All right. Welcome back guys. Which one do I want you to talk about now? Remember, we are in box number two for the day. The first box, we only found three, but the second box was like more of a gold mine with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We found eight books in box number two, so don’t forget to buy your own box and start building your own library.
Early man.
Prehistory and the Civilizations of Ancient Near East. We have the earliest food gatherers, the later food gatherers, the food raisers. Okay, now we go part two, the Origins of Civilization. Civilization in Babylon, Egypt, Empires and subjects, the Syrian and the Persian Empires, the subjects.
Oh, that’s actually pretty interesting. Let’s go.
I mean, there’s a reason it’s taken me so long because a lot of this is really interesting because civilization of Babylon… This civilization of India or of Egypt. I would love to talk more about that, don’t get me wrong. However, it seems like everyone always talks about Egypt. If you go to YouTube, every thing on…if you go to history, you’re going to talk about three different things. You going to talk about Alexander the Great. You going to talk about the Romans and then you’re also going to talk about the Egyptians and then well four different things… And then Genghis Khan now, so it’s four different things and boom that’s like all of ancient history.
However, writing and law didn’t come from any of those. It came from the civilization of Babylon. So we’re going to… That’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go to 80.
What was that picture?
Wait a minute, I see… Look at the Neanderthal.
But you know, it’s kind of funny how they make him have white people hair, even though if he was from Africa, the Neanderthal would be impossible to have white people hair but you know tomatoe tomato, right? Who cares? Fake news. 80
Writing.
All right. Why we’re doing writing? Cause it’s the closest thing to reading, right? In order to read, something has to be written. So let’s go in a deep note bit about this.
By the time we have definitely passed from the prehistoric to the historic age, men could set down their ideas and describe events in writing. The Sumerians had begun to draw conventionalized pictograms represented as physical objects on clay tablets by about 3,500 BC. So what we’re looking at is this picture. Let me show you the picture. See the picture. So in that picture, as this is a clay tablet from Kish, about 3,500 BC on which the symbols are still pictograms, just below the head in the upper right corner is a threshing sledge, which oxen drew around and around on a threshing floor. Contrast the writing in the next picture almost 2000 years later.
So look at these pictures, these are more pictograms.
And when I say 2000 years later. 2000 years. Good God, Jesus died 2000 years ago. So when you put things in perspective, Jesus isn’t even that old. We only in 2020. So 2020 years since Jesus died or whatever or his birth, I don’t remember. But they’re talking about just for us to be able to figure out how to write took 2000 years. Think, just imagine how slow that took… That’s 2000 years.
300 years later, about 32 tablets shown that scribes took tremendous step by developing ideograms, that marks expressions, concepts, such as a day, and phonograms, symbols expressing symbolic phono type values as we might draw a B for the sound B. Interesting. I don’t want to go too far cause you know this can get you…
Wow.
So we’re just kind of skipping around and in that case few of us would learn how to read or write. First this script involved about 500 to 600 signs that many which were complicated in the ancient near East only professional scribes commonly wrote and the evidence they provide is usually most revealing for the upper classes unless commoners got into a lawsuit. Law. So this is super interesting. Just think about that. So it’s kind of like Chinese, they have characters for things. This is old, they all had characters.
All right. So right here, you can kind of see the steady progression.You see how the fish…
You can pause the video. Then when I go over it, you can look. We’ll go from the top row. The top one’s fish, ox, I can’t read, I can’t read, I can’t read, but we’ll go down like that and…
There it is. It goes from the original all the way to Sumerian, early Babylonian and down. So you can kind of see the natural progression of the drawing symbols, of how writing kind of seems, the early depictions of things. It’s just, this real was pretty easy and when you get over here, it’s like, oh my goodness, that’s a lot. So it’s more like Chinese in a sentence because each thing is… I mean, to be able to write in Chinese, that’s a lot of drawing.
All right, well, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go through… Well, I’m going to go through… I’m going to read because it’s really a small chapter of writing. It’s not as intense as I would’ve thought. So we’ll talk more about the Babylonians and the early civilizations, look at some more pictures.
I love how they break all the noses off. That’s amazing. Thank you for that. Fake news history. No, I’m just kidding.
All right. Talk to you guys later on… But this is pretty interesting. Hold on.
Civilization. Civilizations in Babylon. The idea of civilization needs precise description if we are to know how a civilization differs from a culture of uncivilized people.
Leave you on that. Leave you on that to ponder. What is the difference between civilization and culture?