We have finally arrived at the end of the Early Bronze Age and made a start on the Middle. We have yet to look beyond the Aegean to the vastness of Europe, or beyond the Himalayas to the Far East. But in a historical overview such as this one, it made sense to begin where we did, on the plains of Sumer, where writing began.

This might be the place to summarize several of the major themes developed in this course.

1. Although difficult to define precisely, a culture is not a contrived or imagined thing—you know one when you see one. One of the tasks of a historian is to understand what makes a culture unique and what are the nature of those differences.
2. Although theories of migration and diffusion are not popular these days (there is a bias towards “local” development), the evidence suggests that urbanization, trade, industry, and writing emanated from Mesopotamia and Iran during the Early Bronze period.
3. One may argue the science of carbon dating and apply Bayesian analytics and dendritically corrected curves to the data, but C14 dating has tended to produce an overly long chronology for the EBA.
4. The climate of the Ancient Near East was much wetter during the Early Bronze period. This alone can explain why settlements arose in arid regions where none exist today. By the EB IV – MB I, these settlements were abandoned.
5. The river valleys look young using a geological timeframe. The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze cities constructed on the alluvial plains are now deeply buried under sediment whereas others, which were once situated on the coast, are now located a considerable distance inland. Braided rivers which in former times regularly deposited sediment across the alluvial plain have become a single mighty river that has cut a deep channel in the alluvial plain. Former watersheds are now swamps.
6. The technological achievements which explode onto the the scene during the EBA are a profound mystery, not easily explained.
7. The world described in the book of Genesis looks like the world of the Early Bronze Age rather than of the Iron or Neo-Babylonian periods, the latter being the periods most often assigned by scholars to the book’s composition.

In a day and age when knowledge is curated by faceless @ handles and further disconnected from its source by AI, it has never been more important to read old books and learn dead languages. If this course serves as a gateway to this world of learning then I will count it a success.