Hour 6 | 575 - 480 BCE
Indo-European Language Family · Celts · Buddha · Buddhism · Spring and Autumn · Confucius · Contention of the Hundred Schools of Thought · Cyrus · Persian Empire · Behistun Inscription · Zoroastrianism · New Discovery in Ecuador
Browse the main books, articles, lectures, and interviews we relied on to make this episode.
Note: We’ve added links throughout the SYNOPSIS which are not our official sources. We’ve linked pictures, maps, encyclopedia entries, etc for you to enjoy if you want to see the things we are discussing, or get a quick reminder of people, time periods, concepts etc (what is an australopithecine again??). For our official sources check out the BOOKS, ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, and LECTURE tabs.
In this Season 1 Finale, we cover the years from 575 and to 480 BCE. Three massive philosophical and spiritual shifts take place in these years, Confucius in China, Buddha in India and Zoroastrianism in Persia. We will visit the Celts across Europe and end with with a discussion of a newly discovered civilization hidden for millenia beneath the trees of the Amazon which will rewrite the history of Ecuador.
Celts
We begin the episode with an explanation of expansion of the Indo-European Language Family.
Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed ancestor language of dozens of languages and language families across Eurasia, including Persian, Sanskrit and Celtic. We don’t usually link to Wikipedia, but this chart is an incredibly clear and concise layout of the ancient language families and their modern descendants.
You can hear an attempted recreation of Proto-Indo-European here!
One of the branches of this language family is the Celtic languages.
The druids were critically important parts of Celtic society. They played the many roles as diplomats and advisors, as well as healers, historians and priests.
Celtic chariots were important war tools.
Buddha
A little more context for the word Aryan including how it was hijacked in the modern world.
Or check out the book Which of Us Are Aryans? for an in depth look from many perspectives on all the controversy surrounding the influx of Vedic culture into India.
The Buddha’s possible birth site is a Unesco World Heritage Site
The Caste System.
There are many variations on the story of the Buddha’s life. Many are told through art including the incredible frescos in the Ajanta Caves, now a Unesco World Heritage site.
Buddhism
The Four Noble Truths.
The Zhou Dynasty and Confucius in China
The Duke of Zhou was a leader from before Confucius’ time. He was remembered as just and wise.
Confucius’ life fell between the Spring and Autumn Period of the Zhou Dynasty and the Warring States Period.
Confucius teachings were compiled by his followers into the Analects.
Contention of the 100 Schools of Thought was a time when so many important pieces of philosophy and literature and history were written, including The Art of War and the The Spring and Autumn Annals.
The Persian Empire
Cyrus the Great first conquers Media and Lydia.
The Babylonian Empire falls to Cyrus.
Cyrus allows the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem.
The Hebrew Bible refers to Cyrus as a Messiah.
Way too much incest in royal families throughout the ages.
This podcast discusses Persepolis, the political or ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. The three different historians give their perspective on what the role of Persepolis was. *Heads up, the interviewer feels frustratingly rude to me, doesn’t let them talk, cuts them off, etc.
The Behistun Inscription - the “Rosetta Stone” for cuneiform.
Besides the Rosetta Stone, Other Stone Texts have Interpreted Ancient Cultures | Discover Magazine.
The Trojan War, likely a mythologized memory of the Bronze Age Collapse, becomes an important part of Greek Origin stories.
The Battle of Marathon.
Battle of Thermopylae, or you can watch this if you prefer your history to be utter nonsense.
Zoroastrianism
Zarathustra or Zoroaster is the profit or the Zoroastrian religion.
Zoroastrianism is the world’s first major Monotheistic religion. The one true god, Ahura Mazda, has a counterpart, Angra Mainyu.
The Magi are Zoroastrian priests.
Fire is very sacred to the Zoroastrians. example, example, example.
The Faravahar, the winged sun symbol appears through out ancient Persia and is an important symbol for Zoroastrians. example, example.
A newly discovered “ancient civilization” in Ecuador
There aren’t yet books written about this culture. Here are a few articles I relied on:
This photograph of one of the canals connecting the groups of homes shows how difficult they would be to find and recognize with out lidar technology.
Archeologists knew there were mounds and other sites of habitation but had no idea of the extent of the complexity.
Thrilling to think how historical narratives will be rewritten by new technology!
The Current, “Huge Ancient City Discovered in Amazon”
A short interview with one of the main archeologists, Stephen Rostain about the discovery in Ecuador. Also includes a explanation of lidar technology from archeologist Jay Silverstein
Tides of History, “When did things happen in the ancient world? Interview with Professor Sturt Manning”
Great conversation about how technological advances allow archeologists to date things more accurately.
The Forum, “What is Zoroastrianism?”
Dr. Sarah Stewart, Shapoorji Pallonji, Malcolm Deboo, and Yuhan Vevaina, discuss the origins and beliefs of Zoroastrianism.
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(Edited for clarity)
Charlie: Welcome back to World History 24, where my older sister Ellie teaches me world history in order in just 24 hours. My name is Charlie. In our last episode, we covered from 800 to 575 BCE. We followed the expansion of the Bantu people throughout Central and Southern Africa. In the intersection of Eurasia. We saw the Assyrian empire fall and the Babylonians take their place, also taking the Israelites captive. We saw the proliferation of the idea of an alphabet, the rise of the Kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and finally the 10,000 year old Jomon culture in Japan. In this episode, which is our last episode for season one, we cover the years from 575 to 480 BCE. Three massive philosophical and spiritual shifts take place in these years, Confucius in China, Buddha in India, and Zoroastrianism in Persia. We'll visit the Celts across Europe and end with the brand new discovery of a civilization hidden for millennia beneath the trees of the Amazon, which will rewrite the history of Ecuador. World History 24 is entirely listenerF supported. We are so, so grateful for any help. If you'd like to donate to the making of Season 2, you can find information at our website worldhistory24.com. So without further ado, let's call Ellie and continue the magnificent story of human history.
Charlie: Here we are in Episode 6. We've arrived. What times are we going to be covering in this hour?
Ellie: So in this hour, in episode 6, we're going to talk about the years between 575 and 480 BCE.
Charlie: OK. OK. Even more specific than last.
Ellie: Very specific. We're just getting very specific.
Charlie: I like it.
Celts
Charlie: And where do you want to start?
Ellie: So we are going to start in Europe, sort of all across Europe.
Charlie: OK, cool. We haven't been. I I guess we've talked a little bit about like Greece and things, but we haven't really been in Europe much.
Ellie: Yeah, we really kind of haven't, I mean other than the Minoans, kind of you know some people right on the very edge, Turkey and whatever, we sort of haven't really been in Europe. So that's where we're going to start today among the Celts.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: So who are the Celts? That's the big question. What do we mean by the Celts? So as we've now talked about in several episodes with several different groups like the Austronesians or the Bantu or the Olmecs, the question of what is a people, you know, immediately rises when you start talking about the Celts. And so it's easy to kind of say when we're talking about the Celts, we're talking about the people who speak Celtic languages and those people stretch from Ireland to Turkey. However, sort of as we've said with so many of these other groups of people like who's related to each other in terms of their culture and who's related to each other in terms of their language is like not necessarily an overlap.
