Pre-Modern World History: The Eastern Mediterranean, ca. 4000-550 BCE

[@kylepithecus]

Hope you keep making more of these, a lot of history channels are either just a dry recitation of facts or try too hard to be funny and come off as shallow and unserious, but you seem to be both rigorous and accessible in the way you present the topics. Thanks for the lecture!

[@goodenoughhistory]

More to come!

[@vaggelisntaloukas2016]

great lecture, thank you!

[@murri1972]

This videos are awesome!!!

[@DanikaOliver]

Can I say pre-modern government is like a modern school bully? If you give him lunch-money and your lunch he will not be to you as evil as they planned.

[@goodenoughhistory]

Sort of, yeah. There's always a threat of violence behind the state. I would just add that the pre-modern state also enables the livelihoods of its subjects. It builds irrigation projects and that sort of thing to make sure there's always a steady supply of lunch money (in the form of a grain tax!).

[@ESS284]

Farming is invented... One farmer: I wonder if i could farm... people.

[@sebastianbalbo1906]

The society evolved earlier much earlier..5000 lot of astronomical collection was done..orally transmittion was a tough task. You have to memorize entire parts of stories and mathematical notions.

[@goodenoughhistory]

If you have a good source for an earlier date, I'm happy to incorporate it into the in-person version of this lecture for my classes. You might need to also clarify what you mean by society. I don't think I claim there was no society before 5000BCE - just 5000BCE is a good place to start. There is a previous lecture about pre-historical humans. After recording that lecture I saw an article with evidence that writing for calendars occurred far earlier than normally claimed.