The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.6

Sumer: Why There, Why Then

This episode explains why the world's first cities arose on a Mesopotamian plain that had almost nothing you'd think a civilization needs: no stone, timber, or ore, and rivers that flooded unpredictably rather than on schedule like the Nile. It opens with a clay tablet, a 3,700-year-old complaint from a man named Nanni to the merchant Ea-nasir about a bad copper delivery, evidence of how far these networks reached. The episode corrects the thesis that large irrigation works produce centralized despotism; an archaeologist later showed canal systems were small and locally run, with the state building larger ones later. It ends by noting Sumerian died out while its administrative techniques kept running under later empires.