A Very Brief History of Western Civilization

Summary

In a captivating discourse by The Austin School, the video unravels the intricate tapestry of Western civilization's development, its intertwined history with other regions, and the arbitrary construct often categorized as east versus west. It delves into the socio-political, economic, and religious evolutions that sparked what we deem as civilization today, challenging conventional historical demarcations and celebrating the interconnectedness of global cultures through the ages.

Highlights

• The narrative dismantles the notion of the east-west divide, showcasing a more interconnected global history. 🌏
• Civilizational progress is often misattributed solely to the West when it is a culmination of global contributions. 🌍
• The development of writing and government predates agriculture, reshaping our understanding of early societies. 🖋️
• Empires like Persia were pioneers in concepts like multiculturalism and tolerance, which modern societies value. 💬
• Western Civilization is redefined to include diverse global influences, enriching the standard historical narrative. 📜

Key Takeaways

• Western civilization's history is deeply interconnected with other regions, debunking the east-west divide. 🌐
• The rise of civilization is tied to socio-political needs and religious influences, not just agriculture. 🚜
• Historical narratives often overlook significant contributions from non-European civilizations. 🌍
• Civilizations borrowed and integrated knowledge across boundaries, enriching global culture. 📚
• Modern concepts like multiculturalism have ancient roots, particularly in the Persian Empire. 🏛️

Overview

In this captivating lecture, The Austin School takes us on an enlightening journey through the nuances of Western civilization, challenging the often rigid east-west dichotomy that dominates our historical understanding. The talk unfolds how ancient societies across the globe have contributed to what we now term as Western civilization, blending socio-political, economic, and religious developments that transcend traditional boundaries.

The speaker delves into the evolution of critical societal pillars such as government, writing, and religion, illustrating their interdependencies and how they predate conventional agricultural societies. By weaving in stories of empires, myths, and historical figures, the narrative emphasizes the seamless exchanges across cultures, often overshadowed by a Eurocentric focus in history classes.

By acknowledging ancient contributions from regions like Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the discussion expands the breadth of Western civilization's foundation. It highlights how historical narratives should transcend geographical divides to appreciate the mosaic of global influences that have shaped human progress, echoing themes of diversity and multiculturalism against the backdrop of historical marvels.

A Very Brief History of Western Civilization Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I've been working on this topic for a while now it's not something new to me by any means the topic oh wait before I jump into it did you have like t-shirts and stuff okay so the Austin school does have t-shirts they are available Kelsey
• 00:30 - 01:00 has them yeah so the front is cool but the back is better so that's that's the front but the back I don't know what to make of this but I just don't know anyway so this is the back you kind of need to have one of these I'm pretty sure we're using to fundraise for the Austin school so it goes to a terrible cause $18 all right so back to the the
• 01:00 - 01:30 topic at hand so that one of the things that I've often wondered about is how do these categories come into being I was actually talking about this earlier but just as an example I had a student about a year ago who was black and my black I don't mean like he was african-american he was actually actually I had to put white when he filled out race because he was from North Africa but I mean he was
• 01:30 - 02:00 black like his skin was black there's when you see him in the street you're gonna go look there's a black guy you're not gonna go oh my god look at that white guy who looks very dark but when it came time to bubble in race he had to put in white right so like how the hell did we get that category clearly this is a category that's arbitrary at some level there was a rule made and then some and then we we just take people he jammed them into these categories and one of the categories that's always struck me as sort of odd was this
• 02:00 - 02:30 east/west category that we have so if you were here on Thursday I I took the salt a little bit and I talked about how that category formed in terms and why it mattered in terms of Foreign Relations but I'm gonna take this thing even further back and dig into it a little bit deeper because that's pretty much all this is about so even though this talk is a brief history of Western civilization to do that there has to be an East like to compare it to because you can't really understand what the West is
• 02:30 - 03:00 unless you have an other to look at and then you say oh really what the West is is not that right usually when you define something by what it is you really don't know what you're talking about but we need to find it by what it's not it brings it in the light a little bit so I want to take this thing and also and look at the very notion of the idea of the word civilization so we're going to do the east-west divide but we're also going to
• 03:00 - 03:30 do civilization versus non civilization historians have traditionally I'm going to start with civilization and historians have traditionally defined civilization starting with the advent of writing now the reason historians have picked writing is just it's actually really simple it's that all a historian really is at the end of the day is a person who does nonfiction literature alright the difference between the the history department in the English department is that the historian is
• 03:30 - 04:00 doing nonfiction and the English departments doing fiction that's the primary difference between the two because at the end of the day all a historian is doing is reading historical text and maybe trying to put them to memory and then trying to create a narrative based on what they've read because at the end of the day there are lots of holes would you read history there's lots of gaps so you have to fill them in so you're kind of constructing a fictional story to fill in the gaps for the non fictional parts that you know
• 04:00 - 04:30 and so when a historian says oh this is what I think happened what they're really saying is we really don't know what happened part based on the bits that we do know this is the narrative I've come up with if you create if you make history go back to the advent of writing then history is roughly four five thousand one hundred years old now and at the same time that makes civilization five thousand one hundred years old right if you if you if you couple the two
• 04:30 - 05:00 together so history and civilization are Co defined having said that I as a political scientist don't like that so I love history I do history when I was teaching for the University of Maryland University College I was in their history department I consider myself to be at least somewhat of a historian so I'm not saying this to pass on history I just think it's really arbitrary because he as a political
• 05:00 - 05:30 scientist one of the questions I ask is why did writing even come into being and it looks like the reason writing came into being was that there was a state and in this case the state and Sumer but also there was a state in Egypt in these two states had a problem and that was they had a certain amount of cattle they had a certain amount of grain they had a certain amount of fruit they had wine they had beer and they needed two horses sheep whatever they had they didn't have
• 05:30 - 06:00 horses delete courses but sheep right there whatever they had horses came later and they needed to actually categorize and keep track of what they had they needed to be able to take the resources and pull them they needed to be able to distribute their resources to do that they needed some way of writing down what they had to do that they needed numbers and they needed letters right or characters so in Sumer and in Egypt a character system formed the problem with the character system is
• 06:00 - 06:30 right away you get into this trouble of what if we get into a new concept and then we have a word we don't have a character for so the Egyptians also began doing phonetic letters so there's this kind of misconception that the first phonetic alphabet ever was the Phoenician alphabet hence phonetic Phoenician but it really actually it was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that were the first phonetic alphabet it's just a coat at the same time they also used characters so they did both in any case it means government came before
• 06:30 - 07:00 writing right because government made writing happen out of necessity so then my next question is well when a government come into being we think now that it was somewhere around six thousand five hundred years ago or 4500 BC in Egypt Egypt did at first we think and then Mesopotamia did it shortly afterwards so Mesopotamia beat Egypt to writing but Egypt beat Mesopotamia the
• 07:00 - 07:30 government the two kind of did things in tandem one would do one and then the other one would catch up shortly afterwards the reason that the government came into being again was probably out of necessity in the case of Egypt it was probably tied to the flood cycle so Egypt doesn't get much rain annual rain that they have instead these annual floods what happens is it snows in Central Africa it snows in Equatorial
• 07:30 - 08:00 Africa right just the sentence doesn't fit right just what and then the snows melt and then they flood and create the Nile flood the annual Nile floods and that's what created this cycle in Egypt that made Egypt this incredibly fertile place per per acre Egypt is probably the most fertile place on earth when you're in the Nile Valley and that what that did was that made it so it could prove
• 08:00 - 08:30 crazy amounts of food with almost no effort without worrying about burning other soil the problem was is weather is weather and sometimes weather cooperates and sometimes whether it goes haywire and they were they were susceptible to droughts and as a result there was the possibility of famine but also the other was true if they could get a flood that lasted too long and it caused the crops to rot in the field and so they they they had to constantly worry about the
• 08:30 - 09:00 weather here's the thing if they could pool their resources together they could build greeneries and then in the granary they could store the grain so what probably created the first government in Egypt was they probably went through this terrible famine event you know a significant portion of population died and then they were then the next harvest they're looking you know they're bringing in the grain and they're like wow we're leaving a lot of this grain here in the field to rocks we can just casually produce so much
• 09:00 - 09:30 food wouldn't it be cool if this grain was around the next time there was a famine and then somebody probably had the brilliant idea oh my god let's create a granary and tried to talk everybody into it in the act of talking everybody into it they as a community got together made the decision to do this they put their pooled their resources they made the granary the problem is the granary requires upkeep so once they initially got together and made the decision to make the granary now they have to make the decision to allocate the resources to sustaining the
