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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Head
Started reading
May 31, 2023
kisses leave no traces but wounds leave scars. History is mostly about the scars.
Almost every religious or cultural tradition in the world has an ancient, sacred story of how humanity came to exist.
anatomically modern humans began appearing about two hundred thousand years ago in Ethiopia
Some regional mutation occurred depending on climate,
The 195,000-year-old Omo fossils and 160,000-year-old Herto fossils are the oldest anatomically modern human remains ever found,
While the Omo and Herto remains are often discussed together, as if these ancient people were contemporaries, we should pay attention to the fact that the 35,000-year gap in age between these two groups of fossils
historians don’t agree at all on what a city even is.
When we call an ancient settlement a city, we’re not just saying that humans lived there; we’re implying that it existed for a long enough period, and with enough stability, that it developed its own distinctive culture.
regions on Earth were more suitable for human agriculture five thousand years ago than the region historians call the Fertile Crescent. Also known as Mesopotamia (Greek for “between two rivers”), this area is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what we now call Iraq and Turkey.
The broad outline of Mesopotamian history can be split into two periods: the time before 2300 B.C.E., when a loose alliance of city-states
called Sumer spoke a single language and dealt collectively with natural, economic, and military challenges, and the period after 2300 B.C.E., when it was ruled over by a series of nations. The first of these nations, named after its city of origin, was Akkad.
Gudea instituted a variety of building projects and social reforms in his home city-state, including allowing women to inherit property.
is said to have ascended to leadership by selling the finest beer in Sumer—an early example of a political figure achieving power by leveraging her private-sector success.
it would have lasted some three thousand years—far longer than any of the empires that followed.
Egypt is the world’s oldest surviving civilization. Egypt’s first few thousand years are known mainly for its pyramids, as the scale and durability of these monuments are awe inspiring, but there was a time when ancient Egypt was not that different from the nation of the same name
today—a bright, noisy, diverse living society full of stories and intrigue, economics and war, beauty and horror.
Civilizations never start off as civilizations. Like Sumer, Egypt sprouted from a cluster of river settlements. Sumer had the Tigris ...
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early pharaohs were buried with living servants who were sacrificed in this world, and buried with their pharaohs, to serve them in the next.
later pharaohs were buried with small shabti statues intended to depict their servants in the world to come.
Thirty-three hundred years ago, the Middle East was dominated by three superpowers: the Hittites in the north, the Egyptians in the south, and the Assyrians in the southeast.
Pharaoh Rameses II married the Hittite princess Maathorneferure.