Charlie: mmhmm
Ellie: And so there's people who have sort of very Celtic looking archaeological packages who don't speak Celtic languages and there's people who speak Celtic languages that don't have very Celtic archaeological packages.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: So you know, in the grand scheme of a language expansion that we now have some contacts with from our earlier episodes, I feel like this isn't really that surprising. But just know that when we're talking about who are the Celts, it's like very nebulous who the Celts are. Roughly, Celtic is a Indo European language. We sort of briefly have mentioned this a couple times. But in general across a huge amount of Eurasia is one language family all the way down through India. Sanskrit is an Indo European language and then all across Europe. So these are all related groups of languages that likely stemmed from an original language in the steppe. And the steppe, which is, you know, a word I've used a few times, is the huge belt of grassland that stretches, you know, from Ukraine to Mongolia. You know, it's just this gigantic ecosystem in sort of the intersection of Eurasia.
And so people came likely from the western part of that steppe and began to spread out. And there's so many theories about exactly who got where when. These dates and patterns are changing constantly with better archaeology and better genetic sequencing. But roughly speaking, you know, this group of people that some of them end up in India, some of them end up in Iran, some of them end up in Europe, have this massive linguistic and cultural impact across Eurasia.
Voiceover Indo European Languages
46% of the modern world speaks an Indo European language. This is the result of yet another hugely important expansion. The mother language of this expansion, called “Proto Indo European,” really rolls off the tongue, I know, seems to have originated in Ukraine somewhere between 4500 and 2500 BCE. Proto Indo European is the mother language of everything from Hindi to Irish, Armenian to English, Pashto, Bengali, Icelandic, Portuguese and Kurdish, as well as more than 400 other modern languages. It's also the mother language of ancient languages we discuss in this episode, such as Sanskrit, Old Persian and Ancient Greek. As with the Bantu and the Austronesian expansions, it requires the synthesis of archaeology, genetics and linguistics to reveal the whole story. What we find in this case is that the spread of the original Proto Indo European speakers was shockingly fast. This is perhaps not surprising as the Proto Indo European speakers are also the original domesticators of horses. The horse centric nomadic lifestyle of the Indo European people influenced every group they came across, including many that were previously quite urbanized. From Ukraine, Indo European languages spread through Iran and India, across the Slavic nations in Russia and West, through much of Europe, and eventually across most of the Americas, Africa and Oceana. We will be among groups speaking these languages in every episode of this podcast, including this episode where we discussed the Celts, Vedic, India and the Persian Empire. Also, it's worth mentioning you are listening to me speaking Indo European language right now.
Ellie: So probably the simplest way to talk about the Celts is to say that they're the ancient people spread across Europe during this, the time period of this episode. They absolutely would not have thought of themselves as one people. They were constantly warring with each other. But to the Greeks and the Romans, who are the people of this time period who were writing, and so they're who we have writing from about the Celts, they were sort of lumped together as like those Barbarians in the north.
Charlie: The Barbarians. Yeah. Yeah, I see. I got you.
Ellie: Yeah, they were literally one of the four great Barbarians.
Charlie: Yeah, I feel like Greece and Rome are always like making numbered, like ranking. It's like the original clickbait. “The Seven Wonders of the World; you'll never believe number 7”
Ellie: Celtic culture, again, would vary widely. You know, if you're talking about like Turkey to Ireland, like there's Celtic artifacts in like Croatia and Portugal. I mean, this is a huge space. And so any given group, how much did they have in common with like the group that was 800 miles away? Hard to say.
Charlie: yeah.
Ellie: But in like a rough sense, they have very, very like hierarchical societies with a Chieftain at the top. And you didn't exactly own your land. It wasn't like a concept of land ownership. But you, you know, this tribe sort of controlled this land and there was a lot of warring over the borders, you know, between between tribes and then underneath the Chieftain as warriors and nobles. And we'll come back to, like, the warriors and and sort of Celtic warfare in a second.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: And then people called the druids who are sort of like priests will also circle back to them because they're much bigger than just religious figures or just like how we might think of priests.
Charlie: ok
Ellie: They're specialized craftspeople. And then there's farmers who pay taxes in food, you know, up the hierarchical chain and sort of get protection in return. And then there's, you know, poor people and slaves. There's a lot of enslaved people, which is, you know, like basically universal the world over, unfortunately.
Charlie: Sure,
Ellie: Yeah.
Charlie: And the so there are farmers, so they're they're farming. Most of them are farming communities.
Ellie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Even though they don't have, like, gigantic cities, but they nevertheless are, yeah, very much relying on agriculture. And they're growing like wheat and barley, peas, oats, and then a variety of animals like sheep and pigs and cattle and then horses, which were incredibly important to the Celts and to so many other Indo European groups. And we will circle back to horses in a minute.
So just to go to their religion for a second. So there's not really a uniform religion across the Celtic world. There's like 400 different gods that we have named at some point or another, but some, you know, are are more important and more universal. And then the big thing is these druids, which are their priests, but they're also important politicians, like their advisors to The Chieftains and they’re healers and they’re teachers and they’re diplomats, you know, between between other tribes and their big oral historians. There's no writing. We don't have any writing. So, you know, they're required to just do these incredible feats of memorization. They have to spend years like studying and memorizing these oral histories, memorizing healing practices and then religious rituals. So they're very important to religious rituals, including, and I feel like kind of iconically or like famously, stereotypically human sacrifice, feel like that's something people associate a lot with the Celts. And it's true, it's not particularly unique to the Celts, but it is true that there was human sacrifice.
The last thing I want to talk about amongst the Celts is their warfare, which is very wrapped up with their horses. So there's this one Celtic historian named Simon James who calls the Celts flamboyant. Like that was a word he used. And it just really stuck out to me because it seemed so perfect. Because when the Greeks and Romans are writing about them, they're just like these people are out here with like their striped pants and their plaid laid and they're, you know, they're just like always just talking. They're always so weirded out there like they have red hair, they have blonde hair, they have blue eyes, they like, spike their hair, you know, They're just like always so weirded out by them, even though, like a lot of that is probably not remotely true. Most of them surely had dark hair and dark eyes, but whatever.
But the Celts certainly would play up the sort of showmanship side of warfare. And so they fought a lot on Chariots, that was like a big thing. And that was just so intimidating to a lot of the people that they were fighting with. And if you can picture a chariot with like two horses, there's a pole that runs up like from the platform that you're standing on to between the two horses. And they would like leap off the platform and like run up that pole and like shoot their Spears at everybody and then like leap back in. And the whole time they'd be doing it, especially like if they're really far north, they had all these tattoos and they had all this body paint and they would like, spike their hair. And you know, I mean, it's just like they were into the, I don't know, intimidation by showmanship of it, side of things.
Charlie: I like that you said shoot their Spears because–,
Ellie: “Hurl” their Spear? “Throw” their Spears?
Charlie: I assume “hurl?”
Ellie: Probably not shoot. I don't know.
Charlie: But it's just getting into how much of warfare nerds we are not, yeah.
