"5000 years ago, a simple innovation transformed the ancient world, one that was so versatile and so valuable it generated wealth on a global scale, sparked international trade, and ushered in the rise of civilization." "To get civilization you need basically three things." "You need cities and towns, irrigation and water, and you need some sort of new invention." "And it turns out that at about 3000 BC that new invention is bronze, and that kick starts a whole new age." "Throughout the ancient world the Bronze Age arose in different places at different times." "From roughly 2000 BC in China, to 3300 BC in parts of the Near East, it's an era defined by the widespread use of bronze created through a mixture of copper and tin." "Well the new technology of bronze, we don't really know what prompted it." "If you've got what we call native copper, it's copper with arsenic in it, and if you heat it up it actually does make bronze." "The problem is, if you heat up something with arsenic in it you're not gonna live very long." "So they quickly figured out that if you replace the arsenic with tin in a ratio of 90% copper to 10% tin that you will get bronze, and you won't die while making it." "Bronze was more durable than any other metal, and more useful than gold or silver." "The ancients could use it to make agricultural tools, hunting spears, and daggers." "They also created ornamental grave goods, drinking vessels, jewelry, and weapons for war." "So prior to the Bronze Age, in the Neolithic period, people's wealth was in agricultural produce, textiles, pottery, that kind of thing." "And those can be transferred and hoarded to an extent, but they kind of go bad after a while." "Clothes rip, cattle die." "Metal is a new kind of wealth that was not seen before." "Metal is a wealth that can be displayed, it can be used, but its value doesn't go down when it is worn, it can be melted again and made into something else." "The Bronze Age is a moment where people are starting to use this combination of tin and copper on a more regular basis, and that's what sort of historically has given us the name of the Bronze Age," "but it is more specifically and more importantly a moment where connections are being made between societies on a much broader scale, reaching across the sea, reaching across land." "Diplomacy as we think of it now really has its roots in the Bronze Age." "In the region that includes the Mediterranean, the Aegean, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the Bronze Age arrived around 3000 BC and lasted nearly 2000 years." "Bronze and other metals helped to fuel the rise of the first true cities." "These centers of power were ruled by a group of elites, royal families, wealthy landowners, merchants, and temple managers." "In the early Bronze Age, settlements weren't much larger than about two and a half acres in today's measurement, probably groups of around 150, 200 people." "Then towards the middle Bronze Age you get what some archaeologists have called "big men", people controlling the surplus, storing it, extracting taxation from people, and then in the late Bronze Age you get people" "moving into much larger cities, like Knossos and Mycenae at their height probably had around 12,000, 17,000 people, which is around a mid-size city today." "So by the time we get to the late Bronze Age, we're in relatively sophisticated civilizations." "I mean, not on the level of today, of course, with the technology, but at places like Knossos in Crete where you've got the Minoans, they've got a sewer system, they've got running water, and they've got" "international trade around the Mediterranean." "So they're actually quite sophisticated considering it's 3000 years ago." "During the Bronze Age, the population of Egypt's ancient capital," "Thebes, swelled to 80,000 people, and in Mesopotamia, a region that developed along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the city or Uruk had an equal number of inhabitants at the height of its power." "Perhaps it would be more apt to call it something like the Urban Age, the period when urban societies first emerged anywhere in the world as far as we know." "You have economic specialization, where people are not just all food producers but actually have different specialized professions or jobs and so forth, that's part of this phenomenon." "When human societies become not just people of relatively equal social status, but rather you have an elite and you have a middle class and you have a lower class and you have slaves, all that, that's also part of this phenomenon." "To keep these highly stratified societies running efficiently, new systems were developed:" "large scale farming and manufacturing, organized religion, government administration, law and taxation." "They've got laws, they've got jurisprudence, they've got all sorts of things that we would associate with today." "So for example, around 1800 BC we've got Hammurabi, king of Babylon." "In things like Hammurabi's law code we've got regulations that really hit home today." "Divorce, marriage, runaway slaves upon occasion, what to do in the case of a debt, for example." "So we've got society as we know it." "During the Bronze Age, many new technologies and inventions were created to meet the needs of these increasingly complex societies, including the earliest writing systems." "Writing developed first probably in the Sumerian cities of southern Iraq, southern Mesopotamia." "Although in Egypt writing developed about the same time independently, but there was interaction between the Sumerians and the Egyptians." "Basically all of the civilizations that developed these urban based, complex societies developed writing for the elites to control and to administer the complex transactions that were taking place." "So initially a lot of writing had to do with products that are coming into the palace or the temple, products going out, keeping track of the tax revenue coming in, keeping track of the produce going out." "So this is an initial sort of purpose for writing." "Mesopotamian writing started actually as what you might call a logographic system, where each character stood for a word." "So if you wanted to represent the word "water"" "you'd have a symbol that stood for water." "And very often these symbols were also pictographic, meaning it was a picture of the actual object being represented." "But not every character was pictographic." "The character for sheep is a circle with a cross in the middle, and it's not a picture of a sheep, so they just somehow they came up with this symbol." "But the point was that the word sheep got its own character." "This logographic system worked in the early Bronze Age, but with nearly a thousand characters memorizing all of them proved too ineficient." "Over time a new system developed, into what's known as cuneiform." "Cuneiform, it comes from the Latin, it means wedge-shaped, but think about a bird stepping in ink and walking across the page, that's kind of what you've got, except that it's made with reeds" "being pushed into wet clay, and the tablets are small, kind of pillow shaped." "So instead of a curvy line for the sign for water, you would just have two wedges making a straight line." "There is a sign