• 09:30 - 10:00 granary and in that moment government probably formed but then there's this problem that humanity always suffers from you know what the right thing to do is but you're motivated by emotions by addiction by laziness by habits by desire and you'll do the wrong thing anyway right so even after they got the granary up and running and even after they've allocated the resources to
• 10:00 - 10:30 sustain the granary there is this propensity of humans to go geez I should really bring that grain this year what if I don't I'm gonna take the year off and then you know the next year comes along and you don't bring it again there's no consequence the next year comes along and you don't bring it again but then little by little more more people bring less and less grain because we're forgetting the memory the horror of the famine kind of fades next thing you know it's the next generation they didn't experience it so they don't know
• 10:30 - 11:00 what you're talking about when you go yells about famine you should really put grain in that drainer and then the next famine hits and there's no grain and people die really large numbers and they're like well we our ancestors built this granary and we didn't do upkeep how do we do this and at some point somebody must had this idea and it's kind of a fascinating idea when you think about it and that was to lie to manipulate to twist the truth because they realized that the rational
• 11:00 - 11:30 brain wasn't enough to motivate people to do the right thing but if you just walked up to a person goes and it said to them you should do the following because of ABCD you should drive a smaller car because it's better for the environment and then time I see you're in an SUV touring around with absolutely no passengers and never off-roading so no one knows why you have an SUV right because if we're not rational beings humans have never
• 11:30 - 12:00 been rational beings all the science shows humans aren't rational beings you just put that aside we are rationalizing beings right we make a decision and then afterwards we've created we try to create a story to make what we did make not seem completely insane to the people we're gonna have to explain this to later and you were taught to do that probably by your mother every time you did something really stupid she go why'd you do that no you better come up with a reason then sends you off to your room so now you're like what is my reason what is my
• 12:00 - 12:30 reason I have to I anticipate the next time I get into trouble for doing something stupid so when you come home with that giant red SUV right and all your friends are like would you get that for you don't even have family or go off-road like wow I just really like the idea of being paralyzed in a car accident and I heard your six times more likely to be paralyzed in an SUV than in a regular car and so not so I'm going for and be like oh so I've got this
• 12:30 - 13:00 problem if I if I lay it out to you and I say look you really need to bring the grain because there's gonna be a famine and we're all gonna die we know you won't bring the damn grain because humans don't work that way but what if I told you this if you bring the grain I had a dream last night and in it the god almond came to me and he said he would reward people who brought the grain and punish people who didn't you bring the
• 13:00 - 13:30 grain the drought happens next thing you know a priest is doling out the grain cuz right we just invented the priesthood a group of people who had direct contact with a God you didn't bring the grain the drought happens and the next thing you know the priest is like guess what guys some of us are going to starve to death in other words no matter what happens that pre looks recent that priest looks like they
• 13:30 - 14:00 can they can look into the future now your incentive to bring the grain is to establish a closer or link to your best imaginary friend Brian it's so that you can have this direct link with in this case the god Amun so it turns out that the advent of government probably was totally tied to an economic situation and also a religious situation where the goal was by a community or an individual
• 14:00 - 14:30 to intentionally manipulate your economic behavior using religion using a normative method for manipulating your behavior to create some desired economic outcome in this case a giant insurance policy a giant community-wide insurance policy so that the next time the weather went to we didn't all starve so that's that's what I used to think would be an amazing marker for the start of
• 14:30 - 15:00 civilization and then we started making some really unusual discoveries so let me just clarify that the reason I had picked that that period six thousand five hundred years ago was in part based on a bias that I had the bias was the human beings didn't do anything worth noting until we started doing agriculture that agriculture was sort of the this major change this major shift
• 15:00 - 15:30 in our in our way of being now not that agriculture was necessarily a good thing so if you looked at what gathering and hunting societies did before agriculture they move from location a location especially once they started put too much pressure on the local environment right you've eaten too many mongongo nuts it's time to move so that there is enough mongongo nuts laughs to create the next generation of mongongo trees right that's the goal the goal for a
• 15:30 - 16:00 gatherer and hunter is to have no impact on the environment we've killed a bunch of gazelles here we killed just as many as we can to not affect the size of the herd next year it's time to move and fly a new source for food that's your goal we've been at this watering hole just long enough that we've put too much pressure or just enough pressure on it it's time to move and find another watering hole right your goal is to have no impact the gathering and hunting
• 16:00 - 16:30 culture that has an impact breaks their echo system and they starve to death the next year right but in that system you don't own anything you're migratory because you move from place to place topping into seasonal foods but also avoiding over taxing whatever specific food that is that you you rely upon agriculture doesn't happen because we invent it we go oh my god this is better because think about it and gathering and hunting you have a wide variety of foods one of
• 16:30 - 17:00 the problems with the modern diet right is that a lot of people especially the United States just keep eating the same food over and over and over again that can lead to food allergies for one thing one of the reasons why we've seen an increase in the number of people who are gluten intolerant is we basically have a monoculture when it comes to wheat if you were to look at how we planted wheat fields just 200 years ago there were probably a hundred different strains of wheat so when you a tweet you weren't
• 17:00 - 17:30 eating the same wheat every single time but also you ate other things other than wheat you had some barley in the mix right there were you had a variety of foods but a gatherin hunter like you're eating berries for part of the year and you're eating tuber is another part of the year and next thing you know you're eating legumes and then you have this steady source of meat coming into your diet so there's a little bit of deer a little bit of rabbit a little bit of giraffe whatever happens to be available and in the proper quantities right that
• 17:30 - 18:00 makes for a really healthy diet if you just ate macaroni and cheese every day for like four years maybe supplement it with ramen or something you will die of malnutrition like it will kill you you can't just you at some point you're gonna need to eat like something from the broccoli family or something you know I I know it's actually the cabbage family it's just funny to say especially
• 18:00 - 18:30 because have you noticed all the weird broccoli he's like what's that purple broccoli what didn't they do like was it fish DNA they spliced in there to get it to turn purple I don't know what weird DNA they put in that plant to get it to flip there was an experiment at one point with putting fish DNA into strawberries to keep them from freezing in the winter mmm these strawberries tastes funny when we started doing
• 18:30 - 19:00 agriculture it wasn't because we wanted to we did it kicking and screaming so the ancient Egyptians probably the prehistoric Egyptians probably n doing agriculture about 11,000 years ago they were at the first right the Mesopotamians beat the Egyptians by a seven or so centuries but the Egyptians started doing at about eleven thousand years ago by about five thousand years
• 19:00 - 19:30 ago so over a six thousand years span of time they went from 0% dependent on agriculture to about 60 percent dependent on agriculture in other words it took them six thousand years to get 60 percent dependent on agriculture six thousand years that's a remarkably long chunk of time talk about incremental whether they were doing it so slowly it took millennia and the reason is this it
• 19:30 - 20:00 is true that per acre you can get more calories out of your soil with agriculture right so if I have 40 acres and I'm doing agriculture I can sustain myself on it but to do gathering and hunting I probably need 400 acres so as population densities increased increase they reach this point where we are forced to do agriculture we actually think there was a shock event that that
• 20:00 - 20:30 caused the straw to break the camel's back so to speak what had happened was Europe had a an event called the Younger Dryas it was a miniature ice age which is always cool who doesn't like those what had happened was the Laurentian Ice Sheet melted and we now think quite catastrophic ly for years we just assumed it took hundreds of years for the Laurentian Ice Sheet to
• 20:30 - 21:00 melt the Laurentian ice sheet was massive it was the size of a really large country it's probably it probably covered about 20 percent of the United States and about 20% of Canada so is this really massive chunk ice sitting on top of what is today the great lakes and we now now there are some people who suspect it may have melted in as short a period as eight years and it's why there's the st. Lawrence River all that fresh water suddenly had to go somewhere
• 21:00 - 21:30 and it literally cut a straight line to the Atlantic Ocean in the form of the st. Lawrence River and when it did that all that fresh water catastrophic Lee ended up in the North Atlantic now there's a giant underwater River in the Atlantic of hot water and it flows from the equator to the North Atlantic and its surface is pretty close to green to Iceland and when it surfaces it heats the atmosphere so think about this Cairo
• 21:30 - 22:00 Egypt is right about north-south right about where Austin is we're all on the same we're about as far north as Cairo Egypt is wrong Italy is about as far north as New York City well I think a Rome I don't think of a city anywhere near as cold as New York City right Berlin is about where Winnipeg Canada is
• 22:00 - 22:30 Stockholm is about where Anchorage Alaska is Europe is remarkably warmer than North America because of this hot water current that comes to the surface in the North Atlantic and it and it makes Europe this pretty balmy fun place to be in and all of a sudden all that cold water from lunch and ice sheet catastrophic melt dumps into the North Atlantic it turned off that hot water current and froze
• 22:30 - 23:00 Europe it just froze it massive ice sheet formed over the top of Scandinavia and Britain and the population of people that were living there literally had to run south and we now know because of genetics genetics have become so fun that the men in Europe abandoned the place and poured into north into what is today Iraq and probably there was so many that it forced the population in Iraq to to adopt they had to increase the caloric
