fuck it, time to plant some grass.
look at this.
i control the food now.
now everyone will want to be my friend and live near me.
let's all build houses except mine is bigger because i own the food.
this is great, i wonder if anyone else is doing this.
tired of using rocks for everything?
use metal.
it's underground.
better farming was just invented, in a sweet dank valley right in between these two rivers.
and the animals are helping.
guess what happens next
more food.
and more people who came to buy the food.
now you need people to help make the food and keep track of the sales.
and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there's more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there's more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there's business, money, writing, laws, power.
Society
coming soon to a dank river valley near you.
meanwhile, out in the middle of nowhere, the horse is probably being tamed.
why is all my metal so lame and lumpy?
tired of using lame, sad metal?
introducing
Bronze
made with special ingredient tin from the far lands of tin land.
i don't know, my dealer won't tell me where he gets it.
also, guess what?
egypt
meanwhile, out in the middle of nowhere, they figured out how to put wheels on a horse.
now we're getting somewhere.
also
china
and did i mention
indus river valley civilization
norte chico
the middle east is getting more complicated, maybe because it's in the middle of the east.
knock knock, er, clop clop.
it's the people with the horses.
and they made an empire.
and then everyone else copied their horses.
greeks
ah look, it must be the greeks, er, a beta version of the greeks.
let's check in with the indus river valley civilization.
they're gone.
guess who's not gone?
china
new arrivals in india, maybe it's those horse people i was talking about, or their cousins or something
and they wrote some hymns and mantras and stuff
you could make a religion out of this.
there's the bronze age collapse.
now the phoenicians can get down to business
also, can we switch to a metal that's a little easier to find?
thanks.
look who came back to israel, it's the twelve tribes of israel.
and they believe in God
just 1 though, he's got like a ten step program.
here's some huge heads.
must be the olmecs.
the phoenicians make some colonies.
the greeks copy their idea and make some colonies.
the phoenicians made a colony so big it makes colonies.
here comes the assyrian empire.
never mind, it's the babylonian- median-
it's the Persian Empire
"wow, that's big"
(continued)