Armenian Highlands

And I point out the ones that I think very well could be real, because there's a mix of all of those.

I'm looking through here and this one caught my eye and it is from the Armenian Highlands.

I think it's the Vishap or Vishap.

Is it the water dragon? Yeah, you have an illustration of it here I'll show you just to jog your memory.

They are Kurds, both of them, sons of a man named Shadhi ibn Marwan, and their family's road to this citadel on the Tigris has been long and switchbacked in the way that so many roads were long and switchbacked in that fractured century.

Their origins lie further north and east, in the hill country around Diyarbakir, in the borderlands where the Kurdish highlands meet the Armenian Plateau, a landscape of stone villages and grazing flocks entirely unlike the flat river plain on which Tikrit sits.

Shadhi had left that country to seek his fortune in the service of greater men, as ambitious men of modest birth so often did, in an age when the old order of the Great Seljuk Empire was crumbling into a scatter of rival principalities, atabegs, and garrison commanders, each carving out what authority he could from the wreckage of a unified caliphate that existed now more in name than in fact.

Shadhi had settled for a time near Baghdad, in Tikrit itself, and had died there, leaving his sons to make their own way in a world where a man's worth was measured almost entirely by whom he served and how well he served him.

Um, so y- y- we've kind of touched it, but we'll, I'll ask the question anyway.

Um, what would the complete prehistoric toolkit carried through the Armenian Highlands have looked like? And can you infer what particular tools were designed to do from the fragments and wear patterns left behind?

So, um, this is a, um, touching a new topic in a sense, because we have a, a, um, a field in ar- archeology that is very debated, uh, and it's called use wear analysis.

The, what is done on the tools.

So making a reliable tool involves choosing materials, anticipating future needs, and understanding how a design will fail or wear down.

Um, what do these artifacts reveal about the technical knowledge and planning of the people who made them? If we can, [chuckles] if we can work that out.

No, I th- I think that this is, uh, so starting from the fact that most likely a hunter-gatherer in Armenian Highlands knew where to go, and this is the first thing.

As I said, there was a map.

So we're gonna go on a journey today.

And I was aware that this region, the Ararat region, Armenian Highlands, Eastern Turkey, was a hotspot, so I was exploring it because I had done so much of the other ancient megalithic work and studying these, these areas around the world, and so it was fascinating.

So I wanted to see if I could find something there to connect it, and I ne- I never imagined what would, what would happen after that point.

And so I made this.