• 23:00 - 23:30 output of the land they were they were using and so they had to switch from gathering and hunting to agriculture to sustain this massive refugee problem of Europeans pouring into Syria in Iraq how obnoxious the really crazy thing is it resulted in the world's probably one of the world's first ever cities and it was a really large city because the women who got left behind by those deadbeat dads had to figure out how to survive
• 23:30 - 24:00 and historically call most cultures most gathering and hunting cultures the men do the hunting the women do the gathering you're in the middle of an ice age there aren't a lot of plants to gather so all of a sudden the women that were left behind had to switch over to get to hunting because that was the only food available right they needed to they needed to switch over to me and so they instead of remaining scattered they actually went into what is today the
• 24:00 - 24:30 Czech Republic and they found in a large town and they began working together and this cooperative to help each other hunt so that they could raise their families in this massive cooperative eventually though and this is centuries later men start to migrate back out of the Middle East and into Europe and so if you're European this is fun you're genetically you have a huge genetic stock that down
• 24:30 - 25:00 your you're your mother's line that's actually native European and then your father's line is probably mostly Mesopotamian just to make things really confusing anyway um it's not part of our identity but it's better that you know the truth so you know that whom you hate is yourself it just makes you more honest keep hating yourself that's fine whatever it takes to wake up in the morning I prefer hot tea but it's okay
• 25:00 - 25:30 that's what it works that's what works please you know what I mean like you got to be a productive member of society I'm telling you all of this because I want to blow up this this agriculture thing a little bit first of all agriculture sucked once people started doing it it meant you couldn't keep moving and it meant you now had a monoculture instead of eating a little bit of this and eating a little bit of that and eating a little bit of this like we do today with
• 25:30 - 26:00 a grocery store right the grocery store has created the gathering and hunting environment you can walk in oh that looks good in card oh it's like we've made it's like in our hearts we just want to be gathering hunters so we made the grocery store but before the grocery store before we had this luxurious convenient crazy opulent grocery store experience and you're doing agriculture what do we having for breakfast hon I
• 26:00 - 26:30 was thinking about cracked wheat for breakfast and then maybe with some beer oh what's what's for lunch how about some bread and some beer oh cool what's for dinner how about wheat soup and beer all right you're you're gonna eat a lot of whatever you're growing because that's what you have available so there goes your your dietary variety not only is it
• 26:30 - 27:00 probably boring and makes you suicidal but it's also really unhealthy for you to make things worse the number one way we processed wheat was we would grind the wheat between two stones well then we would make bread out of it so we just basically gave you sandpaper and then you chew on that because the two stones are grinding together it's not just the two stones are grinding the weed in between them and so by the time you're done there's little fine particles of dust in your bread and you eat that it takes you in a mall off your teeth and right bread
• 27:00 - 27:30 means no teeth after age 35 as if that wasn't enough prior to that we had medicine gathering and hunting societies had medicine we now think they have acupuncture well one of the reasons we know that is the ice ice man he was found in northern Italy or Switzerland I remember where but they found this guy that was frozen he's like was five six thousand years old and he has these tattoo tracts all across his back and you know they don't
• 27:30 - 28:00 make any obvious picture it looks like a map it looks like somebody has has made this map on his back and then somebody thought you know what I'm gonna look at acupuncture and it turns out they're the exact acupuncture sites you would do for a person who has a bad back and the bad digestive tract and we we know from examining them that he had he had stomach issues in a bad back and so it turns out there's apparently universal truths in acupuncture in ancient Europeans prehistoric Europeans were even doing it he was murdered by the way
• 28:00 - 28:30 so it's also a crime scene investigation somebody stabbed him in the back jerks but thank God because now we have him to examine not morbid it's weird to think that by the way that's the part of Europe that my dad's my grandfather my dad's dad's family is fun so I'm sure I'm actually related to the Ice Man somehow I feel like we should just
• 28:30 - 29:00 examine them a little bit more and give him the good burial that he deserves now let's keep them frozen that's really cool switching over to agriculture also means that that piece of lime that I've planted I have to stick around and wait for it to harvest it's not just I can't keep moving I'm tied to that land because I got to keep Bambi and thumper out on my farm right but then there's my neighbors they're a bunch of
• 29:00 - 29:30 slacker lazy bastards they haven't planted their own field and they're really hungry now and so they're coming onto my field and stealing my food so I need to smash them in the head with a club and try and push them away from my farm field and so we've just invented warfare we've just invented private property to make things worse we're now living in these densely populated areas or at least more densely populated areas so if a disease breaks out we're more likely to transmit it to each other whereas before if a disease broke out in the gathering and hunting band they
• 29:30 - 30:00 would just die before they had a chance to pass it on because there was they were so isolated from each other so we're now having rampant diseases no teeth or diet socks our food tastes like crop and we're doing warfare but I thought like probably most people that's the key ingredient to starting civilization next thing you know we have government organized religion and boom we now think based on a finding in 2007
• 30:00 - 30:30 that something else may be going on the finding was in Syria and as you know four years later there was this inconvenient little civil war we found archaeological sites in Syria where religious monuments were built that predated agriculture by as much as maybe 2,000 years so not predated agriculture by 20 years or a hundred years or 200 years but possibly as much as 2,000
• 30:30 - 31:00 years one to two thousand years it's not cloths right it might as well be a million years away actually at that point it means that monumental structures weren't dependent on agriculture as we had thought that bringing people together into densely populated areas wasn't apparently as dependent on agriculture as we thought we've since found some so archaeological sites that are similar in Turkey and we've been sort of going through the
• 31:00 - 31:30 ones in Turkey but we can't do any of the archaeology on Syria in other words I'm eager for the Syrian civil war day and not just so that Syrians can stop murdering each other but so we can send archaeologists to go in there and dig these sites up I have a feeling that they're gonna reveal something remarkable one of the interesting things is we found bones and we can test bones to see what your diet was you really are literally what you eat and the bones confirm that these were not farmers they were gatherer and
• 31:30 - 32:00 hunters they really were on this pre farm diet so it's not just we're not just relying on carbon dating to confirm this in any case I just want you to know that we're we pegged the start of civilization and how we define what it is should be in something that we question I certainly think we need to throw a Hut and we need to throw it out as fast as we can the advent of writing that's absurdity archaeology makes that
• 32:00 - 32:30 clear just because archaeologists told us all these other remarkable stories what whether we peg it to government like my original assumptions told us to do or we peg it to the advent of organized religion as the sites in Turkey and Syria are clearly indicating happened fourteen thousand years ago I don't know I don't I don't know where to go with this I just need the Syrian civil war to end so we can get more data so that's that's one of the questions
• 32:30 - 33:00 here the other one is this notion of east-west so I want to get back to that because I find it really strange so think about what your your average history class whether it was in high school or maybe it was Western Civ one or Western Civ two in college let's do Western Civ one so you go in and your textbook and your professor let's say let's do a 16-week let's make it a
• 33:00 - 33:30 college class it's a 16-week class you're gonna meet 32 times and in the process you're gonna start off with Mesopotamia right every textbook start off with Mesopotamia why because five thousand one hundred years ago they started writing okay and you your professor probably spends one day on Mesopotamia maybe two and next thing you know you're doing Egypt and and you spend one maybe two
• 33:30 - 34:00 days on Egypt the next thing you know you're doing the Greeks and you're spending five weeks on the Greeks and before you know it you're doing the Romans and you're spending like eight your late eight weeks on the Romans and at this point you probably have a week left after you take all the tests out you jump into the medieval period and quickly say it was terrible the peasants suffered daaad Western Civ one out of the way Western Civ too miraculously starts in the year 1300 and it's basically you
• 34:00 - 34:30 know Plutarch and Galileo and we have skyscrapers and it's done we're on the moon it's great it's great here's where I get lost so and you've probably already figured this out but about me by now we want to talk about your starting point a little bit more I mean when you start something isn't the starting moment kind of one of the most important
• 34:30 - 35:00 moments because doesn't it frame every single thing you will do afterwards now one or two class periods on Mesopotamian the one or two class periods on Egypt doesn't quite seem like it's enough because listen what the textbook and the professor admitting Egypt and Mesopotamia founded Western civilization even if you say no no it happened in Syria all right serious part of Syria is in
• 35:00 - 35:30 Mesopotamia and the rest of Syria is immediately adjacent to Mesopotamia so clearly the foundational moment for Western civilization has at least something to do with what is today Iraq and Syria on top of it all we know that around eleven thousand seven hundred years ago Iraq did agriculture before anybody else so even if you buy the thing that I'm making I'm asking you a question that agriculture was a key component to starting civilization it's still Iraq but then he but then if you
• 35:30 - 36:00 do what I do and you go no no it government although I'm questioning this then it's Egypt and then Iraq because they did it next anyway in other words I I completely agree with starting with Mesopotamia in Egypt where I'm lost is why are you walking away from the founders of your civilization so quickly especially when you consider the breadth and depth of Egyptian history the oldest
• 36:00 - 36:30 continuous lived in City on earth is the city of Luxor it is three thousand was found at 3200 BC it is five thousand two hundred years old and it's been continuously lived in that entire 5200 years I mean that's that in and of itself is shockingly remarkable right when you think about think about it this way Alexander the Great went to Egypt
• 36:30 - 37:00 2,300 years ago so when he went to Egypt right look sir was already 2900 years old look sir was already almost 3,000 years old like just the depth and breadth to Egyptian history how can you cover anything worth mentioning in two or three classroom periods let alone the
