Meri-Amon," the Pharaoh Ramses,

00:11:27.412 --> 00:11:29.010
"the great ruler of Egypt.

00:11:29.010 --> 00:11:31.909
"But hereafter, from this
day, behold Hattusilis,

00:11:31.909 --> 00:11:34.179
"the Great Prince of Hatti,
is under a regulation

00:11:34.179 --> 00:11:37.046
"in order not to permit hostility to occur

00:11:37.046 --> 00:11:39.060
"between them forever."

00:11:39.060 --> 00:11:41.258
Those are big words.

00:11:41.258 --> 00:11:45.342
"Behold, Hattusilis," sometimes
it's spelled Hattusili,

00:11:45.342 --> 00:11:47.289
"the Great Prince of
Hatti, has set himself

00:11:47.289 --> 00:11:51.654
"in a regulation with
User-maat-Re Setep-en-Re,"

00:11:51.654 --> 00:11:55.342
that's sometimes how
Ramses is referred to,

00:11:55.342 --> 00:11:57.447
"the Great ruler of Egypt,
beginning from this day,

00:11:57.447 --> 00:11:58.931
"to cause that good peace and brotherhood

00:11:58.931 --> 00:12:01.210
"occur between us forever, while he is

00:12:01.210 --> 00:12:03.478
"in brotherhood with me
and he is at peace with me,

00:12:03.478 --> 00:12:05.639
"and I am in brotherhood with him

00:12:05.639 --> 00:12:08.675
"and I am in peace with him forever.

00:12:08.675 --> 00:12:11.807
"Behold, I, as the Great Prince of Hatti,

00:12:11.807 --> 00:12:14.593
"am with Ramses Meri-Amon, in good peace

00:12:14.593 --> 00:12:16.072
"and in good brotherhood.

00:12:16.072 --> 00:12:18.206
"The children of the
children of the Great Prince

00:12:18.206 --> 00:12:20.288
"of Hatti are in brotherhood and peace

00:12:20.288 --> 00:12:23.117
"with the children of the
children of Ramses Meri-Amon,

00:12:23.117 --> 00:12:25.238
"the Great ruler of Egypt, for they are

00:12:25.238 --> 00:12:27.655
"in our situation of brotherhood

00:12:27.655 --> 00:12:30.130
"and our situation of peace.

00:12:30.130 --> 00:12:32.217
"The land of Egypt,
with the land of Hatti,

00:12:32.217 --> 00:12:34.816
"shall be at peace and in brotherhood

00:12:34.816 --> 00:12:36.925
"like unto us forever.

00:12:36.925 --> 00:12:40.846
"Hostilities shall not
occur between them forever."

00:12:40.846 --> 00:12:42.957
So not only are they, and
this is just part of the text,

00:12:42.957 --> 00:12:44.174
it's actually quite interesting,

00:12:44.174 --> 00:12:48.341
do a web search for the
Egyptian-Hittite Treaty text,

00:12:49.188 --> 00:12:50.398
and you can actually get the whole text,

00:12:50.398 --> 00:12:52.110
this is just part of an excerpt of it,

00:12:52.110 --> 00:12:53.594
but they go into much more details

00:12:53.594 --> 00:12:55.646
about how they might
provide aid for each other,

00:12:55.646 --> 00:12:57.023
how they're not going to have conflict,

00:12:57.023 --> 00:12:58.508
et cetera, et cetera.

00:12:58.508 --> 00:13:00.984
So I'll leave you there,
but the important thing

00:13:00.984 --> 00:13:03.336
to take away is some
of these modern notions

00:13:03.336 --> 00:13:05.358
of peace treaties and military tactics,

00:13:05.358 --> 00:13:08.153
they go deep into history, and this is

00:13:08.153 --> 00:13:09.695
some of the earliest evidence we find,

00:13:09.695 --> 00:13:11.745
but I would suspect as
we discover more things,

00:13:11.745 --> 00:13:14.745
we might find even earlier evidence.


Ancient Egypt

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.044 --> 00:00:02.190
- [Narrator] In this video,
we are going to give ourselves

00:00:02.190 --> 00:00:04.607
an overview of ancient Egypt,

00:00:06.015 --> 00:00:09.527
which corresponds
geographically pretty closely

00:00:09.527 --> 00:00:14.144
to the modern day state of
Egypt in northeast Africa.

00:00:14.144 --> 00:00:16.906
Now the central feature
in both ancient Egypt

00:00:16.906 --> 00:00:19.833
and in modern Egypt is the Nile River

00:00:19.833 --> 00:00:22.962
that you see in blue right over here.

00:00:22.962 --> 00:00:26.572
And the Nile River is one of
the great rivers of the world.

00:00:26.572 --> 00:00:29.539
It rivals the Amazon
River as the longest river

00:00:29.539 --> 00:00:32.685
and it sources the
tributaries of the Nile Rover

00:00:32.685 --> 00:00:35.421
start even south of this picture

00:00:35.421 --> 00:00:37.742
and the water flows northward

00:00:37.742 --> 00:00:41.442
and eventually its delta
reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

00:00:41.442 --> 00:00:46.012
The delta, which is where
a river opens into the sea,

00:00:46.012 --> 00:00:49.505
is called a delta because,
as you can see, these rivers,

00:00:49.505 --> 00:00:50.451
you can even see it from

00:00:50.451 --> 00:00:51.627
the satellite pictures right over here,

00:00:51.627 --> 00:00:53.593
they start branching up a bunch

00:00:53.593 --> 00:00:56.916
and you have this upside
down triangular region,

00:00:56.916 --> 00:00:58.796
which looks a little bit like

00:00:58.796 --> 00:01:01.633
an upside down Greek letter delta,

00:01:01.633 --> 00:01:03.716
so that's why river delta is called that.

00:01:03.716 --> 00:01:05.305
And this one just happens
to be upside down.

00:01:05.305 --> 00:01:06.552
If it was flowing the other way,

00:01:06.552 --> 00:01:08.432
it would be a right-side-up delta.

00:01:08.432 --> 00:01:12.126
So the Nile River, it
flows from, you could say,

00:01:12.126 --> 00:01:16.126
eastern mid-Africa up
into the Mediterranean Sea

00:01:17.328 --> 00:01:19.781
and because it has this northward flow,

00:01:19.781 --> 00:01:22.953
the southern parts of
the river are upriver

00:01:22.953 --> 00:01:25.680
and they are actually
called the Upper Nile.

00:01:25.680 --> 00:01:26.513
So, Upper.

00:01:27.571 --> 00:01:31.406
The Upper Nile is actually
south of the Lower Nile,

00:01:31.406 --> 00:01:33.270
of the Lower Nile.

00:01:33.270 --> 00:01:36.456
And once again, that's because
the Upper Nile is up river,

00:01:36.456 --> 00:01:39.525
it's also flowing from higher elevations

00:01:39.525 --> 00:01:40.846
to lower elevations.

00:01:40.846 --> 00:01:45.039
So as you go south, you get to
higher and higher elevations.

00:01:45.039 --> 00:01:48.683
Now, the reason why the
river is so important,

00:01:48.683 --> 00:01:50.315
we studied this multiple times,

00:01:50.315 --> 00:01:52.101
rivers are a source of fresh water,

00:01:52.101 --> 00:01:55.339
when they flood they make
the surrounding soil fertile,

00:01:55.339 --> 00:01:57.160
they're suitable for agriculture,

00:01:57.160 --> 00:01:59.381
and the Nile Valley is
one of the first places

00:01:59.381 --> 00:02:01.731
that we see agriculture emerging

00:02:01.731 --> 00:02:04.340
during the neolithic period.

00:02:04.340 --> 00:02:06.190
In fact, human settlement we believe

00:02:06.190 --> 00:02:08.911
was along this Nile River Valley

00:02:08.911 --> 00:02:12.161
as far as 6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago,

00:02:14.321 --> 00:02:18.272
and it might have been there
even further back in time.