Ellie: That's really true. That's very true. That's very true.
Charlie: It's interesting though because I feel like a lot of like things on TV that sort of portray Celts or Gauls show show the Celtic cultures as that, as extremely kind of flamboyant in their warfare and painted and like messy and ‘yell-y’ and like, you know, I don't know, it's interesting to hear that that maybe is accurate.
Ellie: Well, I know exactly. I mean, they're always like the Greeks and Romans are always describing them as, like just fearless, just like they're afraid of nothing. They, like rip a spear out of their own body and like, while they're dying, you know, take someone else out or whatever. But then also as chaotic, you know, 'cause they're just like, we like to March in lines and our phalanx, and they're just out here being chaotic and. And so that's kind of like the image I want to end on is that a lot of the information we have about the Celts comes from either archaeology or from their enemies.
Charlie: sure
Ellie: So it's in their enemies, it's in Greece. And Rome's interest to like make them seem scary because then it's so epic that they would defeat them in war or whatever. And and to make them seem, you know, Chaotic and Barbarian like you know, which is like of course the word barbarian means doesn't speak Greek, you know.
Charlie: Does it really mean that?
Elllie: Yeah, yeah, it stems for the from the Greek word for foreigner. It's like mocking the the babbling sound of like a different language, like blah blah blah or something bar, bar. We talked about them in this episode because the first mention of them in a Greek source is in the year 517 BCE.
But we'll definitely be back with them because they're big players, you know, in this whole part of the world for the next many 100 years. And so as we talk about Greece and Rome, which are both sort of getting going in the years of this episode, you know, they're getting going for sure between 575 and 480 BCE. You know, will will the Celts will come up again and again as we talk about Greece and Rome.
Life of the Buddha.
Charlie: OK, wrapping up the Celts, what else is happening between 575 and 480 BC?
Ellie: So we are going to go to India now and we're going to talk about the life of the Buddha.
Charlie: Oh, OK. We were last in India. The Aryans had come down from through Iran brought bringing Vedic culture. Is that right?
Ellie: Yeah, that's exactly right. The Indo Aryans are you know again a a branch of this Indo European language family and people. So they come down through Iran, end up in India and now we are in Northeastern India sort of near Nepal and the traditional dates for the Buddha's life are 563 to 483 BCE.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie:So you know exactly in the timeline of this episode. However, having said that, lately scholars have been pushing the dates of his life around. So it's actually possible that he wasn't born for like 100 years, you know, and 100 years further, more like 400 BCE or something,
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: However, it's somewhere in this general time and this is, these are the dates traditionally given for his life. So we're covering it here,
Charlie: Understood.
Ellie: And knowing as we've said 100 times that, you know, like ancient history, the dates jump a lot as we discover, you know, as we make new discoveries.
And so as you said in episode four, we talked about the Vedic period in India. And in the the Vedic period, India became significantly more nomadic than it had been under the Indus Valley Civilization timeline.
Charlie: That was episode… two?
Ellie: Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there's this whole long, many hundreds of years, period in which the whole culture sort of across India is quite nomadic, kind of made-up of chiefdoms. And now, as in the past few 100 years leading up to the life of the Buddha, you know, again, the date given is 563 BCE. India is once again becoming much more urbanized.
Charlie: I see.
Ellie: Yeah and so a lot of these things that were kind of chiefdoms are now becoming kingdoms.
And a lot of these kind of spiritual practices, like the spiritual practices of the Varnas with the Brahmin at the top, that kind of have the ear of the power structure, they sort of are the upper class. Like some of these things are now like solidifying and becoming much more rigid as like kingdoms that are urbanized replace kind of nomadic chiefdoms. And and so, as such, the caste system, like the idea that the Brahmin are at the top and they are the ones who have access to Vedic culture, they're the ones who can speak Sanskrit. They can interpret the Vedas, etcetera, you know is just becoming rigid.
The Buddha is born into the warrior caste, the second highest caste,
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: And that caste is very common across this whole part of India that he's born into up near Nepal. And so you can kind of imagine that as some of these practices which had previously been cultural or spiritual, are now becoming political and legal and, you know, more rigid, you can see how that becomes, you know, a system of oppression for many people. And so the Buddha is extremely important and extremely sort of revolutionary. It's also true that there's elements of him that are a product of his time. Meaning, you know, there was general pushback in this part of India against, you know, some of the class structure inherent that you know, that they viewed as inherent to Vedic culture.
And so he's born as a Prince into this warrior cast. And there's, you know, a a very sort of classic story, like famous story of how he goes from being this Prince to becoming the enlightened one, you know, to becoming the Buddha.
Voiceover Buddha
There are many variations to the story of the Buddha's enlightenment. The most common versions say that Siddhartha Gotama is born as a Prince and brought up with no exposure to pain and suffering. His father kept him sheltered from the world one day. Adult Siddhartha, now with a wife and child, has a series of encounters with old age, sickness and death. The Prince is overwhelmed by the discovery of the pain and suffering in the world. He renounces his wealth and his family and spends 6 years attempting to find solace in various spiritual practices. Eventually he tries asceticism and nearly starves to death.
He arrives at the Middle Way. The Middle Way is the reasonable navigation between all extremes, moderation and all things. You don't need to starve yourself to become enlightened, nor do you need to indulge every earthly desire. After having this revelation, he continues to look for relief from the knowledge and reality of human suffering. He sits under a Bodhi tree, and as night falls, a series of temptations are presented to him. The God of desire and then the God of death both visit him, but he's unshakable.
Day after day, he remains under the tree until he achieves a state of bliss without sensual desires, without evil ideas. In this enlightened or awakened state, he believes he now understands what causes suffering and how to cure it. It is as simple and as difficult as ceasing to desire.
Ellie: So then he spends the the rest of his life, 40 years, travelling around telling people this, teaching this.
Charlie: Ok.
Ellie: And he's teaching what the cause of suffering is and how to end it, how to eliminate it, and teaching the idea that the ability to eliminate your suffering is in your own mind, like you have the capacity to do that.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: And he's doing a number of kind of radical things. For instance, he's speaking in the common language to all the people, rather than speaking in the elevated language of Sanskrit, which would only allow you know the very upper class to participate in these teachings.
Charlie: Wouldn't the Buddha not have been able to speak Sanskrit either way as he wasn't a Brahman by birth?
Ellie: The warrior cast actually also like the men of the warrior cast, also have access to Sanskrit.
Charlie: OK, OK.
Ellie: he establishes an order of monks. And within the order of monks, there's also sort of a number of kind of radical things he does, including all the decisions that they make, they make as a committee, like they have these meetings and that's how they decide things.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: He eventually allows all casts, even the lowest classes, to be monks. He eventually allows women to be nuns, and he basically rejects any idea of predestination. He says that your birth doesn't determine your social or your spiritual capabilities. So he says by deeds one becomes an outcast or by deeds one becomes a Brahmin, you know.
Charlie: Rather rather than by birth or. Sure. Cool.
Ellie: And so of course, out of all this comes Buddhism, which is a major, major world religion to this day. And you know, so here I'm going to do one of my summaries of a major world religion. And as is always true, nothing that I say is true about any given person or any given time period. These are just like broad outlines if you have no context at all.