for fish, but it gets turned into a set of wedges and you'd never have known that originally it was making the shape of a fish." "In Egypt, one of the pictographic writing systems survived, and eventually developed into Egyptian hieroglyphics." "When we look at cuneiform versus Egyptian hieroglyphic we see a real difference, and that is that with cuneiform it began as administrative use and so it was really meant for writing on tablets, so a very small sort of medium." "Whereas with Egyptian hieroglyphic, a very different purpose from the very beginning." "That kind of writing was meant for monumental sculpture, monumental paintings, so the actual writing had to be large and because it accompanied these artworks it had to be artful, so what we see in Egypt is a long development of hieroglyphic writing" "as an art form." "In Egypt and Mesopotamia, large central institutions, such as the palace and temple, evolved into highly sophisticated administrative centers." "The Bronze Age elites, who ruled these institutions, were acquiring a surplus of food and other goods from the rest of the population while employing huge numbers of people to help run their cities." "Raw materials were also coming into city centers through extensive trade networks." "Writing allowed civilizations to prosper with better record keeping, stronger taxation, and greater communication over long distances." "Letters, contracts, and other important texts were written with the help of an elite class of professional scribes." "To be trained as a scribe you had to go through rather rigorous years of schooling, and there are texts both from Mesopotamia and Egypt that talk about what it was like to go to school to learn how to read and write, and it wasn't fun." "It was usually reserved for boys, occasionally you know of girls, women who could read and write, wasn't that common." "And in general it does seem to have been limited to a small number of people, and I suppose they had a pretty good lifestyle compared to most people." "In the Egyptian texts they talk about it's a kind of, these texts are advertisements for a scribal way of life, and they talk about how horrible it is to be a farmer, how dangerous it is to be a soldier" "be a scribe, you'll do really well." "You know, it's like I guess the equivalent of telling your kid to be a doctor, there's job security and you'll get paid pretty well." "So there would've been resident scribes at these palaces and they are responsible for very, very" "important diplomatic relationships, and in the same way that you can imagine a translator at the UN today has an incredible load." "These scribes also had incredible weight on them to be able to kind of handle the finesses of correspondance between very important people in the world at that time." "The scribes recorded the yearly histories for the kings and rulers." "They recounted celebrations, campaigns, and conquests." "They also drafted letters from one ruler to another." "Well a lot of the letters start out with" ""Say to Amenhotep, king of Egypt," ""thus says Tushrada, king of,"" "and what is happening is the scribe, one scribe is telling the other scribe to read this out loud because the king can't read." "Sometimes on a couple of them we have a handwritten ink inscription from one scribe to another." ""Hey Joe, it's Phil, how's the wife and kids?" ""By the way when you read this out loud," ""please emphasize the third line down." ""Look forward to hearing from you again."" "And so we've got these private messages that the kings never knew." "Now, it doesn't happen that often, but just enough to instill the humanity in these dry and dusty documents." "In the Aegean where the Minoans flourished during the middle Bronze Age, a large number of scribes and bureaucrats helped run the day to day operations of the palace." "Writing also played an important role in Minoans ritual life, and their extensive system of trade." "Cretan hieroglyphic develops on Crete and then probably just a little bit later we have Linear A developing, a very exciting name for what it seems to be essentially a cursive version of Cretan hieroglyphic, and these are active in different parts of the island." "Now, neither of these scripts have been deciphered." "To the north of Crete, the Mycenaean culture rose on the mainland of Greece toward the end of the middle Bronze Age and into the late Bronze Age." "The Mycenaeans adapted the Minoan Linear A system to create Linear B, which is now known to record an early form of Greek." "Unlike Linear A, Linear B has been deciphered." "We now can read Linear B documents, so we have the wages that are being given to different workers within the palace." "We have record of dedications that are being made at different shrines, etc., so they are not very exciting just by themselves, but they can be opened up to really help us understand how the Mycenaean palace system," "how it worked, and that has been incredibly useful." "One of the most interesting accounts in the Linear B archives is this account of a priestess who is arguing with the damos, the city." "And the city says, you owe us the produce of your agricultural land, you need to give that to the palace, and Arita says no, that land belongs to the god, you have absolutely no right to tax me, I'm not paying." "So we have in the Linear B records evidence of a conflict between the religious fear and the politicals fear, and an evidence of a woman kind of stepping up and asserting her power." "Linear B was used by the Mycenaeans for just 200 years, mainly for administration." "Other forms of writing, such as poetry or literature, never developed." "That's because Mycenae, along with many of the Mediterranean and Near East palace societies largely disappeared after a violent and mysterious collapse that began around 1190 BC." "There are mentions in Egyptian texts of the sea people, we don't know who these people are." "There is mention in the Linear B texts of sending men to the coast to kind of keep an eye, but we don't know if this was standard practice or if they were in a state of alarm." "The fires that destroyed the palaces baked the Linear B tablets, which were on wet clay, and which otherwise would probably have been discarded after the necessary record keeping had happened, so they give us this snapshot of life right at the very end" "and we don't really see a state of alarm." "What appeared to be once thriving palaces and city states were completely destroyed, and with the collapse the need for writing and record keeping disappeared as well." "And this brings in what we call, from hindsight, the Dark Ages." "This is a moment where we do not have written texts to refer to." "Now there was a great deal going on during the Dark Ages, it's just that the lights are turned out on one of our principal ways of accessing these past societies, which is decipherable texts." "In the Aegean, writing wasn't seen for another 400 years, until the Greeks made contact with the Phoenicians." "From the Phoenician alphabet, they developed the Greek alphabet." "Eventually alphabetic writing spread to all of Europe and beyond." "What was once the domain of scribes and other elites during the Bronze Age finally became accessible to the common man."