00:02:18.272 --> 00:02:19.781
And because you have that agriculture,

00:02:19.781 --> 00:02:22.212
it allowed for higher
population densities,

00:02:22.212 --> 00:02:24.271
which allowed for more
specialization of labor

00:02:24.271 --> 00:02:26.170
and more complex societies.

00:02:26.170 --> 00:02:28.103
It's not a coincidence
that some of the first,

00:02:28.103 --> 00:02:32.464
that one of the first great
civilizations emerged here.

00:02:32.464 --> 00:02:36.297
Now, the story of the
Nile River, or of Egypt,

00:02:37.882 --> 00:02:40.590
and actually they are tied very closely,

00:02:40.590 --> 00:02:43.446
even though Egypt is considered
a lot of this region,

00:02:43.446 --> 00:02:47.004
most of the human population,
this is true even today,

00:02:47.004 --> 00:02:51.171
is right along the river,
around that fertile soil,

00:02:53.107 --> 00:02:56.815
where the agriculture actually occurs.

00:02:56.815 --> 00:02:59.315
In fact, this was so important
to the ancient Egyptians

00:02:59.315 --> 00:03:01.307
that their whole calendar, their seasons,

00:03:01.307 --> 00:03:04.042
were based on what the
Nile River was doing.

00:03:04.042 --> 00:03:05.746
They had a season called the inundation,

00:03:05.746 --> 00:03:08.365
or the flooding of the river,
which makes the soil fertile.

00:03:08.365 --> 00:03:10.138
They had a season of growth,

00:03:10.138 --> 00:03:12.145
which is now talking about
the growth of the crops

00:03:12.145 --> 00:03:14.615
and they had a season of harvest.

00:03:14.615 --> 00:03:18.889
And so you had people in this
valley for thousands of years,

00:03:18.889 --> 00:03:20.926
but when we talk about ancient Egypt,

00:03:20.926 --> 00:03:23.895
we formally talk about
it as a civilization

00:03:23.895 --> 00:03:25.895
around 3,100, 3,150 BCE.

00:03:30.346 --> 00:03:33.205
And this is where we get to
our timeline right over here.

00:03:33.205 --> 00:03:36.746
So we're talking about right
around there on our timeline

00:03:36.746 --> 00:03:38.029
and the reason why this is considered

00:03:38.029 --> 00:03:41.071
the beginning of the ancient
Egyptian civilization

00:03:41.071 --> 00:03:42.658
is this is when we believe

00:03:42.658 --> 00:03:46.954
that upper and lower
Egypt were first united

00:03:46.954 --> 00:03:50.126
under the king and there's
different names used,

00:03:50.126 --> 00:03:52.293
Narmer sometimes or Menes.

00:03:55.991 --> 00:03:57.433
I'm going to mispronounce things

00:03:57.433 --> 00:04:00.561
every now and then and I'm
probably doing it here as well.

00:04:00.561 --> 00:04:04.728
And so he was the king that
unified upper and lower Egypt

00:04:05.713 --> 00:04:09.609
into an empire and the
empire, as we will see,

00:04:09.609 --> 00:04:11.880
which lasted thousands of years,

00:04:11.880 --> 00:04:15.298
every one of these spaces
is a hundred years.

00:04:15.298 --> 00:04:18.070
We're gonna go over huge time span,

00:04:18.070 --> 00:04:22.118
but the ancient Egyptian
civilization is roughly divided

00:04:22.118 --> 00:04:23.785
into three kingdoms.

00:04:24.673 --> 00:04:28.719
You have the old kingdom,
which went from about,

00:04:28.719 --> 00:04:31.802
right from about the 27th century BCE

00:04:34.331 --> 00:04:37.081
up to about the 17th century BCE.

00:04:39.700 --> 00:04:43.220
You have the middle kingdom
and you have the new kingdom.

00:04:43.220 --> 00:04:46.660
And once again, this is
spanning right over here

00:04:46.660 --> 00:04:49.410
over a thousand years of history.

00:04:50.339 --> 00:04:53.521
And in between those, you have
these intermediate periods

00:04:53.521 --> 00:04:56.090
where the kingdom or the empire

00:04:56.090 --> 00:04:57.827
was a little bit more fragmented.

00:04:57.827 --> 00:05:00.124
You have in some of these
intermediate periods,

00:05:00.124 --> 00:05:02.774
you have some foreign rule.

00:05:02.774 --> 00:05:06.191
But just to get a sense
of some of what happened

00:05:06.191 --> 00:05:07.550
over this thousands of years,

00:05:07.550 --> 00:05:09.161
and I'm kind of laughing in my head

00:05:09.161 --> 00:05:13.490
because it's hard to cover
over two, 3,000 years,

00:05:13.490 --> 00:05:15.489
in the course of just a few minutes,

00:05:15.489 --> 00:05:17.946
but this will give you a
sense of what ancient Egyptian

00:05:17.946 --> 00:05:20.437
civilization was all about.

00:05:20.437 --> 00:05:23.587
Now the kings are referred to as pharaohs

00:05:23.587 --> 00:05:26.779
but as we'll see that term
pharaoh is not really used

00:05:26.779 --> 00:05:28.390
until we get to the new kingdom.

00:05:28.390 --> 00:05:30.598
But I will refer to the kings as pharaohs

00:05:30.598 --> 00:05:31.569
throughout this video,

00:05:31.569 --> 00:05:33.871
just to say, hey these
are the Egyptian kings.

00:05:33.871 --> 00:05:37.871
And the old kingdom is
probably most known today

00:05:39.369 --> 00:05:41.838
in our popular culture
for what we most associate

00:05:41.838 --> 00:05:45.814
with ancient Egypt and
that is the pyramids.

00:05:45.814 --> 00:05:47.962
And here, right over
here are the pyramids,

00:05:47.962 --> 00:05:49.733
there's the Great Pyramid of Giza,

00:05:49.733 --> 00:05:52.766
which is near modern-day Cairo today.

00:05:52.766 --> 00:05:56.894
This is the Sphinx and they
were built in that old period

00:05:56.894 --> 00:06:01.850
under the Pharaohs Sneferu
and Khufu, right over here

00:06:01.850 --> 00:06:03.850
in the 26th century BCE.

00:06:07.249 --> 00:06:09.200
And we are still trying to
get a better understanding

00:06:09.200 --> 00:06:10.833
of how this was done.

00:06:10.833 --> 00:06:12.568
We actually now don't believe

00:06:12.568 --> 00:06:14.644
that it was done by slave labor,

00:06:14.644 --> 00:06:17.270
but instead it was done
during, you could say,

00:06:17.270 --> 00:06:21.479
the off season by the peasants
as a form of taxation.

00:06:21.479 --> 00:06:24.569
Okay, you're done planting
or harvesting your crops?

00:06:24.569 --> 00:06:25.971
Well now that you have some time,

00:06:25.971 --> 00:06:27.966
and this shows actually the
importance of agriculture

00:06:27.966 --> 00:06:30.041
for freeing people up, so to speak,

00:06:30.041 --> 00:06:33.386
why don't you help the pharaohs
built these massive tombs,

00:06:33.386 --> 00:06:35.036
which I've seen various estimates

00:06:35.036 --> 00:06:36.339
that it might have
taken some place between

00:06:36.339 --> 00:06:40.877
10 and 100,000 people several
decades to build each.

00:06:40.877 --> 00:06:42.701
But these are even today,

00:06:42.701 --> 00:06:45.868
these were built over 4,500 years ago,

00:06:46.707 --> 00:06:49.087
are some of the most iconic symbols

00:06:49.087 --> 00:06:51.670
that humanity has ever created.

00:06:52.548 --> 00:06:56.715
And the reason why we know
so much about ancient Egypt

00:06:58.547 --> 00:07:01.368
is that we have been able
to decipher their writing.

00:07:01.368 --> 00:07:03.224
It's a symbolic, they
have these pictographs,

00:07:03.224 --> 00:07:05.335
these hieroglyphics, I'm sure you've heard

00:07:05.335 --> 00:07:06.414
of the word before,

00:07:06.414 --> 00:07:08.492
and for a while we had
no idea what they said.