Buddhism Summary
In the broadest sense, there's 4 Noble Truths. The 1st is that life is suffering. The word “suffering” is a little bit, maybe more like “dissatisfaction.” Just like whatever you do isn't going to, like bring you the satisfaction that you might expect it to bring, whether it's like your new job or the, you know, chocolate cake. The 2nd noble truth is that that suffering or dissatisfaction – the the word for it is “dukkha” – is caused by desire. The third noble truth is that there is an end to this suffering, to this dukkha.
And the 4th noble truth is that this middle way, which is an eightfold path, will lead you to the end of the suffering. And so the eightfold path is, again, these words are, you know, translated. And so, like, they don't mean exactly this, but roughly they're: right thought, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. So basically through this like very thoughtful and purposeful way of living, way of thinking, way of behaving, way of, you know, concentrating and being mindful about what's happening to you right then, you can rid yourself of desire and end your suffering.
Charlie: So you have to be, you have to, you have to adhere to all eight of those paths in order to achieve enlightenment, according to the Buddha.
Ellie: Yeah, yeah. And and I I I mean, I don't, I don't want to like, put words into the Buddha's mouth, but I don't know if he would say like you have to do this in order to achieve enlightenment. It's more like, it's more like to end your suffering and to see this beautiful thing. This is my way of helping you get there. Like it's it's much more like welcoming.
It does not have a God. Many types of Buddhism that actually exist in the world do worship gods, but there isn't a God that's outside of the cycle of birth and death. Like, there are gods, but they're just, they're sort of like us and in the same cycle of birth and death. And so you actually can be like born as a God. There's not like a one sort of almighty, a creator God that's outside.
So similar to Hinduism, it's possible to break out of this cycle of death and rebirth. And the way to do that in Buddhism is to rid yourself of desire, which is synonymous with achieving enlightenment.
Again, like depending on where you are geographically and where you are in time, the way that you practice Buddhism is very, very different, including the texts that it uses and the way that it views the Buddha. Like whether that's like a single person who's very mortal or more of an idea almost even. And then very much like the rituals and beliefs, like the ways that you bridge yourself of desire and you know, try to end this suffering. Like there's just a lot of different variations on that in in time and geography. But in the sweeping sense that is Buddhism.
And it sort of you know grows a little bit during Buddha's life and post Buddha's life and then huge empire takes over a large part of India called the Mauryan empire and that empire embraces Buddhism as it's you know sort of state religion.And you know, that's how most major religions get spread widely is by getting embraced by an empire. But so, so we'll come back to India, you know, when that happens because then Buddhism is sort of the the religion of most of India for a bit. But at the moment we're going to leave it as kind of more of a regional practice.
Charlie: ok
Ellie: And you know, we'll be back in a couple episodes.
Confucius
Charlie: OK, wrapping up the story of the Buddha in India sticking between 575 and 480 BCE, where are we going next?
Ellie: Next we're going to go to China and we're going to talk about the life of Confucius. That the life of Confucius and the life of the Buddha overlap or essentially overlap is just wild to me.
Charlie: yeah.
Ellie: And it's it's just worth saying quickly that like also within these few 100 years: the Bible, lots of the Bible is being written, you know, post Babylonian exile over in Greece, it's only a little over 100 years before Plato and Aristotle are born, Zoroastrianism is coalescing into a religion, which is incredibly foundational to Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and you know, over in the Americas, the Olmecs start building pyramids.
Charlie: right.
Ellie: You know, I don't know what was like in the ether, but the.
Charlie: Yeah, something.
Ellie: Something and just like the disproportionate impact that these few 100 years, like 600 to 300 BCE ish have on the modern world, like can't be overstated. It's just like, yeah, just.
Charlie: Philosophically. Yeah, totally.
Ellie: yeah
Charlie: spirituality
Ellie: Even like, politically, it's just like, totally, Yeah. Just the modern world is largely shaped by, like, these 300 years.
So now we're going to go to China and talk about Confucius.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: So in episode three we left China in the Shang Dynasty, and since we left China, one of the vassals of the Shang dynasty called the Zhou has risen up and taken over, which is just a very common pattern throughout Chinese history. One group is ruling the empire and then one of the vassals rises up.
Charlie: Sure, OK.
Ellie: The Zhou dynasty starts with a series of leaders that are looked back on very much as like wise and just and noble and just like those, you know the those were the guys, those were the good old days, which is again also quite common at the beginning of the dynasty. That's the whole Mandate from Heaven thing, you know, It's like the first leaders have the blessing of the people, which includes the ancestors.
Charlie: Right. And then over time, the dynasty becomes corrupt, they lose the mandate from heaven, and they're replaced by the next one.
Ellie: Yeah, yeah. So that's a quite common pattern. And and so then as we get later into the Zhou Dynasty, the time period between 771 and 475 is called the “Spring and Autumn,” which I just love that name. And then right after that, from 475 to 221, so that will be in our next episode, but it's, you know, just keep this in mind, that is called the “Warring States” period.
Charlie: Ok
Ellie And so as you can imagine by its title, the Warring States, it's like a very volatile time. It's a very violent time in Chinese history. So Confucius is born as we're leading up to that time period.
Charlie: Leading into the Warring States.
Ellie: Exactly. Exactly. So the Warring States starts at 475. Confucius dies in 479, you know, so his whole life is like the preamble, you know, the the the cross between the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States.
Charlie: Is his life sort of the reason that it transitions or just sort of happens to fall then?
Ellie: No, no, no I his his life is not the reason it transitions, but I think that the mayhem of the political world swirling around him informs his philosophies.
Charlie: Totally
Charlie: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Ellie: So Confucius is born in 551, and he's born into poverty. His dad dies when he's really little. So he, you know, grows up relatively poor. And basically who he becomes is just this brilliant, incredibly important teacher. He's frequently called, like, the first teacher in China.
Charlie: ok. Cool.
Ellie: You know, that's that's like an honorific he's given. And so exactly how, you know, his sort of young adulthood unfolds is like a little bit, you know, we don't totally know everything about it, but he does end up working at various levels of government for various people. Like, that much is clear. And he's, you know, like, not that impressed by, like the behavior of some of these leaders that he's, you know, that he's working for. Like they're just, a lot of them are quite corrupt and they're just, you know, easily distracted by sort of decadence and whatever. And so he especially is looking back to some of these other leaders. Like specifically there was the Duke of Zhou, which was one of the earliest leaders in the Zhou dynasty. And you know, just again has this reputation for being noble and just. And he's just thinking, you know, there's got to be a better way. Like there's a better way for leaders to be, there's a better way for a country or for a nation, whatever to be run and you know and for people to be. And so he sort of over the years studies the ancients views on how to be in the world. I mean that's he presents himself as very much a student of the ancients, and he's just saying something we've always known.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: He seems quite to be like quite a brilliant thinker to me.
Charlie: innovative Yeah, yeah. Understood.
Ellie: Anyway, at at about the age of 54 he leaves and sets off on this 14 year journey with several of his students to just travel around and teach.