• 37:00 - 37:30 fact that you know there was the great library and that was really late in Egyptian history if Egypt is 6500 years as I'm asserting with the advent of of government then by the time they did the Great Library which was just 2,300 years ago they were already 4200 years old compared to our 240 years dude they get
• 37:30 - 38:00 410 and started with Jamestown it's still a joke you know but there's another really weird big problem here so there is this other civilization that just completely got left out I mean it gets talked about a
• 38:00 - 38:30 little bit when you were doing the Greeks and gets talked about a little bit when you're doing the Romans but just barely it's all and it's almost like oh geez okay I guess we have to talk about it the Persians and then when they get portrayed in our movies right the leader of the Persians is this tall gay black man right because everybody hates tall men gay men and black men so they made him the most evil imaginable person the
• 38:30 - 39:00 world has ever seen a tall gay black man which is ironic since he's fighting the Greeks the men who not only wore skirts but they wore them so that they could have quick access after battle you know right what was forget the Greeks Julius Caesar the Roman his name wasn't Julius Caesar by the way it was Gaius Julius Kaiser but it's okay you don't need to
• 39:00 - 39:30 know that what did his men say of them they said Julius Caesar is a husband to all women and a wife to all men anyway back to Persia so first of all Persia is on the Iranian Plateau the Iranian plateau is named by it because that's where the Aryans ended up as in the Aryans as in the thing Hitler was obsessed with as in right what we
• 39:30 - 40:00 think of as the quintessential human you go I don't yeah whatever it's not true you know it right I mean our society thinks that the the average European male male to be precise is the the neutral person in the universe the the perfect person the person that we look to the person so much so that they have to include one of these in every movie right so there's the seven years in Tibet like they wanted to tell a story
• 40:00 - 40:30 about Tibet they're like oh god people watch it unless we include a Nazi here let's put this German into that he really wasn't Tibet but no one cared but then they made the whole movie revolve around Brad Pitt so that you could be lured into watching a movie about Tibet all right Last Samurai they had to stick Tom Cruise in there somewhere so you would go watch the movie about the Japanese being amazing they didn't need a white guy to make that happen but of course if their white
• 40:30 - 41:00 guy isn't there it's so bad it's so bad this thing that I'm talking about that they made a movie about the British stealing the Enigma machine the way they got it was they captured a German sub they didn't it didn't think they caught the damn thing and when they when they got on board they had an Enigma machine just for the record it's not the British or the Americans who cracked the Enigma code during World War two it was the poles who did it and right before Poland
• 41:00 - 41:30 was conquered they sent all their data to the British because they were you know it was like their last all right we're gonna get conquered but we're not gonna we're not gonna go down without hurting you first and the British had this data that the poles had been compiling and they just needed a machine to have that last piece to crack the code they needed a machine and so the British go and they capture the sub the Hollywood movie it's an American sub it's an American Crew that captures the
• 41:30 - 42:00 German sub really you couldn't have made they speak English they they're white you couldn't have made them English how alien are the English to us that we couldn't make a movie that was at least remotely somewhat similar to history so back to the Persians the Persians those Aryans whom you hate so much that you you cast them as tall gay black men the
• 42:00 - 42:30 Persians did really amazing things kourosh Cyrus the Great that when the Romans transliterated K the Greek letter kapa which looks just like a K they transliterated it as a C because in a lot and C's pronounced cuff always they never in Latin you don't forever pronounce cut the C as a saw it's always cut that's why it's Kaiser not Caesar you just badan it's CAE it's not CEA how
• 42:30 - 43:00 do we get Caesar out of that anyway and then AE was probably pronounced I that's why it's Kaiser so Cyrus the Great is this Persian who 2600 years ago comes up with this brilliant idea he wants a long story short he wants to create a massive multicultural Empire and he almost does
• 43:00 - 43:30 it before he dies I mean he does do it but not not it doesn't reach its high-water mark it'll get bigger after he dies by the time they're done they had actually conquered the Indus River Valley and they had named one of the satrapies India after the Indus River which is today in Pakistan just to make things confusing they'd conquered Central Asia like almost all of it Kazakhstan Uzbekistan Turkmenistan that whole zone they
• 43:30 - 44:00 conquered it all of Persia all of Afghanistan the conquered Egypt the entire Middle East except for the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula Turkey and they even conquered huge swathes of what is today Greece Greece and even a little bit of Bulgaria they put this empire together and then instead of subjugating everybody in taking slaves and taking tribute and plundering people's cities they went
• 44:00 - 44:30 welcome welcome to the Persian Empire you're now members which means you get the benefits of the Empire and instead of saying okay we want you to all learn Persian they said keep speaking whatever language you speak that's great instead of saying okay we all want you to have our religion they reserve a strand and you're worship our God Ahura Mazda before it became a car company instead of doing that they said not only do you have
• 44:30 - 45:00 freedom of religion not only will you we let you worship your own gods and have your own religion we will actually fund your temples we will actually do the maintenance on your temples and if your temples are in terrible disrepair we'll help you rebuild them this is this becomes a biblical story at this point right the Jews show up and they go hey the neo-babylonian empire when they conquered Palestine and took us into
• 45:00 - 45:30 slavery they blew up our temple of Solomon were you serious that you'll rebuild our stuff and the Persians go absolutely and so the the Jews show them the plans I go here this is what the / - Babylon is destroyed and the Persians like what the hell that's a man-made Mountain how did they destroy that they really hated us they stuck in an upgrade and the Persians went well we have to
• 45:30 - 46:00 rebuild it I guess but they realize the only people on earth who had the ability to build something like that were the Egyptians so they went and grabbed Egyptian engineers brought them to Palestine and with Persian gold built the Second Temple of Solomon that the Romans eventually destroyed to punish the Jews all right this is that empire that Persian Empire it was a it was an empire of Tolerance it was an empire that celebrated the different cultures if you get a chance to go to Iran it's very hard to do because it's hard to get
• 46:00 - 46:30 a visa go to go to pester police Persepolis and Persian they call it tough to jump she'd there is the staircase called the OP Adana I'm probably totally mispronouncing it staircase go go and look at it and what you will see is you will see men dressed in their native dress carrying gifts they're carrying tribute to the emperor darius but the men don't look like they're in despair and beaten down the
• 46:30 - 47:00 men are in their native dress and the reason the the Persians did this is they wanted to show the diversity at one point there's a group of men who are holding hands they're walking in chain holding hands because the Persians wanted the symbolism of we're in this together Armenians and Jews and Arabs and Babylonians and Assyrians and Egyptians and Greeks and Taj --ax and Afghans and Indians it's one Empire but it's many
• 47:00 - 47:30 people and the way they codified all this a Bill of Rights the world's first ever Bill of Rights it not only guaranteed freedom of religion but it guaranteed you know slavery they banned slavery they outlawed it and so we won't do this we won't reduce whole populations to subservience if you go to New York City go to the UN building as you're walking
• 47:30 - 48:00 in the front door above the door and six languages is a text English is one of them so you can read it that text is that first ever Bill of Rights from 26 centuries ago it's written also in Persian by the way which is only fitting since the Persians made it my point in bringing this up is this is the idea that you some of you anyway I have embraced of multiculturalism this is the idea that some of you have embraced with
• 48:00 - 48:30 the notion the United States is a melting pot this is the idea that some of you embrace that you should have the right to have your own religion and it's from Persia it spreads from Persia to the Greeks when the Greeks execute Socrates one of the things that they nailed him for one of the reasons he got the death penalty was defaming the gods in other words the Athenian democracy didn't have freedom of religion like the
• 48:30 - 49:00 Persian Empire did when they were executing Socrates for defaming the gods the other one was corrupting the youth by giving them bad ideas and making them question the civilization they lived because he thought it was deeply flawed so how did Persia get left on this story now Persia does collapse but then it's
• 49:00 - 49:30 resurrected if it doesn't just randomly collapse it's destroyed by a guy named Alexander the Great but then he gets resurrected and that resurrection is so utterly complete that you can go to Iran today and find Persians named Iskandar Alexander because they don't even though he destroys their empire the Persian Empire sub one they replace it with three more there will be the slow kids and after
• 49:30 - 50:00 that the Parthians and after that the sustain Ian's and so even though they have to replace their empire they don't see him as a villain they see him as an integral part of their history somebody to be celebrated somebody extraordinary because they saw this as this merger of civilizations that they had become a little bit Greek in the process of Alexander conquering them and the Greeks had become a little bit Persian in that process as well that it wasn't it was a mutual exchange of ideas and information we don't look at
• 50:00 - 50:30 it that way we see it as this evil dark gross Empire being destroyed by our hero Alexander a megalomaniac who believed that Zeus was his dad which is why he took 15,000 men on a violent rampage through a stable Empire and destroyed it and burnt their capital destroying their library in the process wiping out history that we'll never be able to read because it's gone because he was a
• 50:30 - 51:00 narcissist but somehow he's the good guy and they're the bad guys even though they're clearly the victims here but there's something even stranger in all of this so in the aftermath of Alexander the Potala means are gonna build a great library and then maintain it well the great library becomes the massive repository for the world's knowledge in a way it was our first ever attempt at an Internet right one location you could go to
• 51:00 - 51:30 find everything there was that was known and they got to a million books it was an extraordinary experiment and it lasted a long time the library was founded right around 290 and it was just BC and it was destroyed in 391 ad so we're talking six hundred and eighty years she's almost seven centuries and at that place they made one incredible discovery after the other the fur world's first ever static rocket the world's first