00:07:08.492 --> 00:07:10.683
We would see these
encryptions in these tombs

00:07:10.683 --> 00:07:13.194
and we had a sense that, okay these tombs,

00:07:13.194 --> 00:07:15.103
especially things like the pyramids

00:07:15.103 --> 00:07:16.750
would be for these great kings,

00:07:16.750 --> 00:07:19.522
we could tell that it
was a stratified society,

00:07:19.522 --> 00:07:21.407
that nobility had better
tombs than others,

00:07:21.407 --> 00:07:23.433
but we didn't really have a
good sense of what was going on

00:07:23.433 --> 00:07:27.018
until we discovered this,
which is the Rosetta Stone,

00:07:27.018 --> 00:07:29.325
which was discovered in 1799.

00:07:29.325 --> 00:07:32.220
The reason why this is so valuable

00:07:32.220 --> 00:07:33.405
is it has the same text

00:07:33.405 --> 00:07:35.966
written in three different languages.

00:07:35.966 --> 00:07:38.335
It has it written in the hieroglyphs

00:07:38.335 --> 00:07:40.166
of the ancient Egyptians,

00:07:40.166 --> 00:07:43.156
and it has it written in a
later script used in Egypt,

00:07:43.156 --> 00:07:45.920
called demotic Egyptian,
and most importantly,

00:07:45.920 --> 00:07:49.193
it has it also written in Greek.

00:07:49.193 --> 00:07:52.023
And so historians were able to say,

00:07:52.023 --> 00:07:54.756
okay, we can now start to
decipher what these symbols mean

00:07:54.756 --> 00:07:57.166
because we have a translation of them

00:07:57.166 --> 00:07:58.939
and that's why it's one
of the first civilizations

00:07:58.939 --> 00:08:02.276
where we're able to put
the picture together.

00:08:02.276 --> 00:08:06.275
And hieroglyphics are one of
the first forms of writing.

00:08:06.275 --> 00:08:09.437
But let's now go on in our journey

00:08:09.437 --> 00:08:13.778
through thousands of years of
ancient Egyptian civilization.

00:08:13.778 --> 00:08:16.881
Between the old kingdom
and the middle kingdom,

00:08:16.881 --> 00:08:18.944
you have the first intermediate period

00:08:18.944 --> 00:08:20.461
and then you have the middle kingdom

00:08:20.461 --> 00:08:22.471
and then you have the Hyksos,

00:08:22.471 --> 00:08:23.626
which are Semitic people,

00:08:23.626 --> 00:08:25.368
Semitic referring to their language

00:08:25.368 --> 00:08:29.417
being of the same family as
Semitic languages like Arabic,

00:08:29.417 --> 00:08:31.598
or Hebrew, or Aramaic.

00:08:31.598 --> 00:08:33.288
But then you have the new kingdom,

00:08:33.288 --> 00:08:36.455
and the new kingdom is
considered to be the peak

00:08:36.455 --> 00:08:38.366
of ancient Egypt.

00:08:38.366 --> 00:08:40.666
It's really the height
of their technology,

00:08:40.666 --> 00:08:43.903
it's the height of their
military capability.

00:08:43.903 --> 00:08:46.972
And there are several pharaohs
that are worthy of note

00:08:46.972 --> 00:08:48.431
in the new kingdom.

00:08:48.431 --> 00:08:51.348
The first is, he was born Amenhotep

00:08:53.002 --> 00:08:55.794
or he was originally known
as Amenhotep the Fourth

00:08:55.794 --> 00:08:58.793
and then he eventually
names himself Akhenaton

00:08:58.793 --> 00:09:01.751
and Akhenaton means effective for Aton,

00:09:01.751 --> 00:09:04.918
Aton being a significant Egyptian god.

00:09:05.969 --> 00:09:10.468
And the reason why he changed
his name is he decides

00:09:10.468 --> 00:09:13.244
that, okay we have, the
Egyptians have this huge

00:09:13.244 --> 00:09:15.402
pantheon of gods.

00:09:15.402 --> 00:09:17.905
Here is just the sum of
them right over here,

00:09:17.905 --> 00:09:21.855
this is the god Osiris, often
associated with the afterlife

00:09:21.855 --> 00:09:25.355
or transition, regeneration, resurrection.

00:09:26.876 --> 00:09:30.883
You have the god Amun here
and his first name Amenhotep,

00:09:30.883 --> 00:09:33.133
it means Amun is satisfied.

00:09:34.548 --> 00:09:36.872
What is considered kind
of the equivalent of Zeus,

00:09:36.872 --> 00:09:39.060
you have the god here Horace,

00:09:39.060 --> 00:09:41.074
once again a very significant god

00:09:41.074 --> 00:09:42.830
at different times in Egypt,

00:09:42.830 --> 00:09:45.932
but what was interesting
about Amenhotep the Fourth

00:09:45.932 --> 00:09:47.793
or Akhenaton, whichever
name you want to use,

00:09:47.793 --> 00:09:51.021
is he decided, no, no, no,
I don't like this pantheon,

00:09:51.021 --> 00:09:54.354
this polytheistic religion that we have,

00:09:55.839 --> 00:09:57.509
I wanna worship one god,

00:09:57.509 --> 00:09:59.366
and the god that he decides to worship

00:09:59.366 --> 00:10:02.755
is really the, you could
consider it the sun god,

00:10:02.755 --> 00:10:06.347
or the sun disc, and
its representation looks

00:10:06.347 --> 00:10:11.134
something like this and
it was referred to as Aten

00:10:11.134 --> 00:10:14.343
and so he changes his name to Akhenaton

00:10:14.343 --> 00:10:17.011
and he actually starts to
try to get rid of evidence

00:10:17.011 --> 00:10:21.485
of these other gods or to make
them a lot less important.

00:10:21.485 --> 00:10:23.115
And so the reason why that's notable

00:10:23.115 --> 00:10:25.399
is this is viewed as perhaps

00:10:25.399 --> 00:10:27.584
one of the first attempts at monotheism,

00:10:27.584 --> 00:10:32.569
at least within this ancient
Egyptian civilization.

00:10:32.569 --> 00:10:37.008
He's also noted for giving
a lot of power to his wife,

00:10:37.008 --> 00:10:38.889
to the queen, Nefertiti,

00:10:38.889 --> 00:10:41.886
who some people say was second in command,

00:10:41.886 --> 00:10:45.238
or even co-ruled alongside him.

00:10:45.238 --> 00:10:47.978
Now he was also famous
because after his death,

00:10:47.978 --> 00:10:52.145
eventually, his son, King Tut,
Tutankhamen, comes to power.

00:10:54.113 --> 00:10:57.179
And the reason why King
Tut, as he's often known,

00:10:57.179 --> 00:11:00.106
although it's Tutankhamen,
is known is because

00:11:00.106 --> 00:11:04.273
we were able to find his
tombs in relatively good order

00:11:05.474 --> 00:11:09.641
and so he's become a popular
part of the imagination.

00:11:12.064 --> 00:11:13.726
And he's known as a child pharaoh.

00:11:13.726 --> 00:11:15.413
He comes to power when he's very young,

00:11:15.413 --> 00:11:19.561
he dies at 18 and so it's
kind of an interesting story.

00:11:19.561 --> 00:11:23.018
Now, most prominent
amongst all of the pharaohs

00:11:23.018 --> 00:11:24.994
across Egyptian history,

00:11:24.994 --> 00:11:26.680
and this is also in the new kingdom,

00:11:26.680 --> 00:11:29.109
comes a little bit after Tutankhamen,

00:11:29.109 --> 00:11:30.859
is Ramses the Second.

00:11:31.703 --> 00:11:35.870
And Ramses the Second, who
emerges here in the 13th century,

00:11:36.955 --> 00:11:40.626
and he rules for most
of the 13th century BCE,

00:11:40.626 --> 00:11:44.720
he represents really the
peak of Egypt, ancient Egypt,

00:11:44.720 --> 00:11:46.549
as a military power.