Charlie: OK. It's about like 500 BC at this point.
Ellie: Yes, yeah, yeah, roughly somewhere in there. You know, again we're heading into the Warring States, so the whole, you know, land is quite volatile, quite violent and this is the, you know, landscape in which he's walking around and teaching.
I'm going to just summarize roughly what he teaches
Charlie: right.
Ellie: and sort of what are the principles of Confucianism.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: And as we've now said several times, it's way too big of a subject to summarize quickly and you know, just it, it's just ridiculous. And many people, many people would categorize Confucianism as a religion, and many categorize it as more like a practice or a philosophy. And, you know, I think we've made our position on splitting hairs about vocabulary not being particularly helpful.
Charlie: hopefully clear
Ellie: Yeah, exactly. But. But either way, this is like an incredibly important philosophy and way of thinking about the world.
So there's one quote of his that I feel like perfectly encapsulates his general philosophy. And that is “if there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there's beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there's harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation, and if there's order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.” That summarizes what he thought in the sense that he very much believes that like at each level of society, if we are good, like if we're noble, and if we play our role, then the whole society works and there's like peace and harmony throughout, throughout the world.
And so he believes that your character is formed in your family and that that character is what ends up making you a good member of the society, and that the good members of society end up making a good society. So he says, “let the ruler be a ruler, the subject be a subject, the father a father, the son, a son.”
So ritual plays a really important role in Confucius philosophy. The the idea is that almost every aspect of life, like every aspect of the ways in which we interact with each other, can be ritualized such that everybody knows their role. So you don't have to feel confused and thrown off by, like, what you ought to do when someone shows up at your door. It's just like this is what you do. This is the proper thing to do. And so there's this very, you know, there's this word that. Sometimes
Charlie: What are you supposed to do? Because I'm confused and thrown off every time. There's this idea in Confucianism that yourself is defined by your relationship with others.
Ellie: And so instead of saying like I'm Ellie and I'm a woman or whatever, you would say like I'm Ellie, I'm a daughter and a sister and a mother and a friend. And you know, like all the all the adjectives are relational. And so there's this word that, you know, doesn't translate exactly, but it means something like ritual or propriety, you know, and it and it doesn't really mean quite either one of those, but it's just about, you know, knowing the the proper way to be. And if we behave in those proper ways, like all the way up the chain, you know, from, like in your home, if you treat your parents properly and if they treat you properly, you know, then then we can live in, in peace and harmony. So he just believes really, really strongly in education. You know that there's all this wisdom that we can use. You know, we don't have to make it up as we go. And then there's all this, you know, propriety and ritual that we can rely on. And we don't have to make it all up as we go. And then we can have a more peaceful society.
Ellie: During this time period of his life. All these really important books to Chinese philosophy and Chinese culture going forward were written The Book of Documents, The Book of Changes, the Book of Poetry, The Spring and Autumn Annals, and he is credited in various ways for either editing them, composing some of them. Or maybe just compiling them, you know?
Charlie: ok
Ellie: But either way, he's just really, really credited for being foundational to the kind of Canon of, you know, early Chinese writing. And then of course after he dies in 479, his own teachings are then compiled by his students into The Analytics, which you know are are all phrased like questions from his students and then his answers and and so that you know again go go read more but but that like, you know, that's Confucius who's about as foundational to China for the next 2000 years, you know, as any individual.
Voiceover: The Contention of the 100 Schools of Thought
As Ellie said in the beginning of this section, both the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods occur between 771 and 221 BCE combined. This time is called the Golden Age of Chinese Philosophy. It's also known as the contention of the 100 Schools of Thought. It was a time when great thinkers were experimenting and writing about ideas in all disciplines, logic and ethics, communal living and spirituality. Like Confucius, scholars were frequently employed by government officials to advise them on the arts of war and the arts of diplomacy. There was a blossoming of literature, poetry, philosophy, art, and recorded history. This blossoming gave rise to many different schools of thought. Of these, Confucianism, Taoism, and legalism had the most long lasting overt influence over Chinese philosophy and government, and we'll talk much more about them in a future episode. Most of the other philosophies from this time disappeared under the brutal destruction of the short lived Qin Dynasty, which we will also discuss in the future episode. But their ideas still helped to form China's philosophical, economic, spiritual and legal understanding of the world and humans place within it.
Persian Empire
Charlie: So, so far we've covered the Celts in Europe, covered Buddha and India and Confucius in China. What else is happening between 575 and 480 BCE?
Ellie: So we are going to go and we're going to talk about Persia. We're going to talk about the Persian Empire.
Charlie: Oh, snap. OK.
Ellie: Oh, snap. And within the Persian Empire, we're gonna talk about a religion that that does get to count as a religion. So they're ready for that. So where are we in the world? We are in the modern country of Iran, and that is the center of what becomes the Persian Empire. So as we've mentioned when talking about India, there's this group of people called the Aryans which come down through Iran and end up in India. And you know, that word in our modern years rings very weirdly. And you know, that has to do with history. That's like 2000 years away from this, you know, the timeline of this episode. So at the time that we're talking about, this is just a group of people. This is a subset of the Indo Europeans and they, you know, come down, they're very nomadic horse people, as so many of these Indo European groups are. They come down through Iran and end up in India. And so the word Iran and the word Aryan that, you know, that's the same word.
So all across Iran are this group of Aryan people, and they're kind of divided into different kingdoms. And there's one large, very powerful Kingdom of, you know, pretty nomadic people, and they're called the Medes. And then there's a smaller and less powerful group called the Persians. There's other groups too, but those are the two that, you know, we're going to focus on.
In around 600 BCE a Median Princess is married off to the Persian king, which is incredibly standard practice throughout time and space, you know.
Charlie: Strength and political ties or whatever.
Ellie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So they have a baby named Cyrus, and he grows up and becomes the Persian king. But of course, he also has this tie to the Medes and is like maybe even a little bit in line to the Median throne because his mother had been a Median Princess.
As he grows up, the Medes have a kind of corrupt king that they don't love that much. And Cyrus has decided he's going to take over the entire world. And so he uses the fact that the Medes aren't crazy about their king and goes and conquers the Medes. And then he's like, look at me, I liberated you from that bad guy. Now I'm the real king of the Medes, obviously, because my mom is Mede. And so you can all just celebrate and I'll be great to you.
The normal behavior when you capture a people is to kill them all or enslave them all and burn their cities to the ground, etcetera. And he doesn't do that.
Charlie: I see.
Ellie: He's just like, aren't you so glad that I'm arrived to be your king,
Charlie: right.
Ellie: which is going to become a big pattern of the Persians. So now he has like a much, much bigger, you know, basically like a small empire. And he, you know, continues to expand it. He takes over a big group of people from the Kingdom of Lydia. He tries to kind of pull the same deal with them, like, look, I'm such a Liberator, don't you love me? And they view that as a sign of weakness. So then he's like, OK, fine and kills them all and enslaves the rest of them. And so by doing that, he has shown that he's perfectly willing to do that. But he also doesn't need to. And so you can kind of imagine that like other smaller kingdoms sort of get in line.