• 51:30 - 52:00 ever mechanical play you turned it on it was steam powered it would do scenes and sounds all right they invented geometry that's a great library Euclid did it and he can go on and on they figured out the size of the earth not only did they know it was a sphere but they knew its size they figured out that the earth wobbled it's does one full wobble every 26,000 years think about that in one year you're only measuring one twenty six
• 52:00 - 52:30 thousandth of the wobble they had done such amazingly precise star measurements that they after a few years of observation noticed this imperceptible wobble it's called the parallax goes on and on well I bright was in Egypt that was literally the heart of Western civilization and the brain and somehow we don't think of Egypt as being in the
• 52:30 - 53:00 West even though Egypt is we give it credit as being one of the two founding civilizations there was the Egyptians of the Mesopotamians but somehow Egypt gets left out now it is true the Great Library gets burned which means we're gonna have to start over again but the place we're starting over again is actually in the Persian Empire because just before the Great Library gets burnt in Alexandria the Persians had decided they wanted a library of their own and the escape the people who escaped from the Roman Empire with their books trying
• 53:00 - 53:30 to get away from Theodosius the Roman Emperor who decides to to purge Roman Empire of all its long Christians including its non-christian ideas he's by the way the guy who ended the Olympics no we won't do that anymore pagon like everything had to go all the knowledge all the traditions if you look at the text of the time period of Theodosius Emperor Theodosius he treated the the pre-christian Romans as if they were aliens not as if he was the
• 53:30 - 54:00 descendant of them right it's like who they they try to destroy all the pre-christian statues so they they would find a statue to Emperor Marcus Aurelius they'd melt it it was they were purging the earth of everything pre-christian they wanted to erase it well that pre-christian stuff included Aristotle and Plato and Aristotle ease and Sophocles that included heron and Euclid and Aristophanes and they were
• 54:00 - 54:30 doing this at the same time the Persians were greedily gobbling that stuff up and adding it to their collection of knowledge and starting a new library at Gandhi shapour but then that brings us to the next really weird moment in this east-west divide this Western civilization thing where we've left it out and I didn't discover it until I was probably about 18 or 19 I'll just admit I was already obsessed with history I realized something and that was I didn't
• 54:30 - 55:00 know anything about the Middle East during the medieval period I knew a little bit about ancient Egypt I knew a little bit about Mesopotamia and you I remember who murabbi right in his crazy code everybody's blind and toothless good I was sick so that was that was what we focused on of course not Cyrus the Great and his hey worship the gods you want I will support that
• 55:00 - 55:30 monetarily no no we focused on Hammurabi I knew I knew a lot about Rome I was obsessed as a kid and I knew a little bit about the Greeks I didn't know anything about the Persians right like they hadn't yet made the movie so I didn't know they were tall gay and black I knew a little bit about the Vikings I didn't know anything about medieval
• 55:30 - 56:00 medieval Middle East and I found this book on it I went to library and I found this book and it was written by certain Sir John Baggett glove Basha his name is John glove but you know how sometimes people get a little carried away with their names and start adding stuff to it so Sir John Baggett glove Basha Basha is a title obviously so sir and he had he'd been in
• 56:00 - 56:30 the British military and when the British pulled out of what it was then called Transjordan Palestine but they got renamed Transjordan and then they got renamed just Jordan so it's today it's the Kingdom of Jordan when the British pulled out of Jordan he stayed behind he went to the Jordanians and went I don't ever want to leave I was born British but in my heart I'm an Arab let me stay anyway yeah we need skilled officers and he became a general in the trans jordanian army and he
• 56:30 - 57:00 stayed behind and he he wrote a series of books and i got a hold of one of these books and I read it and I couldn't believe the hole in my knowledge base and then went fun another one of his books and I read it and I started trying to fill this hole the hole was the herbs the Arabs it turns out had invent had built this massive empire overnight that embraced knowledge and was shockingly tolerant it was similar to the Persian
• 57:00 - 57:30 Empire in fact it's really remarkable because if you look at the area that the Arabs conquered they conquered everything from Spain to Pakistan when they built their empire it was like the Persian Empire plus most of the Roman Empire combined so it was bigger than any empire that had preceded it one of the things that's remarkable about it was the majority of the world's Christian population was in that empire 60% of all of Christendom was in that Muslim ruled Arab Empire in the in its
• 57:30 - 58:00 first couple of centuries there were almost no Muslims in the Arab Empire they were the rulers but they were like 5% of the population because they didn't force anybody to convert so not only did they end up with the majority of the Christian population of earth but they were majority Christian also and it was okay they were tolerated that Christian population was tolerated it tolerated and integrated into their society because they were a tolerant
• 58:00 - 58:30 Empire now what's remarkable about this is they began to advance human knowledge the lens invented by Abe Nell - the same guy who invented the camera he's also the guy who realized that light travelled in finite speed at a finite speed in waves and could be broken down into its constituent colors and that all objects in the universe exert gravity on each other he also invented the world's
• 58:30 - 59:00 first ever scientific method he stated Newton's first law of motion 600 years before Newton dabbled in calculus 600 years before Leibniz in Newton stated Kepler's first law of planetary motion 500 years before Kepler there was a Miss Tina the guy who invented modern medicine he's also the guy who came up with the idea of singularities he effectively postulated Big Bang he's the guy who kicked off phenomenology that was Searle and Heidegger will later on take on and develop further right there
• 59:00 - 59:30 was this huge blossoming of scientific and philosophical knowledge in that time period Nick Halden the father of political science the father of history the father of sociology the herbs invented literary studies where you would you would look at literary sources for the purposes of trying to figure out what the truth was - for the purpose of trying to understand in other words the English departments all their existence - these guys how can that much be carved out of
• 59:30 - 60:00 your historical knowledge when all of it is Western that's that's the key to this the knowledge that the Arabs were building off of was Western the knowledge that they made was Western and the answer is that what we did was we intentionally we created this east-west paradigm to divorce the Arabs and the Persians from
• 60:00 - 60:30 the rest of the West that this was an intentional thing right al Flores me invented algebra algorithms zero Arabic numerals well you can't you can't jettison these guys they're too much of our foundational understanding of the inner verse right what would we be without algebra and algorithms to mine your internet activity in and then launch really nice ads directly aimed at
• 60:30 - 61:00 you customized for you to get you to buy stuff you don't need how many times have you flipped open opened an app or something and saw they add that was exactly about what you were just talking to to somebody scrapie here's what happened in a nutshell Europe had gone through a phase of massive intolerance under the leadership of the Romans especially epitomized by Emperor
• 61:00 - 61:30 Theodosius the first Theodosius the first declared that the Roman Empire was a Christian only Empire in other words he was a fundamentalist Christian who decided to jettison any concept of tolerance that existed in the process he set into motion this idea that it was Christianity versus the rest of the world now the Romans had already had enormous trouble with the Jewish population right and they ultimately burnt or destroyed the second temple of
• 61:30 - 62:00 Solomon in the process but for that matter the Romans had had trouble with the Christian population we all know about Romans feeding Christians to the Lions but Rome is now converted to Christianity and now they've taken all that intolerance that they had been directing towards Christianity and other directing it towards everybody else aslam is born shortly afterwards the Emperor Theodosius right is the late 300 early 400s and then Islam is born in the early 600 s so there's about two
• 62:00 - 62:30 centuries later Islam comes into being and so all of religious intolerance that have been brewing in the Roman Empire gets focused on Muslims at a time when the Muslims are conquering whole swathes of the Roman Empire and so the Roman Empire sees itself is the victim of these people but here's the twist that period of time that I just referred to where I said that Muslims were conquering the whole whole swathes of
• 62:30 - 63:00 the Roman Empire we have actually undone that we've undone that conquest and here's how we've done it about five hundred years ago a German historian came up with the concept of the Byzantine Empire the original name of Constantinople was Byzantium when the Romans got there they turned Byzantium is to Byzantium and so that's where we get the term Byzantine Empire as in from his aunt or in this case zantium
• 63:00 - 63:30 Constantinople had been called Constantinople for centuries by the talk by the time the Roman Empire collapsed in 1453 and it was about a hundred years later that this German historian came up with the term Byzantium the Roman Empire he's told us died on April I'm sorry on September 4th 476 ad he gave us a very precise date so this is when the Roman Empire died so then when the Roman
• 63:30 - 64:00 Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Empire on May 29 1453 it wasn't the it wasn't the Roman Empire that the Ottoman Empire conquered it was the Byzantine Empire something that never existed at the moment that the Roman Empire is surrendering on may 28 29 1453 it called itself the Roman Empire in other words the Roman Empire collapsed and then years later it gets
• 64:00 - 64:30 renamed whoa just its last thousand years of existence it would be like if the United States changed its capital from Washington DC to San Francisco right because that's what the Romans did they got they move their capital Constantinople and then a thousand years from now historians come back let's say we change our capital San Francisco next year Trump decides to do it we moved the capital of San Francisco and in a thousand years from now a historian
• 64:30 - 65:00 comes back and renames the United States from that moment that our capitals in San Francisco on and he calls the United States the the Republic of yerba buena which you all love yeah sorry I was just meant it's meant everybody loves mint there was the original name San Cisco so I came up with that for those of you are wondering what I was really implying well right so San Francisco was called