00:11:46.549 --> 00:11:50.068
He's famous for the Battle at Kaddish,

00:11:50.068 --> 00:11:52.665
which is the earliest battle
where we actually know

00:11:52.665 --> 00:11:55.183
what the tactics and the formations were

00:11:55.183 --> 00:11:59.145
and it was with the also
significant Hittite Empire

00:11:59.145 --> 00:12:03.312
in 1274 BCE, this is an
image drawn much, much later,

00:12:04.546 --> 00:12:05.903
of the Battle of Kaddish.

00:12:05.903 --> 00:12:06.927
The battle, we now believe,

00:12:06.927 --> 00:12:08.434
might have been a bit of a stalemate,

00:12:08.434 --> 00:12:10.861
Ramses the Second wasn't
able to capture Kaddish,

00:12:10.861 --> 00:12:13.835
but has told us a lot
about military tactics

00:12:13.835 --> 00:12:15.925
and strategy and formation of that time.

00:12:15.925 --> 00:12:18.334
Historians today think it
might have been the largest

00:12:18.334 --> 00:12:21.264
chariot battle maybe ever.

00:12:21.264 --> 00:12:24.154
So this was a significant
thing that happened.

00:12:24.154 --> 00:12:28.022
Now, eventually the new
kingdom does collapse,

00:12:28.022 --> 00:12:30.777
as we get to the end of
the second millennium,

00:12:30.777 --> 00:12:33.202
and then over the next
several hundreds of years,

00:12:33.202 --> 00:12:35.154
we're talking about a
very long period of time,

00:12:35.154 --> 00:12:38.188
it gets fragmented, you
have several rulers,

00:12:38.188 --> 00:12:41.794
you have the Kushites
rule from the Upper Nile,

00:12:41.794 --> 00:12:45.725
the Kushites were in this
area right over here.

00:12:45.725 --> 00:12:47.625
They rule for a brief period.

00:12:47.625 --> 00:12:50.784
The Assyrians, that's a
Mesopotamian civilization,

00:12:50.784 --> 00:12:53.895
they rule for a small period of time,

00:12:53.895 --> 00:12:56.241
and then eventually and we
talk about this in some detail

00:12:56.241 --> 00:12:59.543
in other videos, you have
the Persians take over,

00:12:59.543 --> 00:13:02.902
you have Cambyses, Osiris the Great's son,

00:13:02.902 --> 00:13:06.342
he's able to rule over,
he's able to conquer Egypt

00:13:06.342 --> 00:13:09.251
and Egypt becomes part of the
Achaemenid Empire for a while

00:13:09.251 --> 00:13:12.611
until the conquering
of Alexander the Great.

00:13:12.611 --> 00:13:14.353
And after Alexander the Great dies,

00:13:14.353 --> 00:13:16.994
one of his generals and
his dynasty takes over,

00:13:16.994 --> 00:13:20.034
Ptolemaic Egypt and now it's
being ruled by foreigners,

00:13:20.034 --> 00:13:22.094
well it's been ruled by
foreigners for a while now,

00:13:22.094 --> 00:13:24.138
but now it's by the Greeks

00:13:24.138 --> 00:13:25.719
and the famous Cleopatra,

00:13:25.719 --> 00:13:27.749
who's considered a pharaoh of Egypt,

00:13:27.749 --> 00:13:29.612
she's actually Greek by blood,

00:13:29.612 --> 00:13:33.068
she's actually the one
that seduced you could say

00:13:33.068 --> 00:13:35.906
Julius Cesar and Marc Antony

00:13:35.906 --> 00:13:38.422
and after Cleopatra's
death, more and more,

00:13:38.422 --> 00:13:42.269
actually eventually it
becomes part of Rome.

00:13:42.269 --> 00:13:44.985
So as you can see we
covered this enormous large

00:13:44.985 --> 00:13:46.902
time period in history,

00:13:47.815 --> 00:13:50.876
one of the most significant
civilizations in all of history,

00:13:50.876 --> 00:13:53.450
one of the most famous
poems about civilizations

00:13:53.450 --> 00:13:56.275
and rulers, about Ramses the
Second, the poem Ozymandias

00:13:56.275 --> 00:13:57.792
was named after him.

00:13:57.792 --> 00:14:00.366
You have some of the great
cities of the ancient world,

00:14:00.366 --> 00:14:01.917
Thebes, which was the capital

00:14:01.917 --> 00:14:05.462
during parts of the new
kingdom and the middle kingdom,

00:14:05.462 --> 00:14:07.640
you have Memphis, which was one of the,

00:14:07.640 --> 00:14:09.653
some people say founded by Menes

00:14:09.653 --> 00:14:11.909
and the capital of the old kingdom.

00:14:11.909 --> 00:14:14.862
These were all happening in ancient Egypt.


Indus Valley Civilization

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.609 --> 00:00:02.950
- [Narrator] As we've talked
about in multiple videos,

00:00:02.950 --> 00:00:05.366
some of the earliest
civilizations we have found

00:00:05.366 --> 00:00:07.315
have been around river valleys,

00:00:07.315 --> 00:00:09.407
and that is no coincidence
because some of the first

00:00:09.407 --> 00:00:11.973
agriculture emerged around river valleys

00:00:11.973 --> 00:00:14.690
and the agriculture supported
higher population densities

00:00:14.690 --> 00:00:17.155
and more sedentary populations,

00:00:17.155 --> 00:00:19.758
and allowed for more specialization.

00:00:19.758 --> 00:00:21.770
And we have talked about several of these,

00:00:21.770 --> 00:00:25.437
the ancient Egyptians
around the Nile River,

00:00:26.536 --> 00:00:30.004
the ancient Mesopotamians
around the Tigris and Euphrates.

00:00:30.004 --> 00:00:33.889
And now we're gonna talk
about the ancient civilization

00:00:33.889 --> 00:00:35.762
around the Indus River.

00:00:35.762 --> 00:00:39.115
The Indus River runs mostly
in modern-day Pakistan,

00:00:39.115 --> 00:00:43.160
and that's why it's called
the Indus Valley civilization.

00:00:43.160 --> 00:00:45.327
Indus Valley Civilization.

00:00:48.883 --> 00:00:50.657
It's also sometimes referred to

00:00:50.657 --> 00:00:52.324
as the Harappan civilization,

00:00:52.324 --> 00:00:54.893
which was the first site
where they found evidence

00:00:54.893 --> 00:00:58.807
of this fairly extensive civilization.

00:00:58.807 --> 00:01:02.825
Now to get ourselves acquainted in time,

00:01:02.825 --> 00:01:06.325
this shows when archaeologists, historians

00:01:07.266 --> 00:01:11.433
consider to be the main part
of the Harappan civilization.

00:01:12.508 --> 00:01:15.747
There's evidence that
people had basic villages,

00:01:15.747 --> 00:01:17.672
civilizations, agriculture here,

00:01:17.672 --> 00:01:19.755
as far back as 7,000 BCE,

00:01:21.294 --> 00:01:23.657
and that's just based on
the evidence we have today,

00:01:23.657 --> 00:01:26.245
but when people refer to the
Indus Valley civilization

00:01:26.245 --> 00:01:30.632
in particular, they're usually
staring around 3300 BCE

00:01:30.632 --> 00:01:33.844
and in orange right over here,
this is the early period,

00:01:33.844 --> 00:01:37.802
or you could say the early
Indus Valley civilization.

00:01:37.802 --> 00:01:41.106
Now some of the biggest
structures and pieces

00:01:41.106 --> 00:01:43.276
of technology that have been discovered

00:01:43.276 --> 00:01:45.211
have been right over here,
which is often referred to

00:01:45.211 --> 00:01:49.378
as the mature period for the
Indus Valley civilization,

00:01:50.312 --> 00:01:51.837
and then it goes into decline.

00:01:51.837 --> 00:01:53.779
We'll talk about why it
might have gone into decline,

00:01:53.779 --> 00:01:55.509
although we're not really sure,

00:01:55.509 --> 00:01:57.974
and this is called the late.

00:01:57.974 --> 00:02:00.063
Now to put it in context
relative to these other

00:02:00.063 --> 00:02:03.485
civilizations, remember
the ancient Sumerians were

00:02:03.485 --> 00:02:06.811
starting to be quite, I guess
you could say civilized,

00:02:06.811 --> 00:02:08.706
by about this period.