And then he kind of famously goes and takes over Babylon.
Charlie: Right, right.
Ellie: Yeah. So we mentioned that in the previous one that Babylon falls to Persia. And so similarly to how he kind of talked to the Medes, Persia would tell this story as we liberated Babylon. You know, Babylon right view themselves as having been conquered. But Persia is like ‘thank goodness we came and saved you from that bad king that you had. And you know we restored your good, your rightful gods to their places. And your gods wanted us to do this, and everybody's so happy that we liberated you.
Charlie: Yeah, aren't you grateful?
Ellie: Yeah, they're just all about like we're on your team. We liberated you from usurpers. That's their whole thing. And there is, in fact, a lot of truth to that. As we said, you know, the Israelites were captive in Babylon. Cyrus sends them home to Jerusalem, rebuilds their temple on his own dime. And it's like Yahweh, your God, just, you know, is so glad that I'm the king. And in the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, he's literally called the Messiah. He's called the “Anointed One,” and he's the only Gentile in the whole Hebrew Bible who's like, given the anointed one name. So he does do a lot of things that make a lot of people grateful. I mean, it's not just a show. Like, he really is a bit, you know, like, I mean, I can see how if the Persians were sort of marching down your street ready to take over, it's like I can see the temptation to be like, let's just let them take it,
Charlie: right.
Ellie: You know, like we we're, no, it's not like we have a good deal from our current government, you know, and like I said, you know, they're more than happy to genocide a group, you know, like everybody else has at this time. You know, it's not like they're, they wouldn't do that or they're incapable of brutality.
It's just that there's like also this other thing going on, which is like a big PR stunt and also has some truth to it. Both. You know.
Cyrus takes over this massive space at the height of the Persian Empire. It's like between 5 and 8 million square kilometers. And you'd think I could be more specific, but every source gave me a different number, and I don't know why.
Charlie: Ok.
Ellie: And so Cyrus dies in like 530 BCE and he leaves his empire to his son. He marries his son to his two daughters. So, like the son marries his two sisters, which again is kind of appallingly normal among royal families the world over,
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: 'cause you're trying to keep the blood in the family, you know? And you're also trying not to create the chaos of, like, if your daughters are out there having babies with other people, then do their children have, like, claims to the throne? You know, it's like you want anyone with a claim to the throne, like under your roof, you know?
Charlie: Right, and Cyrus knows that. Especially well considering he used his claim to the throne from the Medes.
Ellie: Literally. Exactly, exactly. The royal family becomes in the most standard across history and standard across geography way just like a, you know, Game of Thrones special of just like violent like fratricide and incest and marrying your dead relatives’ wives and you know, just whatever… which is extremely normal. But so we're just going to step like a little bit back and just kind of talk about like the government and life in Persia in under the Persian Empire.
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: So one interesting thing about the government is that they sort of keep this nod to their nomadic Aryan lives. And so while they're running a huge empire, they move a lot. You know, like the the actual literal government moves a lot, the kings move a lot. And so they have these like elaborate, gorgeous sort of tent cities that they just like, uproot and move.
Charlie: whoa.
Ellie: Yeah, it's very, very cool. It's something that like other groups that they encounter, like through war, usually sort of talk about a lot. Like here they come with their fancy tents. You know, they're just so decadent. Having said that, this one, King Darius does establish Persepolis as sort of a capital, and our understanding of exactly what the role of Persepolis was is actually changing with new archaeology. So how much of it was the actual center of the empire through which the empire was run and how much of it was a bit more symbolic? It's just like a bit of a moving target. We're just still learning.
Charlie: And where where is Persepolis?
Ellie: It's in southwestern Iran.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: Yeah. And so within the government, there's harems, like a harem, you know, a harem.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: And so I just want to take two seconds to talk about a harem because I feel like they have a weird place in, like, the imagination of, I don't know what.
Charlie: yeah totally.
Ellie: Yeah. And so that word basically just refers to, like, the private household. So in in the royal sense, it's like it is like the King's wives and concubines, but it's also his mom, his sisters in laws, specifically all the children. You know, it's kind of like the women and children's quarters. But the word has a sense of of meaning, like the taboo, the private meaning, like the part of your household that the public does not have access to.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: You know, it's it's like behind, you know, and not necessarily a physical wall at all, especially not in these sort of nomadic ways, but but just, you know, away from the public eye. And so within, within the harems, there's like a very sort of hierarchical structure which at times does become, you know, part of like kind of the political uproar of a household. You know, the mother is usually at the top of it, like the King's mother is usually at the top of it. But then there is, like, as we mentioned when we were talking about the Assyrians, like there is, you know, some amount of, like competition amongst the women for their own sons. You know, people want like their own sons to be the ones who end up in power or at least to have a lot of favour of the king.
Charlie: Totally.
Ellie: And so it it is a bit of like a setup that's going to end up pitting women against each other. But it's just not like sort of the creepy thing that, like, Hollywood wishes it was or like painters from, you know, England in the 1800s wish it was.
Outside of the palace across the Persian Empire, it's been divided into roughly 40 provinces with a, satrap at the top, which is like, you know, a governor or something.
Charlie: ok.
Ellie: And so you might wonder, like how on earth somebody's governing this huge space with all these, like other powerful people in it who might at any moment decide to rise up or take over their neighbors or whatever, decide they're the ones in charge.
Charlie: To be honest, I wonder that like all the time about all these civilizations actually.
Ellie: Yeah, that's really fair. That's really fair. So in the Persian Empire, the way they do it is by having just the most insanely efficient bureaucracy you can imagine.
Charlie: Hmm ok.
And so among the things they have are these things called, like the eyes and ears of the king. So they just have this really intricate spy network
Charlie: Ah sure.
Ellie: That's just like all across everybody. You know, there's just a lot of spies everywhere, just making sure that none of these governors get any big ideas. And then, you know, that's all fine and well. But if they're 1000 miles away, what good does it do that this spy knows? And so the other thing that they have is just the most efficient communication. So there's just miles and miles and miles of roads all across the Persian Empire of this pounded dirt road. They're very, very well maintained and all along them are these way station, you know, roadside hotel type things. And then there's just basically a system like a Pony Express. You know exactly how we'd think of a Pony Express where like you know one runner on a horse like goes from one of these way stations to the next one, and then a fresh horse comes, You know, exactly like you think of the Pony Express. And so as such,
Charlie: cool. Wow.
Ellie: they could get news and information across the entire empire so quickly and efficiently.
Charlie: And I imagine like to the to the anecdote you were saying earlier about 1 governor is maybe getting some big ideas they can get orders.
Ellie: Exactly.
Charlie: To assassins and things, yeah.
Ellie: There's just a shocking amount of, just like it's just a very tight ship, it's run very efficiently.
Charlie: You've mentioned bureaucracy, you've mentioned bureaucracy and like Mesopotamia generally. And I'm, I'm realizing maybe that's the answer to my, like more general question about like how do you run a civilization? Cuz that's how you run civilizations now.