• 65:00 - 65:30 yerba buena at the time that the United States and invaded it and conquered it and they went this is a terrible name good mint there good good herb who would call a city that and then flip the name to San Francisco because it sounded cooler I have to admit I kind of agree but do you see what I mean like it's weird like wow you're going back and resurrecting this ain't this old name we don't use it anymore and you're calling the whole Republic after that weird name that doesn't get used anymore where did
• 65:30 - 66:00 this come from and here's where it came from I told you it was a German who came up with this in 476 ad there was a German named odovacar I'm not a cool name Otto and order Walker had decided that he was going to take over Italy that's tough for the Roman Empire though because Italy was like the symbolic core of the Roman Empire for
• 66:00 - 66:30 all intents and purposes the Roman Empire's capital was in Constantinople it did have a secondary capital in Ravana and it had two Emperor's there was the Emperor of the East and the Emperor in the West the Emperor in the east was Emperor Zeno in the Emperor in the West was this guy named Romulus Augustus an order of ocker takes his armies up and down Italy conquers it captures Otto Vakar caught forces the Roman Senate to of the West cuz there
• 66:30 - 67:00 were two Senate's to to Emperor's to sentence forces the Romanum sent Imperial Senate to form up and then he gets it for in front of them on April 4 476 and he goes I am creating the Kingdom of Italy I am the new king he didn't say and I'm taking it out of the Roman Empire he's you know Italy will remain as part of the Roman Empire I'm just the new king I'm just the German king of the Kingdom of Italy which is still in the Roman
• 67:00 - 67:30 Empire but now there's no need to have a Western Roman Emperor so he tells Romulus Augustus who I think was like 16 take off your robe he had a purple robe he takes it off the Senate agrees to this they vote for this to happen they take off the robe they stick it in a box they call FedEx FedEx comes and picks up the box and they deliver it to Constantinople with a note saying they probably emailed it saying we don't need two Emperor's Emperor Zeno is enough Romulus Augustus is abdicating in fact
• 67:30 - 68:00 what happened on September 4 476 is wrong sort of the Roman Empire sort of reunified it it's switched back to having one Capitol one Emperor the it still had to sentence the Western Roman Senate died somewhere in the early 600 we're not exactly sure what year it died with such a whimper we don't know it didn't even vote to dissolve itself that just sort of dissolved and never came back Emperor Heraclius was Emperor when it
• 68:00 - 68:30 went away that's all we know government shut down they run out of money and they just stopped they stopped meeting stop doing their job so they raised the debt ceiling or change the calendar to accommodate the fact that they weren't allowed to have debt so that they could have a year with ten months in it and forever ruin my understanding of the names of the months right just so irritating acht is 8 October should be
• 68:30 - 69:00 the 8th month and there it is the 10th month really really anyway why is this important okay great question so this German is rewriting history to make it so that the Roman Empire doesn't die at the hands of the Ottoman Empire a Muslim Empire it's the Byzantine Empire that dies at the hands of the at the of the Ottoman
• 69:00 - 69:30 Empire and instead the jerk the Germans destroy the Roman Empire and the reason he wants this to happen is there's a institution called the Holy Roman Empire now when Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 he declared the Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy Roman nor an empire and by the way I agree it was definitely not holy it was very much not Roman although
• 69:30 - 70:00 it did have parts of Italy and it was into an empire at all it was a confederacy it was a confederacy of German and Italian states mostly city-states they were sort of clumped together they the kings in the Holy Roman Emperor Empire with the electors would elect an emperor and the Emperor did have some sway he did have some some control over things but not not in the way that you would think of an emperor like we're not talking star wars Emperor here we're not even talking like Emperor Theodosius Emperor we what we're really
• 70:00 - 70:30 talking about is like president the Confederate States of America right there's there's 11 States and we're not really sure how closely linked they are and the guy doesn't really actually do much except get statues erected to them in 1965 in counties named after him sometimes forts so this German wants the Holy Roman Empire which is this German
• 70:30 - 71:00 Confederacy to have legitimacy if the Germans destroyed the Roman Empire then it's the Germans who are the heirs to the Roman Empire so then the name Holy Roman Empire has some meaning but then to make things more interesting the Ottomans had as their specified goal to create a new Roman Empire their goal was to create a Muslim Roman Empire their goal was to replace the old
• 71:00 - 71:30 decrepit corrupt dying Christian Roman Empire with a new vibrant Muslim Roman Empire that's why they wanted Constantinople so badly because once they had the capital of the Roman Empire that would not only become their capital and it would become a splendid capital but it would also be enormous symbolic gesture we have Rome it's done we've done it we've made this Muslim Roman Empire so deep legitimize the
• 71:30 - 72:00 Ottoman Empire it became useful to have oh no you thought you conquered Rome you didn't you conquered the Byzantine Empire we Germans we took out Roman thousand years ago sorry you missed it right we were literally in the act of rewriting history to mean something it didn't mean to be something it wasn't for ideological reasons to create this east-west divide this east-west divide
• 72:00 - 72:30 that is so weird catch this crescent moon and star is the symbol of the Ottomans for sure who else the Pakistani flag has it but why does the Pakistani flag have it it's the symbol of Islam it's also the symbol of the city of Constantinople the last capital of the Roman Empire when the Muslims took that as their holy symbol
• 72:30 - 73:00 the crescent moon and the star it had been the symbol it had been the banner for the capital of the Roman Empire in other words the Muslims weren't creating something new they were taking something that existed and when that's cool we'll take that for ourselves if you look at the original coins that the Muslims minted they have an emperor standing with a cross on one hand and an globus Kreuziger and globus Crusader is a globe with a cross sticking out of it the
• 73:00 - 73:30 original Muslim coins had two crosses on it and the Muslims didn't see any contradiction and the fact that they were minting Roman coins they didn't have any Arabic script on them anywhere the civilization that the Muslims created had indoor plumbing sewage water was pumped out they created a coffee industry a sugar industry they created they resurrected ice cream it had existed in some shape or form went
• 73:30 - 74:00 out of existence the Arabs brought it back it wasn't really ice cream with sherbert it was ice with with fruit juice in fact that's why we get the word sherbert from its from Sharbot which is just juice and Arabic right coffee comes from the Arabic word Dawa sucker comes originally from a Hindi word but through Arabic which is just sugar sucker sift zero comes from Arabic algebra algorithm
• 74:00 - 74:30 Admiral apricot all those are Arabic words they were brought in zenith nadir so all brought in to our language and then rich and our language in the process so I'm gonna go back a little bit though I want to talk about one other weird thing in this story so you know the Vikings so just disclaimer I am a quarter Scandinavian so when I talk about the
• 74:30 - 75:00 Vikings like enormous chunks of pride come welling up and it's if I sound gross it's because I am right just just for the record I can't help it who here doesn't like the Vikings nobody raised their hand okay so some of you are dishonest oh okay there that's good thanks really appreciate they were really mean so the Vikings go on this tear now that
• 75:00 - 75:30 terror that they go on is shockingly similar to what the Arabs do except that the Arabs do it suddenly and they end up conquering a huge Empire in the process well the Vikings do takes about three centuries so it's not very sudden and the Vikings had a little bit of a cruel edge to them just for the record whereas the arabs just they didn't maybe they weren't so into the cruelty thing but they had one thing really in common and that was that they thought of their homeland as merely a
• 75:30 - 76:00 starting point that it was sacred there was there was some religious value to it but from an economic standpoint from a political standpoint it wasn't very useful and the reason is think about it what is today Saudi Arabia is the starting point for the Arabs there are no rivers like right there oh my god crappy piece of real estate are you functioning with no rivers where do you get your water how do you do agriculture like oh my god you wouldn't even know
• 76:00 - 76:30 the name Saudi Arabia if it wasn't for oil because the place is basically uninhabitable and the Arabs kind of saw it that way they're like oh god here I go another day and River free land the Vikings saw Scandinavia the same way they they saw it as a chunk of land that you could get trees from you could go fishing from you could raise dairy cows and parts of it but you couldn't farm it it's just too cold and as a result it
• 76:30 - 77:00 was actually really crappy land so one of the goals really it's one of two goals that the Vikings had when they began leaving Scandinavia and attacking places like Scotland and Ireland in England and Germany and France and Poland in Spain in Italy and Russia in Lithuanian Estonia and Latvia and Finland their goal was to get some agricultural land to just be able to to get out there and work the soil and
• 77:00 - 77:30 plant some plants and eat some vegetables because they were really sick of fish beef and cheese wheels the other thing that the Vikings were really interested in was trade they really thought unlike today in the United States that trade was the pathway to wealth all right that your ability to interact with other countries in a
• 77:30 - 78:00 peaceful manner where you would exchange goods would generate huge amounts of wealth now one of the reasons why the Vikings turns violent was they were having a hard time trading with the rest of Europe because Europe was 1200 years ago extremely poor by extremely poor I mean sharla money I didn't have any gold so he had to mean to all his coins and silver like Europe just didn't have any resources Paris was a city of 10,000 people right like UT is
• 78:00 - 78:30 five times bigger the Vikings turned a little vicious on their neighbors not just to grab their land but also to steal goods worth selling and one of the reasons they did this was they wanted to be able to trade with homeland according to the Viking sagas the Vikings were originally from Persia and he wanted to go back to Persia and trade with them but by the time they're getting back to Persia in the in the 800s Persia has already been conquered
• 78:30 - 79:00 by Muslims so they're actually arriving in Muslim Persia and those those those Muslims not only had street lamps lit up by oil and not only did they have silk and linen and cotton but they were experimenting with modern technology like modern medicine and modern agriculture and private property ownership and different ways of doing metal for example what the Arabs had realized was that the Indians knew how to make steel not iron steel and so the
• 79:00 - 79:30 Arabs would go to India they buy they buy steel ingots from from India and they'd bring it back and they'd make steel tools steel swords steel armor and that gave them an edge on everything and the Vikings were like oh my god we need a piece of this how do we get into this and interestingly enough they began enslaving northern Europe and taking those slave populations and selling them into the Persian Empire in exchange for this technology and these goods but then something remarkable happens and that is