00:02:08.706 --> 00:02:10.773
You start having a lot of intermingling

00:02:10.773 --> 00:02:13.232
between the Acadians and the Sumerians

00:02:13.232 --> 00:02:16.650
as you get into the late third millennium.

00:02:16.650 --> 00:02:19.978
That's when you have the
empire of Sargon the Great,

00:02:19.978 --> 00:02:21.412
the Acadian Empire.

00:02:21.412 --> 00:02:23.622
As you get to the end
of this mature period

00:02:23.622 --> 00:02:26.301
right over here, this is
close to or around the time

00:02:26.301 --> 00:02:28.998
of Hammurabi, the Babylonian Empire,

00:02:28.998 --> 00:02:32.985
and in Egypt, if you
go back to around 2500,

00:02:32.985 --> 00:02:35.525
around this time, that's
when the pyramids were built

00:02:35.525 --> 00:02:37.694
and you have the Egyptian Kings,

00:02:37.694 --> 00:02:41.774
these god-kings that were
ruling for most of this period

00:02:41.774 --> 00:02:44.685
right over here and as we'll
see, there was actually,

00:02:44.685 --> 00:02:47.020
we believe, a good bit
of cultural interchange

00:02:47.020 --> 00:02:49.963
between the significant civilizations.

00:02:49.963 --> 00:02:53.461
Now just to appreciate how
extensive this Indus Valley

00:02:53.461 --> 00:02:57.044
civilization was, I
will show you this map.

00:02:58.334 --> 00:03:00.955
And this map, it's
zoomed in of that region

00:03:00.955 --> 00:03:03.267
around the Indus Valley
that I just showed you.

00:03:03.267 --> 00:03:05.541
This is a map of most of Pakistan here,

00:03:05.541 --> 00:03:08.778
and these red squares are
places where they have found

00:03:08.778 --> 00:03:10.574
evidence of the civilization.

00:03:10.574 --> 00:03:14.708
The first place was
Harappa, right over here,

00:03:14.708 --> 00:03:17.289
the Punjab region of Pakistan.

00:03:17.289 --> 00:03:20.183
And that's why it's called
the Harappan civilization.

00:03:20.183 --> 00:03:25.091
But as you can see, it's much
more than just around Harappa.

00:03:25.091 --> 00:03:28.364
The largest site is at Mohenjo-Daro,

00:03:28.364 --> 00:03:31.052
right over here in the
Sindh region of Pakistan

00:03:31.052 --> 00:03:33.629
and it's believed that
as many as 40,000 people

00:03:33.629 --> 00:03:36.256
lived in that city that
we now, or that site,

00:03:36.256 --> 00:03:39.415
that we now call Mohenjo-Daro.

00:03:39.415 --> 00:03:43.171
And so far, we have discovered
over 1,000 sites in this area

00:03:43.171 --> 00:03:46.869
and we believe that as
many as five million people

00:03:46.869 --> 00:03:49.622
might have been part of the civilization.

00:03:49.622 --> 00:03:52.657
Now the reason why we
think it is a civilization

00:03:52.657 --> 00:03:55.127
and now, and let me actually
keep scrolling around

00:03:55.127 --> 00:03:56.922
so you appreciate the extent of it.

00:03:56.922 --> 00:04:00.285
There's sites in mainly, many
in Pakistan that you see here.

00:04:00.285 --> 00:04:03.952
There's also quite a
few in modern-day India

00:04:06.436 --> 00:04:08.804
right over here, so it's
an extensive network

00:04:08.804 --> 00:04:11.801
of these sites and the
reason why we think it's

00:04:11.801 --> 00:04:15.132
one civilization, or at
least a connected culture,

00:04:15.132 --> 00:04:17.659
is that you find a lot of standardization.

00:04:17.659 --> 00:04:20.843
You find standardization in
their weights and measures.

00:04:20.843 --> 00:04:22.717
In fact, they have a unit
of measurement that's

00:04:22.717 --> 00:04:25.889
as small as 1.6 millimeters,
and the reason why that's

00:04:25.889 --> 00:04:28.171
important is you wouldn't
create a unit of measurement

00:04:28.171 --> 00:04:31.694
of 1.6 millimeters unless you
knew how to use something,

00:04:31.694 --> 00:04:35.015
unless you know how to
make things that precise.

00:04:35.015 --> 00:04:37.566
And one of the things that
they made that precise

00:04:37.566 --> 00:04:39.427
are things like their structures.

00:04:39.427 --> 00:04:42.424
They had these standard
bricks and this brick size

00:04:42.424 --> 00:04:44.665
and many of these symbols that they used

00:04:44.665 --> 00:04:47.258
were found throughout these sites.

00:04:47.258 --> 00:04:49.564
Which said we don't know
whether they were controlled

00:04:49.564 --> 00:04:52.291
by one ruler or one emperor,
but there was definitely

00:04:52.291 --> 00:04:55.218
a lot of cultural interchange

00:04:55.218 --> 00:04:57.394
to the point that they were
using the same size bricks,

00:04:57.394 --> 00:04:59.116
they were using the same symbols,

00:04:59.116 --> 00:05:01.916
they were using the same
units of measurement.

00:05:01.916 --> 00:05:03.549
And also, as you can imagine,

00:05:03.549 --> 00:05:05.974
having a unit of measurement that precise,

00:05:05.974 --> 00:05:09.959
that small implies that
they were great builders.

00:05:09.959 --> 00:05:13.331
And the evidence we find
today says yes, they were.

00:05:13.331 --> 00:05:16.221
This is a picture of
the site at Mohenjo-Daro

00:05:16.221 --> 00:05:18.331
in modern-day Sindh Pakistan,

00:05:18.331 --> 00:05:20.986
and you can see how
tight this brick work is,

00:05:20.986 --> 00:05:23.901
even by modern standards
this is quite good.

00:05:23.901 --> 00:05:26.198
You'd need to think of how
many things we would build

00:05:26.198 --> 00:05:29.125
would last 5,000 years in this good,

00:05:29.125 --> 00:05:31.647
being exposed to the environments.

00:05:31.647 --> 00:05:33.134
They think this was a public bath.

00:05:33.134 --> 00:05:34.959
You see a citadel in the background.

00:05:34.959 --> 00:05:36.805
We've discovered defensive structures.

00:05:36.805 --> 00:05:39.339
Perhaps most impressively, there is,

00:05:39.339 --> 00:05:43.218
or most impressive,
there's sewage systems.

00:05:43.218 --> 00:05:45.455
They think houses had wells, water.

00:05:45.455 --> 00:05:48.154
So this was a technologically
advanced civilization

00:05:48.154 --> 00:05:49.573
especially for that time.

00:05:49.573 --> 00:05:52.423
In many ways, more advanced
than the other civilizations,

00:05:52.423 --> 00:05:55.095
the contemporary civilizations
that we had talked about.

00:05:55.095 --> 00:05:59.576
Here are some examples of their
sculpture or of their art.

00:05:59.576 --> 00:06:02.719
This is, this one right
over here is a picture,

00:06:02.719 --> 00:06:05.475
it's called Dancing Girl,
but she's not dancing,

00:06:05.475 --> 00:06:07.187
but they think that
might be her profession.

00:06:07.187 --> 00:06:09.711
It's all speculation by
archaeologists today.

00:06:09.711 --> 00:06:13.087
This they believe is called Priest-King,

00:06:13.087 --> 00:06:15.040
once again, it's all speculation.

00:06:15.040 --> 00:06:18.432
This is an example of the
types of seals they made.

00:06:18.432 --> 00:06:19.806
This is their jewelry, once again,

00:06:19.806 --> 00:06:21.710
this is quite intricate jewelry,

00:06:21.710 --> 00:06:24.235
and this jewelry was
not just discovered in

00:06:24.235 --> 00:06:27.245
archaeological digs in
these various sites.

00:06:27.245 --> 00:06:30.828
There's evidence of
their jewelry as far as

00:06:33.131 --> 00:06:35.680
Mesopotamia in digs there.