Ellie: Yeah, for sure. I think maybe it's just the universal. I mean, in Persia, there's an entire class of people called the Kurtash, which are essentially enslaved laborers. And you know, there's literally like ration records that vary, you know, if you're a man or a woman, if you're a child or an adult, if you've given birth, if you've given birth to a boy or a girl. It's different, You know, I mean, it's just so meticulous, meticulously recorded, rationed, you know, it's just in a very intense bureaucracy.
So that that same King Darius that I just briefly mentioned who sort of established a lot of this bureaucracy. One other quick thing I want to say about him is that he makes this huge inscription on a rock face called the Bahiston Inscription and it's just sort of bragging about how he is the king of kings and took over the world and God's on his side. But what it is, is the “cuneiform Rosetta Stone.”
Charlie: Oh, cool.
Ellie: Yeah.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: It's totally cool. And it's like basically because they're running this giant empire with all these different people speaking different languages, and so the exact same text is written, you know, in multiple languages. So that's why we can read cuneiform. So thank goodness for Darius.
Voiceover Rosetta Stones
Ellie has mentioned the term Rosetta Stone a few times, so I just want to talk about them for a second. Back in episode two, we discussed the original Rosetta Stone being instrumental to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs by using the Ancient Greek. Also on the tablet, similar artifacts which have the same content written in multiple languages have allowed linguists to decipher other ancient languages. These surprisingly rare artifacts are frequently nicknamed Rosetta Stones, after the original, the idea of an alphabet had reached Persia by the time Darius created the Behiston inscription, so they were writing their language, known to us as Old Persian, in an alphabet. Alphabets, being inherently easier to translate, allowed linguists to eventually decipher Old Persian and therefore the other two scripts also on the Behiston inscription, one of which, as Ellie said, was cuneiform. So this Rosetta Stone was the key to unlocking the script we have relied on for sources the past five episodes throughout the world. We have only found a tiny handful of these multilingual inscriptions, and you can imagine how precious these Rosetta Stones are and what an unbelievable stroke of luck they are to find.
Ellie: So there's only one more thing that's I think really important to say about the Persians, and that has to do with Greece. So as we said when we were talking earlier about the Celts, you know, Greece and Rome are, you know, growing in the background of the past couple episodes. Sparta is a city that already exists by now, and Athens is a city that already exists.You know, by now. We're going to talk specifically about Greece in the next episode because that's like their quote, golden age. But just know that, like these are cities that exist and they're like becoming more powerful, taking over some of the people around them, you know, sort of in the background.
And so then in 490 BCE, King Darius, who is, you know, following in the footsteps of all the other Persian kings and expanding the empire as much as he can. He starts going West and he invades what's solidifying into Greece, You know, this sort of set of city states that's slowly building alliances, you know,
Charlie: Sure.
Ellie: And he's defeated. So this is like the Battle of Marathon, you know, that everybody still likes to talk about and you know, so he is defeated. And Sparta and Athens are just like, look at us. You know, we're so great. But then ten years later, another Persian king, Xerxes, invades again. So this is in 480 BCE. And this is like, you know, the Battle of Thermopylae where like some tiny number of Spartans are like holding the pass against a huge number of Persians. And you know all those stories. So this is that. And it doesn't, you know, all you need to know about it is just that, very unexpectedly, Greece wins. You know and the Persians are be.
Charlie: Against this like massive
Ellie: Against this massive empire,
Charlie: Right.
Ellie: this like, you know, world ruling empire.
Charlie: right.
Ellie: And so this completely defines Greece. You know, they're just like we are amazing.
Charlie: Are the Champions.
Ellie: And it begins their whole golden age, exactly.
Charlie: And Persia's Persia's like that was annoying
Ellie: Persia's just like. We had like this border skirmish and it's like embarrassing that we lost, but like whatever, they just continue on with their lives.
Charlie: that’s crazy.
Ellie: However, the reason it's important to mention is because Greece like remains worked up about it. So in, you know, a while, Alexander the Great shows up in Greece. And he comes and like the Persian Empire falls to Alexander the Great because he's still worked up about like the big bad Persians who came and invaded like precious Greece.
Charlie: I see.
Ellie: So we're going to leave the Persian Empire there after this unexpected defeat by Greece. But they're very much thriving. They're still at, you know, at their height.
Ellie: And so we're going to leave the Persian Empire there. But what we are going to talk about is Zoroastrianism, which is the religion of the Persian Empire.
Charlie: OK.
Ellie: Because this is absolutely an important world religion that plenty of people still practice today. But the reason that we're covering it and giving it the time to summarize as we have with some of these others, is because of just the enormous outsized impact it has on Judaism and Christianity and therefore Islam. So it has a huge effect on more than half the people in the world.
Charlie: Sure, sure. Right. I see what you're saying.
Zoroastrianism Summary
Ellie: Zoroastrianism has a prophet. A main prophet named Zarathustra or Zoroaster is the Greek version of that same name, and he was born in somewhere in like Iran or Afghanistan or maybe Azerbaijan, and his life probably took place around 1700 to 1000 BCE.
Charlie: OK. That would have been like Episode 3 for for our listeners.
Ellie: Yeah, exactly. And so he's frustrated by the sort of corruptness of the world and the carelessness of the way that people live. And he when he's between 30 and 40, he goes to the river to get water for a ritual and has receives a vision from the God, Ahura Mazda. After that he preaches and writes about what he learned in this vision and that is sort of the religion of Zoroastrianism.
So who is the God, Ahura Mazda? Ahura Mazda is an uncreated and eternal God who lives in heaven rather than in a temple in the city. He's the Father of everything, who separates light from dark and heaven from earth, and he's the Lord of order and truth and wisdom and light and the creator of everything that's good.
And then he has a counterpart, and the counterpart is Angramanu, and he is the Destroyer, who's the Lord of falseness and deceit and decay and chaos and sort of everything that's bad. There's just a strong, strong dualism in Zoroastrianism. You know, there's the the Creator and the Destroyer and the darkness and the light and the truth and the lies.
And so Zoroastrians believe that the world is engaged in this struggle, and that it will be engaged in this struggle for millennia. And then a saviour will be born of a virgin mother, and then that will bring about end time. And after that we'll all live in peace.
So humans have free will and the ability to determine what's good and bad. And our job is to aid Ahura Mazda through our good thoughts and good words and good deeds. You know, to aid the truth of the world. And so after we die, our bodies are considered impure because they're no longer alive, and death is of Angra Mainyu. And as such, they don't want to put a body into the ground which might pollute the earth, or into a fire which might pollute a fire which is very, very sacred in Zoroastrianism. And so instead, our bodies are taken to the top of these circular towers called the ‘Tower of Silence,” and they're laid on the roof. And then birds come and eat the bodies. And that's considered like a final act of sort of generosity and goodness into the world. Like you're giving your body back and feeding birds with your with your body that you no longer need.
And so that's what happens to your body. And what happens to your spirit is that it comes to a bridge, like the bridge of Judgement or the Bridge of the Requiter. And if you have lived a good life, and with your good thoughts and good words and good deeds, then you will cross the bridge and be taken to the House of Song. If you've lived a life that was aiding Angra Manyu, then the bridge will be very narrow and you'll fall from it into the House of Lies.