• 79:30 - 80:00 they start to succeed in actually conquering chunks of land they conquer northern part of northern France they they will conquer England twice they do it lose it and get it back all right they kept the first time they capture it is under Knut the great and then the second time they capture it is under William the conquerer well one of the things that happens to the Vikings as they're conquering by the way they invented Russia the Vikings invented Russia the word Russia is a Viking word it's from ruse are us and what had
• 80:00 - 80:30 happened was the ruse for a tie a viking tribe that had gotten hired by what are today ukrainians ukrainian lords to create order in the area the roof show up they beat everybody up they create order right and then they realize why are we submitting to these Ukrainians we're taking over and the next thing you know the Roose are ruling Ukraine the original Russia and before you know what they create Russia and then all today
• 80:30 - 81:00 Ukraine wants nothing to do with Russia the irony is too weird a group of these Vikings end up in butter balls which you know today is solder Gaza it's in Spain it's on the Ebro River in northern Spain and the Vikings took it from the Arabs when the Vikings conquered northern France they dumped their Viking
• 81:00 - 81:30 languages and switched over to French when the Vikings did the ruse thing they dumped they dumped that and they switched over to Russian right because it just peasants were to uneducable you couldn't teach them Swedish so you just learned their language it was easier well when they end up in in northern Spain capturing this Muslim town from the Muslims the next thing you know the Vikings are dressed like Muslims they're talking like Muslims they're adopting Muslim society and eventually they get
• 81:30 - 82:00 it in their head why stop here let's keep going and they go and in 1050 they conquer Sicily Hrothgar the Viking rough car the Norman you know it's Roger the first he conquers Sicily they decide because the Muslims on Sicily Arabic was the dominant language in Sicily at the time they decide to adopt Arabic ways the coins that are minted by the descendants of Hrothgar by
• 82:00 - 82:30 this to the first right up until Henry the six there were a few Sicilian kings the coins on one side have Latin on the other side have Arabic so these guys are Catholic Vikings ruling Arabic Sicily which by the way it was a multi-ethnic place to begin with there were Greeks and there were Phoenicians and there were Romans and
• 82:30 - 83:00 then the Arabs came and they sort of mingled with them now there's Vikings running around Sicily and just adding another weird nation into the mix and the Vikings by the way start marrying into German royal families and the next thing you know there's like Sicily is basically ruled by these Germans who are mixed Viking and mixed German and it's very complicated in the mix this guy comes about his name is Frederick the second not the great that's a different guy frederick ii friedrich ii friedrich
• 83:00 - 83:30 spoke Latin French Sicilian it was six languages Arabic and two other languages he read Arabic ducks he he he conducted scientific experiments because he had learned from Arabic he had learned from Arabic text he is reading the scientific method he embraced this Arab civilization and he began advancing it by the way this is the 13th century he
• 83:30 - 84:00 wrote his own scientific treatise on falconry he appears twice in the book he had himself painted and he puts himself twice his own book he wrote it in Latin just for the record but the guy that he cites the most the guy the biggest source is an Arabic thinker friedrich ii is so intent on being the sky that's between the two civilizations between this Arab civilization and this Christian civilization that not only
• 84:00 - 84:30 does he continue the policies of tolerance towards Arabs that his predecessors had he actually will take on the Pope in Rome himself and he got excommunicated I think it was three times he ends up as the Holy Roman Emperor so he owned basically everything from Southern Denmark to Sicily just this huge swath of land right through the middle of Europe now owned in a loose sense because the Holy Roman Empire which he's the leader of was really more of a confederacy but he's also the king
• 84:30 - 85:00 of Sicily in other words through most of history when the East and the West clashed together the people at the center knew that both sides were just part of the same civilization especially when they were in the Mediterranean when when the Greek philosopher and historian Hecate ass made his first atlas he said there are three continents Europe Asia and Libya Asia was today what the Middle East is including India by the way he
• 85:00 - 85:30 included India in that Libya is nor is just Africa it was the Greek name for Africa and in Europe was approximately what Europe is today he didn't see those as three dividing lines that separated the three he himself was from Asia according to the way he defined it he was actually born in the Persian Empire he was ethnically Greek but born in the Persian Empire he didn't see that as a
• 85:30 - 86:00 contradiction there was nothing weird about that that was just how things were he saw Europe Asia and Libya as regions within a whole today we see Africa Europe and Asia as three separate distinct places with you know might as well be a thousand foot tall wall dividing them and there are European countries that now wish there was as people are pouring in well of course the
• 86:00 - 86:30 people are pouring in because of the wars United States in Europe has waged in the Middle East destabilizing the whole area and now the European whoa whoa whoa what are you coming here for and they're like well cuz you blow up my house yeah I'd be great if you stayed over there the Mediterranean was always a highway it was never a divider it didn't separate but what happened was we started to get into the mindset that there was this separation and Europe really pushed Christian
• 86:30 - 87:00 Europe really pushed for the separation and of course no single event did this more than the Crusades because at the moment that the Crusades happened Christian Europe made it clear to to the rest of the West that there was no way to reconcile that the division was too great that Christian Europe was willing to do anything and everything it could to take Jerusalem back including just absolute cruel depravities and the Crusades right they would they would slaughter whole populations they went on
• 87:00 - 87:30 these rape fests at one point they captured salahuddin sister and they raped her to death for no other reason than just to antagonize him of course they'll pay because he kicks their ass afterwards but right that recalcitrant division is the division that we're facing today so first of all if you've ever meditated or done yoga right you know that there's been an infusion of Indian culture or Buddhist culture into
• 87:30 - 88:00 the United States that the boundary between the two is is already fuzzy at that point so if you ever travel to to any part of Asia people walk around with cell phones that is to say that the exchange goes both directions bah when you when you look at the difference between say Turkey and Italy or Persia and Spain the division is even thinner
• 88:00 - 88:30 so first of all this idea that there's an East is absurd because you're gonna you're gonna lump Vietnam with India with Japan with China these are shockingly different cultures from each other now obviously Japan and China have had a lot of cultural exchange back and forth but Japan and India have not in other words the this idea that there's this Asia with this model with it culture doesn't make any sense not not
• 88:30 - 89:00 to mention that there's no similarity between Japan and Syria although Persia Persians love Japanese movies Akira Kurosawa movies like I think seventh summer I the seventh time I might be one of purchase favorite every movies but that's clearly not the same thing as they should be lumped in the same category by the way I just for the record Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest all-time film makers period and if you don't know who he is you really need to look him up I think he was involved in the making of like a hundred
• 89:00 - 89:30 and thirty films including Star Wars it turns out he said notice on us oh really so Steven Spielberg oh not Spielberg George Lucas stole stole the idea of Star Wars from Akira Kurosawa so what was it was it hidden fortress does anybody remember anyway totally totally look it up I didn't go watch the air kirik or saw a movie there's even a c-3po and an r2d2 in it
• 89:30 - 90:00 there's there's this short guy in this tall guy and then and the dialogue is almost identical it's really weird my point is that by doing this by insisting that there's this division we make the division the division becomes true the this notion that there's a Western civilization is absurd right pulp paper comes from China the stirrup
• 90:00 - 90:30 comes from India steel comes from India the Arabs invented algebra you see I mean like this this notion that somehow our civilizations are separated and they don't interact with each other doesn't make any geographical or historical sense now it is true some civilizations are closer to each other than others like Greece and Turkey are obviously very close to each other because the Turks on the Greeks for so long but even when you go further out it
• 90:30 - 91:00 becomes a little bit on the absurd side and so I guess at the end of the day what I would say to you is there is no such thing specifically as Western civilization but I think you could make an argument that there was such a thing as Mediterranean civilization I think you could make an argument that there was such a thing as Indian civilization or Chinese civilization does that make sense so that it's not an east-west thing it's that throughout Africa in Asia in Europe there are these clusters of civilizations that are similar to each other that have
• 91:00 - 91:30 interacted with each other more than say though their next-door neighbors like obviously India and China and India and Persia have interacted with each other but it's not like they're one cultural region there's clearly a distinction there anyway I hope at least give you some food for thought I'll feel some questions and let's call it a day I'm not feeling good I'm pretty sure I've got bubonic plague it's no joke
• 91:30 - 92:00 what's happening in Madagascar crap ah that's a really hard question I mean I I think Russia Iran is just so brilliantly made it's hard to not pick it as one of my favorites it's even better Seven Samurai I also like Kagoshima but I don't think it's as good a movie by any means and
• 92:00 - 92:30 then ran ran is ran and cinema cinema graphically one of the best movies ever made it's just gorgeous I put it with Blade Runner the original one and the new one I was blown away by the new one Wow that Ridley Scott although it wasn't he produced it but he didn't direct it who directed the villain in a way of a guy villain oh I don't know how you say his name Denis Denis Villanueva
• 92:30 - 93:00 so No yeah you should rewrite that yeah what happened was so the question is that the Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire the eastern Roman Empire died claiming it was the Roman Empire it never surrendered that idea under the emperor
• 93:00 - 93:30 heraclius he took over in ten I'm sorry six ten a little I was gonna say ten six whatever that date would be he took over at 610 ad he's the one who flipped the official language of the Roman Empire from Latin to Greek but the reason he did that was because right being having the Empire's capital be in Thrace most of the top bureaucrats were Greek so it was this moment of we should