00:06:35.680 --> 00:06:39.067
And they believe that there
was actually a very active

00:06:39.067 --> 00:06:42.496
maritime trade network
between these areas.

00:06:42.496 --> 00:06:45.304
There's jewelry discovered
in these Indus Valley

00:06:45.304 --> 00:06:47.571
civilizations that were based on shells

00:06:47.571 --> 00:06:50.461
from the Arabian peninsula.

00:06:50.461 --> 00:06:52.394
They have materials from China,

00:06:52.394 --> 00:06:54.415
so there's materials from
other parts of India,

00:06:54.415 --> 00:06:58.222
so once again, a very very
extensive trade network.

00:06:58.222 --> 00:07:02.725
These civilizations would
have known about them.

00:07:02.725 --> 00:07:05.453
But as we said, they were extremely,

00:07:05.453 --> 00:07:08.143
they seemed somewhat organized.

00:07:08.143 --> 00:07:10.678
Even though we can't read their writing,

00:07:10.678 --> 00:07:13.720
in fact I have some examples
of their writing here.

00:07:13.720 --> 00:07:16.026
And you might notice, so this is examples

00:07:16.026 --> 00:07:19.007
of their writing and
you might notice there,

00:07:19.007 --> 00:07:22.056
this is turned into a
somewhat infamous symbol now,

00:07:22.056 --> 00:07:24.515
because of the Nazis, this is a swastika.

00:07:24.515 --> 00:07:27.512
But the swastika was one
of the symbols they used,

00:07:27.512 --> 00:07:29.358
it's a symbol in Hinduism,

00:07:29.358 --> 00:07:32.301
it's considered a symbol of good luck.

00:07:32.301 --> 00:07:35.322
It's something that the
Nazis kind of usurped

00:07:35.322 --> 00:07:37.770
and turned it into a very negative thing,

00:07:37.770 --> 00:07:40.336
but it does show this connection between

00:07:40.336 --> 00:07:42.871
that Indus Valley or that
Harappan civilization

00:07:42.871 --> 00:07:45.570
and modern cultures that are in India and

00:07:45.570 --> 00:07:47.377
things like the Hindu religion.

00:07:47.377 --> 00:07:49.064
Although once again, we do not know a ton

00:07:49.064 --> 00:07:52.439
about their religion because
their language hasn't

00:07:52.439 --> 00:07:56.829
survived and we cannot
decipher their actual writing.

00:07:56.829 --> 00:08:00.390
But because of their
organization and the consistency,

00:08:00.390 --> 00:08:02.983
or relative consistency
amongst these different sites

00:08:02.983 --> 00:08:04.106
that are so far flung,

00:08:04.106 --> 00:08:06.760
this is a large distance
even on modern day terms,

00:08:06.760 --> 00:08:09.327
but especially if we're
talking about four or five

00:08:09.327 --> 00:08:10.994
thousand years ago.

00:08:10.994 --> 00:08:12.930
Because of that, we think that, okay,

00:08:12.930 --> 00:08:15.435
there must have been at
least decent government

00:08:15.435 --> 00:08:18.329
administration or organization
at a city-state level,

00:08:18.329 --> 00:08:20.520
although we're unsure
whether there was a connected

00:08:20.520 --> 00:08:23.220
empire, whether you had an
organization beyond that

00:08:23.220 --> 00:08:26.021
or they all just decided to
take each other's standards

00:08:26.021 --> 00:08:30.104
and symbols and brick
sizes and things like that.

00:08:31.447 --> 00:08:35.530
Now, one of the key
mysteries of the Indus Valley

00:08:36.887 --> 00:08:39.384
civilization is why did it end?

00:08:39.384 --> 00:08:43.217
It seemed to be this
thriving civilization,

00:08:43.217 --> 00:08:45.705
perhaps the most extensive one.

00:08:45.705 --> 00:08:48.007
In other videos, I talk about right now,

00:08:48.007 --> 00:08:50.145
the oldest wheel was
discovered in Mesopotamia,

00:08:50.145 --> 00:08:52.152
but some people think that
the wheel might have been

00:08:52.152 --> 00:08:55.448
used even earlier in the
Indus Valley civilization.

00:08:55.448 --> 00:08:58.967
I talk about this period,
as early as 3300 BCE,

00:08:58.967 --> 00:09:02.789
but there's evidence that the civilization

00:09:02.789 --> 00:09:04.423
started much earlier.

00:09:04.423 --> 00:09:07.404
In the site right over here in Mehrgarh,

00:09:07.404 --> 00:09:09.300
right over here in Pakistan.

00:09:09.300 --> 00:09:12.265
They think that humans
were having simple villages

00:09:12.265 --> 00:09:14.022
and agriculture as early, there's evidence

00:09:14.022 --> 00:09:15.884
as early as 7000 BCE

00:09:15.884 --> 00:09:18.555
and that site was discovered just in 1974.

00:09:18.555 --> 00:09:20.495
We might discover things that take us

00:09:20.495 --> 00:09:22.061
even further into the past,

00:09:22.061 --> 00:09:24.812
and when you have a
civilization that was around for

00:09:24.812 --> 00:09:27.463
so long, if there were people
there as early as 7000 BCE,

00:09:27.463 --> 00:09:30.282
we're talking about it was
there for thousands of years,

00:09:30.282 --> 00:09:32.402
but all of a sudden, it starts to decline.

00:09:32.402 --> 00:09:35.292
There's evidence of less
and less trade going on,

00:09:35.292 --> 00:09:38.232
less and less sophistication,
and then it ends.

00:09:38.232 --> 00:09:40.474
And it's one of the mysteries of history,

00:09:40.474 --> 00:09:42.106
of archaeology today.

00:09:42.106 --> 00:09:45.143
Why did this Indus
Valley civilization end?

00:09:45.143 --> 00:09:47.264
Some of the older
theories were it was maybe

00:09:47.264 --> 00:09:50.044
it was a foreign invasion,
maybe some of the ancestors

00:09:50.044 --> 00:09:52.175
of the modern Indians invaded,

00:09:52.175 --> 00:09:54.347
or maybe they assimilated it somehow.

00:09:54.347 --> 00:09:57.587
More current theories don't
think that was the case.

00:09:57.587 --> 00:09:59.716
They think it might be some
form of climate change,

00:09:59.716 --> 00:10:01.934
that some of the
important rivers dried up,

00:10:01.934 --> 00:10:03.727
made the agriculture much harder.

00:10:03.727 --> 00:10:05.791
Some people think it might
have been a natural disaster,

00:10:05.791 --> 00:10:07.669
it might have been a flood of some kind.

00:10:07.669 --> 00:10:09.006
But we just don't know.

00:10:09.006 --> 00:10:10.815
Or the people, for some
reason, decided to leave,

00:10:10.815 --> 00:10:14.323
die, migrate to maybe
other parts of the region.

00:10:14.323 --> 00:10:17.726
But needless to say, it was
a significant civilization,

00:10:17.726 --> 00:10:19.668
and we're just scratching the surface

00:10:19.668 --> 00:10:21.653
of what we know about it.

00:10:21.653 --> 00:10:23.572
We know a lot and we
know it was impressive,

00:10:23.572 --> 00:10:25.515
even though we can't read their script

00:10:25.515 --> 00:10:27.687
and we don't know as
much about it as we know

00:10:27.687 --> 00:10:30.306
about ancient Mesopotamia
and the ancient Egyptians,

00:10:30.306 --> 00:10:32.991
but signs are that as more time passes,

00:10:32.991 --> 00:10:36.688
we'll realize that it was
more and more sophisticated

00:10:36.688 --> 00:10:40.855
and impressive than maybe
we even appreciate today.


Ancient Mesopotamia

WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

00:00:00.594 --> 00:00:01.600
- [Instructor] In other videos,

00:00:01.600 --> 00:00:04.336
we talk about how 10 to 15,000 years ago.

