The kings had, however, begun to realizeits potential for extending communication, in an almost magical way,beyond what could be accomplished with the spoken word. Writingcould perpetually and eternally address an audience on a king’sbehalf; the words were always there, even when the king was notthinking about them. Given that the population was almost entirelyilliterate, such an audience was mostly made up of gods. Thestatuette of the king’s personal god (or sometimes of the kinghimself), inscribed with the same text as the tablet, could thereforepray continuously in a way that a real person could not.

The Sumerian term for king, “lugal,” literally meant “big man.”

ngship seemed so obvious and right to the Mesopotamians thatthey believed that it had been invented by the gods, that it hadcome “down from heaven.” Some later scribes made a grand list ofall the kings from the beginning of time to their own era. Theycalled it “When kingship came down from heaven,” which was itsfirst line. To modern scholars it is the Sumerian King List.

the really big progress traps uh come with with the invention of 00:07:20 agriculture and i i mentioned the first full-blown civilization in the old world the sumerians who perfected the art of irrigation 00:07:33 in what is now southern iraq

Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.