• 93:30 - 94:00 really just streamline things the interesting thing is if if a person that we would think of as an ethnic Greek were to meet a person from Italy so you would think right the Italian is the real Roman and the Greek guy is the sort of fake Roman the Greek guy would refer to himself as a Roman and then refer to the Italian as an ethnic horse which literally means an ethnic I which is what we do and we owe your ethnic even
• 94:00 - 94:30 use the same terminology but that Greek I would insist he was a genuine Roman he would not he would not see the contradiction we think we want there to be a contradiction because we want to we want to divorce Rome from its last thousand years those last thousand years weren't particularly glorious the Roman Empire just shrank and shrank and shrank and shrank there's no such thing as a Byzantine Empire Rome Rome was born on
• 94:30 - 95:00 April 21st 753 BC and died on May 29 1453 ad and had a 2,200 year run with the last thousand years being ruff yeah yeah so that they could get around the chain because they had a chain at the Golden Horn and that's how they got around the chain yeah
• 95:00 - 95:30 the Vikings also like to drag ships across land to just I don't I don't know I technically I guess the Vikings put them on their shoulders but still that's kind of a manly thing to do feeling like that would kill most of us
• 95:30 - 96:00 okay so like how far advanced are these cities is what you're saying okay so the
• 96:00 - 96:30 so that's a great question so the the city that formed in what is today the Czech Republic as a gather of Hunter group I mean I think you need to think of it as a series of huts well I don't go too far with this there's there's definitely no paved roads but the way to think of it is it was it had become a gathering and hunting co-op and part of the reason was just out of necessity right because all of a sudden all these women are left behind with all these kids that they
• 96:30 - 97:00 have to raise and in the process they need to help each other because when women are out on the hunt they're gonna have to they're gonna have to send more women and the men would have gone because it's right this is a very physical thing because not only are you gonna bring the animal down but then you got to chop it up and and lug it back to your settlement it's gonna take more women just because of the strength differentiation I'm sure I'm sure they kick our ass but but relative to the men at the time obviously this is this means more work and but then who's gonna take
• 97:00 - 97:30 care of the kids while this is happening and so they literally just took took care of each other and they just turn themselves into a massive family when you think of what was going on in Syria it looks again we need more archeology on this and they don't have any writing as far as we know wouldn't that be a mine screw if they did it looks like organized religion it looks like organized religion that convinced people for the purposes of religion to build these sacred spaces
• 97:30 - 98:00 they so some of it is these these monoliths these stones that stick up so think kind of Stonehenge like but even more complicated in the sense that some of them are in the form of T's so there's a stone that comes up and a long stone that's stacked on top so they had to make this groove slot they put them in and they built these structures all over the place but then there's also these ritual burial sites where they buried stuff like that just like I've described in this pit where
• 98:00 - 98:30 they took a bunch of arrowheads and ox heads and just Flint map stone and they piled it and made these burial spots that lasted tens of thousands of years until archeologists were like what is this and start digging and find them they were fixed in one location yeah that yeah and now the city's like the way we think of them today the first one
• 98:30 - 99:00 would have been more like looks or where you know you're building out a stone you're building these temples you've got this government structure it's a five thousand two hundred year olds continuously lived in town there's actually a lot of those cities in Egypt that are like that that yeah they're frequently built on a hill because the old city gets buried over time and the city literally goes up in the air as you build on top of the old city and which is great for flooding purposes because now you've pulled your town out of the floodplain the Arabs when they built
• 99:00 - 99:30 their cities they they they not only had like I told you they had fresh water piped in and then sewage water piped out they have oil lamps to light the streets up at night they had a fast-food industry yeah and in fact the fast food was cheaper than going to the grocery store and buying it and then taking it home and cooking yourself so when you wanted to show off for guests instead of ordering your food from a restaurant you would say I'll cook you a home-cooked meal because it was more expensive right
• 99:30 - 100:00 and so that it's just yeah well and that's that's the irony of course is that real that's what they use those were when the Spanish came to Mexico they they the Spanish were eating Arabic food which was a piece of bread folded over a series of ingredients and they went to the Aztecs that they had just conquered and said make these and the Aztecs code we don't have those ingredients we have these and that's why
• 100:00 - 100:30 we have the taco the taco is the Aztec attempt with Aztec ingredients to make Arabic food well we've got this boundary this separation which is imaginary
• 100:30 - 101:00 so the Mongols did agriculture they didn't do the this type of plant agriculture they were they were herdsmen right they were herders so they were still by the definition of agriculture doing agriculture Native Americans were also doing agriculture so those those warring Native American nations that
• 101:00 - 101:30 went out it with each other and they they got vicious were probably mostly doing it for good agricultural land as well now some of some Native American nations tended to be more nomadic and less agriculture and some tended to be more agriculture so there was a little bit of variation there but I think I think it's safe to say that the majority of the North American population pre-columbian did agriculture obviously when they would take breaks if they were gonna follow the Bison right they would take breaks from what farming they did
• 101:30 - 102:00 and if he lives on the Great Plains the Great Plains sucked for agricultural purposes so they weren't doing much but if you're around the Great Lakes or in the East Coast or around the Mississippi or even in the southwest like the Anasazi they were totally doing agriculture and they were doing it on grand scales and then you know by the time you get to the Aztec empire they had created a type of Agriculture that was so advanced that when the Spanish conquered them it meant to a catastrophic caloric drop and one of the reasons so many Aztecs died was they literally starved to death because the Spanish couldn't keep up with the food
• 102:00 - 102:30 demand because the Aztecs had a superior agriculture system to the Spanish right if you measure it by caloric output anyway yeah so it's actually a legal issue here what happened was I think it was 1908 it
• 102:30 - 103:00 was around 1908 there was a Lebanese American who was a security guard by American I meant that he I should say he was a Lebanese immigrant to the United States who was a security guard who wanted to apply for US citizenship according to the laws at the time until 1952 the only nineteen fifty two the only people eligible to become a naturalized US citizen were whites so if
• 103:00 - 103:30 you were from Asia and you lived in the United States for twenty-five years and you had children who were born here you could not become a naturalized US citizen if you were from Africa you could not become a naturally naturalized US citizen there was no path for citizenship for you so this this lebanese american wants to become a citizen he'd been here for a long time he had been living here for a long time he wanted to become a citizen and by the way there was a huge number
• 103:30 - 104:00 of Lebanese he really started coming over in the 1880s and a lot of them ended up by the way in Austin Austin a bunch of you if you from Austin like you've bet your your your people have been here for a century or more should totally take 23andme I think of you're gonna find out that a lot of you are part Lebanese in any case this guy sued and went to the courts he walks into the courtroom and he goes I have a question for you what was Jesus and the court
• 104:00 - 104:30 when Jesus was white Thomas and the Lebanese guy goes well I'm from where Jesus was from he won that case instantaneously like dude you're white and then they declared that everybody from North Africa in the Middle East therefore was white so if your Persian if your Turkish if you're Arab if you're Jewish if you're Egyptian if you're Sudanese if you're
• 104:30 - 105:00 Libyan you're Algerian you're Moroccan your you have to put white that is that is how American race law works and so it doesn't matter what color your skin is it matters the place of your origin and your so you have to you have to put white now having said that in February of this year the Census Bureau has suggested the creation of a new race and we we're still in the process of determining that but they want it ready to be put on the census for 2020 and
• 105:00 - 105:30 that six race right because right now it's Hispanic white black Asian and then Native American Pacific Islander the sixth race would be Middle East and North Africa so that so that could be fixed I guess by doing that but it's still kind of weird no North African counts as white having having said that
• 105:30 - 106:00 one of the problems that Middle East Studies programs have always had was when it came time to hire faculty if that if if the person interviewing for the job was from turkey Persia Egypt Morocco right all from the Middle East and North Africa I know you're doing a Middle East Studies program so that's what you want you won't you I think you would want those guys they there was you were reluctant to hire them because they didn't count as a minority because they just checked the box off for white so what they would do is they would go hire
• 106:00 - 106:30 somebody from Pakistan or India because if that person was Muslim at least they were the right the right religion but that person doesn't know anything about the Middle East they're not from the Middle East but that's again back to this east-west paradigm where you just lump everybody together and you're like yeah yeah they're all the same let God sort them all right and so what we've had is we've had this really strange situation where in the United States Middle East Studies programs are overrun
• 106:30 - 107:00 by Pakistanis and Indians who are not from the Middle East and there's a tragic shortage of Arabs and Turks and Persians in those programs so that so one of the things that might be nice about the census change is if they do create the new category then there'll be an incentive at least to hire people from the Middle East for Middle East Studies program so that's the only positive I could see unless of course you're for ethnically cleansing the United States of its Middle East population because right that's how Hitler found out where the Jews were as he bought the census data
• 107:00 - 107:30 from IBM and that cool IBM made money off of the Holocaust doesn't that just warm your heart it's the American Way make money off of the suffering of others right pretty sure that's our motto we should dump in god we trust' eat capital yay capitals yeah any other questions one more and I'll let you go I swear
• 107:30 - 108:00 okay fine I'll just let you go [Applause]