00:00:04.336 --> 00:00:07.118
You have the emergence of agriculture

00:00:07.118 --> 00:00:10.370
primarily around river valleys,

00:00:10.370 --> 00:00:12.393
and it's no surprise that agriculture

00:00:12.393 --> 00:00:14.853
first came about around river valleys

00:00:14.853 --> 00:00:17.040
because the rivers would flood,

00:00:17.040 --> 00:00:19.410
making the soil around them fertile.

00:00:19.410 --> 00:00:22.339
They would provide fresh water for crops

00:00:22.339 --> 00:00:24.421
and for the people who
would live near them.

00:00:24.421 --> 00:00:26.520
Later on, the rivers could be useful for

00:00:26.520 --> 00:00:29.335
transporting things like crops,

00:00:29.335 --> 00:00:31.076
and so it's not surprising that our

00:00:31.076 --> 00:00:33.978
first significant
civilizations also emerged

00:00:33.978 --> 00:00:37.093
where the first agriculture emerged.

00:00:37.093 --> 00:00:38.728
And our first civilizations we'll see

00:00:38.728 --> 00:00:41.274
in ancient Egypt along the Nile.

00:00:41.274 --> 00:00:45.338
We will see it in the Indus
Valley along the Indus River.

00:00:45.338 --> 00:00:49.569
We'll see it in China along
the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers,

00:00:49.569 --> 00:00:51.979
and we'll also see it in Mesopotamia

00:00:51.979 --> 00:00:55.229
along the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers.

00:00:56.726 --> 00:00:58.779
And what we're gonna focus on in

00:00:58.779 --> 00:01:02.112
this video in particular is Mesopotamia.

00:01:03.814 --> 00:01:05.379
Now, the word Mesopotamia
literally come from

00:01:05.379 --> 00:01:07.613
meso, between, and potamos.

00:01:07.613 --> 00:01:10.772
I'm probably not pronouncing
it right, rivers.

00:01:10.772 --> 00:01:13.433
So it's the area between
rivers is literally

00:01:13.433 --> 00:01:15.839
what Mesopotamia is referring to.

00:01:15.839 --> 00:01:19.587
And it's primarily modern day Iraq.

00:01:19.587 --> 00:01:21.707
Now the reason why this is
particularly interesting

00:01:21.707 --> 00:01:24.027
and it's called the
cradle of civilization,

00:01:24.027 --> 00:01:27.345
is not only is it one of or perhaps

00:01:27.345 --> 00:01:29.899
the first place that
agriculture developed,

00:01:29.899 --> 00:01:33.916
it was at the crossroads of
many other early civilizations.

00:01:33.916 --> 00:01:35.840
Notice it's right in between

00:01:35.840 --> 00:01:37.673
the Indus Valley civilization here,

00:01:37.673 --> 00:01:39.722
and then the ancient Egyptians,

00:01:39.722 --> 00:01:42.851
and other civilizations that
were emerging in the area.

00:01:42.851 --> 00:01:44.517
And so it's not surprising that this was

00:01:44.517 --> 00:01:47.835
a geography that had
significant developments

00:01:47.835 --> 00:01:50.977
in terms of technology,
in terms of architecture,

00:01:50.977 --> 00:01:54.576
in terms of religion, in terms of writing.

00:01:54.576 --> 00:01:57.138
And the first civilization we believe

00:01:57.138 --> 00:02:01.180
that emerged in Mesopotamia
are the Sumerians.

00:02:01.180 --> 00:02:02.013
Sumerians.

00:02:04.924 --> 00:02:07.677
And Sumeria and Sumerians,
it's most associated with

00:02:07.677 --> 00:02:12.463
this region right over
here of, let me circle it,

00:02:12.463 --> 00:02:17.251
this region right over here
of southern Mesopotamia.

00:02:17.251 --> 00:02:19.477
And we currently think
that this civilization

00:02:19.477 --> 00:02:22.747
started to emerge around 4000 BCE.

00:02:22.747 --> 00:02:25.368
You can see it on this
timeline here in orange,

00:02:25.368 --> 00:02:30.116
and they developed things
as basic as the wheel.

00:02:30.116 --> 00:02:31.637
The first wheel that was ever discovered

00:02:31.637 --> 00:02:33.637
was 3500 BCE in Sumeria.

00:02:35.873 --> 00:02:37.974
They're famous for their
architectural structures.

00:02:37.974 --> 00:02:39.786
This is a picture here of a ziggurat,

00:02:39.786 --> 00:02:41.515
which was at the center of many of

00:02:41.515 --> 00:02:44.774
these Sumerian and as we'll
see Mesopotamian cities.

00:02:44.774 --> 00:02:47.620
This would require an incredible
amount of labor to produce,

00:02:47.620 --> 00:02:50.565
and at the top of these they
had temples to their Gods

00:02:50.565 --> 00:02:53.416
and their Gods, they had
a polytheistic religion,

00:02:53.416 --> 00:02:55.999
and their Gods took human form.

00:02:58.341 --> 00:03:02.358
Also amongst the Sumerians
is where we think

00:03:02.358 --> 00:03:05.658
one of the first written
languages developed.

00:03:05.658 --> 00:03:06.662
It wasn't the first.

00:03:06.662 --> 00:03:07.895
You also have the Egyptian hieroglyphics

00:03:07.895 --> 00:03:09.841
and written language emerged amongst

00:03:09.841 --> 00:03:12.925
the Harappans and the
Indus Valley civilization

00:03:12.925 --> 00:03:14.774
and amongst the Chinese,

00:03:14.774 --> 00:03:16.511
but it was one of the first languages.

00:03:16.511 --> 00:03:20.156
This right over here is an
example of a cuneiform tablet.

00:03:20.156 --> 00:03:24.210
This is a cuneiform tablet
written in the script.

00:03:24.210 --> 00:03:28.127
Cuneiform developed by
these ancient Sumerians.

00:03:30.060 --> 00:03:32.163
Now, when you talk about Mesopotamia,

00:03:32.163 --> 00:03:33.452
you'll talk about Sumerians,

00:03:33.452 --> 00:03:36.695
but we'll also talk about other
civilizations that emerge.

00:03:36.695 --> 00:03:38.334
In particular, let me write them all down.

00:03:38.334 --> 00:03:39.788
You have the Sumerians.

00:03:39.788 --> 00:03:41.877
You'll also hear
something called Akkadian,

00:03:41.877 --> 00:03:45.556
and as we'll see, Akkadian
is both a language

00:03:45.556 --> 00:03:48.341
and an empire that will emerge.

00:03:48.341 --> 00:03:52.341
In Mesopotamia over the
roughly 3,000 years BCE,

00:03:54.316 --> 00:03:58.260
the two primary languages are Akkadian,

00:03:58.260 --> 00:04:01.608
which is considered a Semitic language.

00:04:01.608 --> 00:04:03.913
It's related to modern Semitic languages,

00:04:03.913 --> 00:04:06.496
like Arabic and Hebrew,

00:04:06.496 --> 00:04:08.280
and the reason why
they're called Semitic is

00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:10.533
because they're spoken or
they're reported to be spoken

00:04:10.533 --> 00:04:14.337
by the descendants of
Shem, who was Noah's son,

00:04:14.337 --> 00:04:16.591
in the Hebrew bible.

00:04:16.591 --> 00:04:19.169
So, you have the language
Akkadian, which is Semitic,

00:04:19.169 --> 00:04:21.639
and then you have the other
language, which is Sumerian.

00:04:21.639 --> 00:04:25.306
And as we get into the
third millennium BCE,

00:04:26.599 --> 00:04:28.995
the Sumerians start to have a lot of

00:04:28.995 --> 00:04:31.034
interaction with Akkadian speaking people,

00:04:31.034 --> 00:04:33.944
and Akkadian speaking people
are initially associated

00:04:33.944 --> 00:04:37.091
primarily with northern Mesopotamia,

00:04:37.091 --> 00:04:41.493
and we believe the first
empire, true empire,

00:04:41.493 --> 00:04:45.789
perhaps the first empire in
the world emerged from Acadia,

00:04:45.789 --> 00:04:47.962
and it was called the Akkadian Empire.