And so the final thing I want to say is that is the sacred book of the Zoroastrians is called the Avesta, which I will link you to on the website. And it's just beautiful. And the very oldest parts of it are the Gothas, which are 17 poems, and those are written by Zarathustra. And so just like with the Vedas, they're passed down orally for almost 1000 years before they're actually written. So our oldest copy of the Avesta is 1000 years after the oldest parts were composed. But nevertheless, you know you can, you can read, read those texts. As I said, we'll circle back. You know what, like the Zoroastrianism will keep coming up. But that, in summary, is Zoroastrianism.
New civ. In Ecuador
Charlie: So, wrapping up Zoroastrianism and the Persians, what else is happening in the world between 575 and 480 BCE?
Ellie: So the last thing we have to talk about, and this is so tiny and quick because we have almost no information about it, is something so exciting. Like, I'm just so excited about this, which is that really recently archaeologists discovered, or at least they wrote about it publicly an entire major civilization in Ecuador that was at its height right during this episode, like between 500 BCE and then all the way up to 300 CE. So it it goes way forward.
Charlie: okay okay.
Ellie: I know it's so cool. It's so cool, 'cause we, like literally didn't know about it like a matter of months ago or someone did. But I you know, the average of us didn't.
Charlie: Sure, sure.
Ellie: And so the way this is so neat, so we know, again, we don't know very much about it. Like obviously there aren't books written about it yet or anything. But there's this new technology where they use these lasers that can see through trees, but then hit the hard ground underneath them so it can see through plants and foliage, but see the shape of the ground. And they took this huge picture of 300 square kilometers of dense rainforest in the Amazon of Ecuador.
Charlie: okay.
Ellie: And so it's almost like I heard it described as like a sonar with lasers or like an X-ray. And what they saw was 600 earthen platforms that are laid out in a geometric pattern.
Charlie: whow.
Ellie: I know it's so cool. And so there's like 5 large, large settlements and 10 smaller ones And in between them are lots of fields and gardens.
Charlie: Wow.
Ellie: And so when they're describing this sort of gigantic civilization, they called it “garden urbanism.” Because as we've talked about, they love nothing more than, like inventing new terms for the difference between, I don't know, agriculture and.
Charlie: Yeah. Hunter, Gatherer, collector Yeah, yeah.
Ellie: And so on these farm fields, they were growing like corn and sweet potatoes and you know, things that you would expect in Ecuador. And these different settlements are connected by a really intricate network of roads and canals.
Charlie: wow.
Ellie: And that definitely demonstrates how complex the society was because it it's clear that they all like knew about each other and were interacting regularly. It's not as though they just like happened to exist simultaneously or whatever.
Charlie: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ellie: You know they were. They were certainly interacting. And you know, we so like because this is also brand new, it's not like we have a lot of information about like how their government structure worked or how their cities functioned or what, you know, these communities functioned. But we have found pottery. So surely we're going to find like all kinds of other cool stuff soon.
Charlie: mhmm.
Ellie: And so previously, like this type of like architecture and infrastructure is just totally unprecedented. In the Amazon, there was just kind of this idea that there was just like tiny little groups of hunter gatherers. And so hopefully by this point we know that that's like kind of a a narrative that doesn't make a lot of sense anyway. There's always a lot of variation on even what that means. But what we now know is in fact at this time at like 500 BCE, there was like this gigantic civilization
Charlie: wow.
Ellie: and we just have so much to learn about it.
Charlie: cool.
Ellie: But we can know that like while this was going on in India and while that was going on in China or whatever, there was some big thing happening in Ecuador, which I just think is so exciting and cool
Charlie: It is. It is.
Ellie: and and then interestingly like, so they don't know what happened, you know, to end it. Again, this is all so brand new, but it's possible that it was kind of taken out by a volcano, which unfortunately is also kind of a common story. But they only, you know, they were looking in these 300 square kilometers. So like surely
Charlie: Its bigger
Ellie: By this point they're now looking all the way outside. Yeah, exactly.
Charlie: yeah right.
Ellie: So like, who knows what else we'll find.
Charlie: Wow.
Ellie: But yeah, it's really cool. Really cool.
Letter of Gratitude
And with that, we come to the end of our 6th call, covering the years from 575 to 480 BCE. We also end our first season. If you'd like to financially support this series and the making of Season 2, please head to our website at worldhistory24.com or follow the links in our social media BIOS.
And before we hang up, a short letter of gratitude:
“We want to end the season with a love letter to everyone who's had our backs since we started making episode one in 2021. So in no order. To Sherry, who gave us our first lesson in Squarespace so we could make a website. To Paul, who gave me The Dawn of Everything and rekindled my obsession with chronological history. To Shelley for listening to endless early variations of episodes to help us find the shape of the project. To Lydia, our senior youth correspondent. To Woody for his invaluable advice.
And Aunt Julie for introducing us to him. To our siblings, parents and friends who have listened to us obsess. To Tag for writing to tell us Episode one was accurate and up to date, the weight that rolled off our shoulders. To Jade. To Quinn and Jack. To Grammy. To Alyssa for her art, coding, advice and enthusiasm. To the people we live with, who have tiptoed around our recording sessions for years, gone without heat for hours so the vents don't make noise, not eating lunch until we're done recording, listen to the same 3 seconds of editing coming from my studio for literal hours. To the Trust for African Rock Art.
To Kaia, Steve, Jean and the rest of our Jedi Council your advice was so grounding. To all of you who have donated financially, it makes such a massive difference to this project. We really can't do it without you. To all the listeners who have written to us excited about Poverty Point and Chattel Holyoke and covered Plumbing in 2000 BCE, etcetera, it's so encouraging. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Bye, Charlie!
Bye, Ellie!
World History 24 is written and researched by Ellie Koczela. I do the production and music. Our logo and design work is done by Alyssa Alarcon Santo. For links to any sources mentioned in the episode, as well as lots of fascinating extra material, visit worldhistory24.com. You can also find information there about how to support this podcast. That's worldhistory24.com. My name is Charlie Koczela and on behalf of myself and my sister, thank you for listening and we'll see you next hour.
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Episodes
- Jan 24, 2023 Hour 1 | 3,300,000 - 4000 BCE
- Jan 23, 2023 Hour 2 | 4000 - 1700 BCE
- Jan 22, 2023 Hour 3 | 1700 - 1200 BCE
- Jan 21, 2023 Hour 4 | 1200 - 800 BCE
- Jan 20, 2023 Hour 5 | 800 - 575 BCE
- Jan 19, 2023 Hour 6 | 575 - 480 BCE
- Jan 18, 2023 Hour 7 | 480 - 300 BCE
- Jan 17, 2023 Hour 8 | 300 - 100 BCE
- Jan 16, 2023 Hour 9 | 100 BCE - 100 CE
A fascinating look at the Indo European expansion. Due to many recent discoveries and new research methods, some of it is already out of date. The author is currently writing a new book. Still absolutely worth reading for the first third alone, which explains the evolution of languages and the way linguists worked backwards to recreate Proto-Indo-European.