Mesopotamia

And indeed, at the end of this victory, where we find a division of 273 soldiers managing to defeat 32 armies.

And that 273 is so reminiscent of the sort of numbers that we have with Gidon, where Gidon fought with 300 men, and even Avram Avinu, who attacked a coalition of armies from Mesopotamia with 318 men, all around that number 300.

And after they had this incredible victory, the Nabi says, bolster yourself because next year they'll be back.

And when they come to fight, once again, he says, because Arama said, theirs is the God of the hills and not the God of the valleys, and therefore we're going to win this time.

You have entered the world's earliest experiments in the written word.

Our story begins around 3200 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq.

Here, beside the great rivers Tigris and Euphrates, people have begun building some of the world's earliest cities.

One of the greatest is Uruk, a bustling settlement of temples, workshops, merchants and houses constructed largely from mud bricks.

The disadvantage is that your entire literary collection now weighs approximately as much as a small family.

Imagine settling down in bed with a particularly gripping novel and discovering that chapter three requires both hands and a reasonably strong lower back.

The Mesopotamians have invented the tablet.

It will take another 5,000 years for somebody to put a touchscreen on it.

So it's kind of on the Iran and Iraq border, essentially.

And it is actually located in the whole ancient region of ancient Sumer, Uruk, like basically the whole Mesopotamian area.

Is that where the Tigris and Euphrates is located?

Yes, exactly.

You have the Chinese and the Neolithic dynasty, the Egyptians, dynasties 4, 5, and 6.

You have the Mesopotamians, the early dynastic period, the Sumerians, the early dynastics 3a and 3b, the Peruvians, Norte Chico civilization, and more.

We find a continuous line of culture, construction, art, and historical records that run through the time of Noah's flood was supposed to happen.

So we'll get into more art soon.

In myth, the latter goddess taught farming to a man named Triptolemus, pictured at right, then sent him out on a winged chariot to deliver the knowledge to all of Greece, an episode immortalized on ancient vases.

Mesopotamia.

Ancient Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent attributed farming to Ashnan, the grain goddess, whose face is honey-covered, the lady, the procreatress, the vigor of the land, per an ancient Sumerian poem.

In myth, Ashnan and her sibling Lahar, deity of livestock, once drunkenly debated whether grains or sheep were more important.

A bad harvest, illness, or death in the family could force a household to borrow seed or silver.

And according to experts in ancient Near Eastern agrarian finance, shout out to all of you ancient agrarian finance experts, interest rates in Mesopotamia could be ludicrously high.

Conventional rates were around 33% for loans of grain and 20% for loans of silver.

For a subsistence farmer already dealing with crop failure, borrowing seed for a planting season could kick off a debt spiral leading to the loss of land, family members, and eventually the debtor's personal freedom.

We see differences in status between debt slaves and people enslaved permanently, and also between enslaved men and enslaved women.

Specifically, a male Hebrew slave has to be released with his wife if he was already married, but verse 4 says if the enslaver gives him a wife, the wife and their kids must remain enslaved when the man is released.

We find something similar in much older Mesopotamian law.

One of the surviving laws of Ur-Nammah from around the 21st century BCE considers what happens when two enslaved people marry and the man is released.

The Indus Valley civilisation was in its early stages.

Writing had been invented in Mesopotamia, but had not spread beyond a small region of the Near East.

Agriculture had arrived in Britain relatively recently.

Perhaps a thousand years earlier, transforming a landscape of hunter-gatherers into a landscape of farmers.

Close your eyes, if you haven't already, and imagine a scribe seated in the cool shade of a palace room, a brush of fine hair resting between his fingers, about to give shape to a thought that would outlive him by well over a thousand years.

The Maya writing system is, by the careful measure of scholars, one of the most sophisticated ever developed in the ancient world, and remarkably, it arose independently, without influence from the writing traditions of Egypt or Mesopotamia or China.

It grew from the soil of Mesoamerica itself, nurtured by earlier cultures and brought to its fullest expression by Maya hands during the centuries we now call the Classic Period, though its roots reach back even further into the quiet accumulation of symbols among earlier societies in the region.

What made this system so advanced was its flexibility, the way it wove together two very different kinds of signs.