00:04:47.962 --> 00:04:50.629
And if we scroll down over here,

00:04:52.876 --> 00:04:56.368
we can see how the Akkadian Empire spread.

00:04:56.368 --> 00:04:58.436
We believe that the town of Akkad,

00:04:58.436 --> 00:05:00.999
which the Akkadian Empire is named for,

00:05:00.999 --> 00:05:03.101
some place in this region right over here,

00:05:03.101 --> 00:05:04.799
and the first significant ruler

00:05:04.799 --> 00:05:07.288
who really spread that empire was Sargon,

00:05:07.288 --> 00:05:10.855
often referred to as Sargon the Great.

00:05:10.855 --> 00:05:13.694
And you can see, you can see that

00:05:13.694 --> 00:05:15.499
that would have been established around

00:05:15.499 --> 00:05:19.666
the middle of the 23rd, or
actually the 24th century BCE.

00:05:21.797 --> 00:05:24.720
So around 2350, you
have Sargon establishing

00:05:24.720 --> 00:05:27.584
what might be the first
Dynastic empire in the world,

00:05:27.584 --> 00:05:29.094
the Akkadian Empire,

00:05:29.094 --> 00:05:31.091
and he was able to take control of

00:05:31.091 --> 00:05:33.667
both northern and southern Mesopotamia,

00:05:33.667 --> 00:05:35.933
so even the Sumerians were under

00:05:35.933 --> 00:05:37.660
the control of the Akkadians.

00:05:37.660 --> 00:05:38.890
As we'll see over time,

00:05:38.890 --> 00:05:41.603
you have a lot of mixing
between the Akkadian language,

00:05:41.603 --> 00:05:42.866
the Sumerian language.

00:05:42.866 --> 00:05:46.132
Akkadian gets written
in the Cuneiform script,

00:05:46.132 --> 00:05:47.900
and starting at around this period,

00:05:47.900 --> 00:05:50.168
Sumerian starts to die
as a spoken language

00:05:50.168 --> 00:05:52.538
and Akkadian really becomes dominant.

00:05:52.538 --> 00:05:57.001
Now, the Akkadians rule for
a little over 100 years,

00:05:57.001 --> 00:06:00.026
and then you have several other empires.

00:06:00.026 --> 00:06:01.313
It can get confusing.

00:06:01.313 --> 00:06:03.026
The way I have structured this timeline is

00:06:03.026 --> 00:06:05.680
this top line right over
here is southern Mesopotamia

00:06:05.680 --> 00:06:09.067
and this bottom line right over
here is northern Mesopotamia

00:06:09.067 --> 00:06:12.335
so this orange shows you where
the Sumerians were reigning.

00:06:12.335 --> 00:06:14.059
Some people think that they might

00:06:14.059 --> 00:06:15.306
have been the first empire.

00:06:15.306 --> 00:06:17.316
This bottom line here, you
can see the Akkadian speakers,

00:06:17.316 --> 00:06:20.285
but they were fragmented until
you have Sargon the great

00:06:20.285 --> 00:06:22.863
establishing the Akkadian Empire.

00:06:22.863 --> 00:06:27.030
Now, you briefly then have a
short-term neo-Sumerian empire,

00:06:28.398 --> 00:06:31.330
but the next significant empire
that's often talked about

00:06:31.330 --> 00:06:36.234
when associated with Mesopotamia
is the Babylonian Empire.

00:06:36.234 --> 00:06:38.838
So Babylon, the Babylonian Empire

00:06:38.838 --> 00:06:40.928
was centered at Babylon, right over here,

00:06:40.928 --> 00:06:44.454
and it really became a significant empire

00:06:44.454 --> 00:06:47.428
under the ruler Hammurabi.

00:06:47.428 --> 00:06:49.999
And Hammurabi is perhaps most known,

00:06:49.999 --> 00:06:52.269
you can see how he was
able to spread the empire.

00:06:52.269 --> 00:06:55.777
The dark brown is what he had with

00:06:55.777 --> 00:06:57.858
this empire when he took rule,

00:06:57.858 --> 00:07:00.121
and the light brown is what
he was able to spread it to,

00:07:00.121 --> 00:07:01.916
so once again, both north and south,

00:07:01.916 --> 00:07:03.607
and he's perhaps most famous for

00:07:03.607 --> 00:07:07.039
his famous code of Hammurabi,
which is depicted here,

00:07:07.039 --> 00:07:09.671
and it wasn't the first written code,

00:07:09.671 --> 00:07:11.568
but it was one of the earliest,

00:07:11.568 --> 00:07:14.376
and you could view it as
almost a proto-constitution,

00:07:14.376 --> 00:07:17.340
and it was based on things
that the Sumerians had before,

00:07:17.340 --> 00:07:20.677
but they've even influenced
things like biblical laws,

00:07:20.677 --> 00:07:24.668
things that come down to
modern codes of law today.

00:07:24.668 --> 00:07:26.740
Now, after the Babylonians,

00:07:26.740 --> 00:07:30.015
the other significant empire
that would have control over

00:07:30.015 --> 00:07:34.457
significant portions of
Mesopotamia is the Assyrian Empire.

00:07:34.457 --> 00:07:37.191
And the Assyrian Empire
is named for their,

00:07:37.191 --> 00:07:41.941
I guess you could say their
home base, the town of Assur.

00:07:41.941 --> 00:07:43.482
You can see it in this map here,

00:07:43.482 --> 00:07:45.060
where we showed the Akkadian Empire.

00:07:45.060 --> 00:07:47.150
And both the Babylonians and the Assyrians

00:07:47.150 --> 00:07:49.788
were Akkadian speaking,
so at this point now,

00:07:49.788 --> 00:07:52.351
and as we get into the
later Assyrian period,

00:07:52.351 --> 00:07:54.922
we'll start to have Aramaic be
a more significant language,

00:07:54.922 --> 00:07:57.579
another Semitic language,
but as you can see here,

00:07:57.579 --> 00:07:59.721
the Assyrian Empire at its peak controlled

00:07:59.721 --> 00:08:02.638
much of the modern day Middle East.

00:08:03.496 --> 00:08:06.213
Now, the Assyrian Empire
would eventually collapse

00:08:06.213 --> 00:08:08.463
in the seventh century BCE,

00:08:09.412 --> 00:08:12.513
and it would be taken over
by the Neobabylonian Empire.

00:08:12.513 --> 00:08:15.596
I have a map of that right over here,

00:08:16.774 --> 00:08:19.464
which also controlled much
of the modern middle east.

00:08:19.464 --> 00:08:22.655
Probably the most famous ruler
of the Neobabylonian Empire

00:08:22.655 --> 00:08:26.089
was Nebuchadnezzar II from
the Hebrew bible famous for

00:08:26.089 --> 00:08:29.339
taking the early Jewish people captive,

00:08:31.822 --> 00:08:33.796
the famous Babylonian captivity,

00:08:33.796 --> 00:08:35.971
but eventually they would be overthrown,

00:08:35.971 --> 00:08:39.952
and they would be overthrown
in the sixth century BCE

00:08:39.952 --> 00:08:43.263
by the Persians and Cyrus the Great,

00:08:43.263 --> 00:08:44.849
and that'll actually be the end of

00:08:44.849 --> 00:08:48.077
the Babylonian captivity
according to biblical accounts.

00:08:48.077 --> 00:08:50.692
But the big picture is
that Mesopotamia is called

00:08:50.692 --> 00:08:54.582
the cradle of civilization
for a good reason.

00:08:54.582 --> 00:08:56.536
Not only do we have these technological

00:08:56.536 --> 00:08:58.405
and architectural advancements,

00:08:58.405 --> 00:09:01.490
their religion, their writing
has influenced civilization

00:09:01.490 --> 00:09:05.073
since, for the last
five, six, 7,000 years.

00:09:08.121 --> 00:09:11.146
Well, I'd say definitely
the last 5,000 years,

00:09:11.146 --> 00:09:14.631
and a lot of these ideas
that came out of Mesopotamia,

00:09:14.631 --> 00:09:17.195
like written codes of
law and the technologies

00:09:17.195 --> 00:09:20.362
and all the rest follow with us today.