Hour 7 | 480 - 300 BCE

Episodes
Written By Alyssa Alarcon Santo

Second Temple Period  ·  Writing of the Bible  ·  Judaism ·  Abrahamic Religions ·  Nok Culture  · Woodland Period in North America  ·  Adena and Hopewell Cultures · Great Hopewell Road · Classical Period of Ancient Greece  ·  Alexander the Great

SYNOPSIS

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, and OTHER tabs.

This episode will cover from 480 - 300 BCE, this includes the second temple period of Israel, a defining time for Judaism when much of the bible was written. As we travel Southwest over Egypt and the Sahara, we find a major civilization in Nigeria known as the Nok, whose history is baked into terracotta. Spinning the globe, we arrive in the Woodland Period in North America, where the Adena and Hopewell cultures are building intricate earthen-mounds. Back in the Mediterranean Sea, a group of disparate warring city states is hellbent on conquering and enslaving one another. We now call them all simply, Greece. And finally, the story of one famous Greek, who the Greek’s seem to have hated, Alexander the Great.

Second Temple Period  ·  Writing of the Bible

The Nok

Woodland Period in North America

Classical Period of Ancient Greece   

Alexander the Great

BOOKS
OTHER SOURCES

Royal Society of Chemistry, “The Chemistry of Pottery”

BC Campus, “Chemical Weathering”

The Bible for Normal People (Podcast Interview), “Richard Elliott Friedman - Who Wrote the Pentateuch.”

Digital Hammurabi (Podcast Interview), “Did Moses Write the Torah? Interview with Dr. Joel Baden.”

Archaeology Magazine, “The Nok of Nigeria.”

  • (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 the years 575 to 480 BCE.

    We heard the story of the Celts throughout Europe with their horses and barbaric pants. Ellie summarized 3 religious philosophical movements, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, and Zoroastrianism in Persia. We ended the episode and season one with the breaking news that archaeologists using Lidar technology had discovered hundreds of kilometers of interconnected roads, as well as the footprints

    of farm fields and buildings, indicating a previously unknown major civilization in the rainforest of Ecuador.


    This episode we'll cover from 480 to 300 BCE. This includes the Second Temple period of Israel, a defining time for Judaism when much of the Bible was written. As we travel southwest over Egypt and the Sahara, we find a major civilization in Nigeria known as the Nok, whose history is baked into terracotta. Then spinning the globe, we arrive in the woodland period in North America where the Adena and Hopewell cultures are building intricate earthen mounds. Back in the Mediterranean Sea, a group of disparate warring city states are hell bent on conquering and enslaving one another. We now call them all simply Greece. And finally, the story of one famous Greek who the Greeks seem to have hated, Alexander the Great. So without further ado, let's call Ellie and continue the magnificent story of human history. The year is 480 BCE.


    Second Temple Period


    Charlie: The clock is set to 480 BCE. Who are we going to start with today?


    Ellie: So we are going to start in Canaan, in the Kingdom of Judah, and we're going to talk about the

    Second Temple period and the writing of the Hebrew Bible. 


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: So where did we leave the Israelites? If you remember in our last episode, they were captive in Babylon when the Babylonian Empire falls to the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. So Cyrus the Great of Persia frees the Israelites in 538 BCE, sends them home to Jerusalem.


    Charlie: OK, right.


    Ellie: Or allows them to go home to Jerusalem. Might be a a better way to phrase that they rebuild their temple. And so because the temple has been rebuilt, it's their second temple. And that gives this whole time period its name, which is the second Temple period.


    Charlie: Gotcha. So if we're thinking in terms of Israelite history, we've gone from the Babylonian captivity period to the time period of this episode, which is the Second Temple period.


    Ellie: Yeah, that's exactly right.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: And so the Second Temple period stretches roughly from 539 BCE to 73 CE. So of course, at the beginning of this time period, it's under Persian rule. As we just said, the Persian Empire eventually falls to Alexander the Great, which we'll talk about at the end of this episode. And so at that point, the Kingdom of Judah is under the Greeks, then it becomes part of the Ptolemaic Empire, then it becomes part of the Seleucid Empire, and on and on. And so this is just, you know, as we've said several times, this is like, unfortunately the brutal reality of like this entire corner of Afro Eurasia is just getting endlessly eaten by one expanding empire after another expanding empire. But of course what that also means is that there's just endless cultural and intellectual and philosophical like academic exchange amongst all these different peoples. 


    Charlie: Right, it's not just that empires are taking over 1 after another. In addition, all the peoples of the empires and the elites and the warriors and the farmers and stuff are all talking to each other, exchanging stories and ideas and things.


    Ellie: Absolutely.


    Charlie: For the past thousand years, yeah. Or thousands of years.


    Ellie: Thousands of years, yeah, totally. And so it's during the Babylonian captivity, and certainly in the time period after that, the Judeans begin the cultural practices that we would recognize as Judaism today. They become increasingly and then entirely monotheistic. The God Yahweh moves from being, you know, a statue in a temple in the center of a city to living in heaven and, you know, being the one, the one God. And it's important to note that these cultural practices are largely established amongst the elite

    in, like, big cities. And this is true in, you know, all over the world. As major religions get established, you know it takes much, much longer for like, the average random farmer to be participating in the cultural practices of the sort of intellectual and political elites of a city. 


    Voiceover: origins and the proliferation of a religion

    As we distill history, it's easy to be left with the impression that once a religion begins, everyone in the surrounding regions more or less jumps on board right away. But the origins and the proliferation of a religion are two very different events, often separated by hundreds of years. Archaeology shows that generally, people continue to practice their indigenous religions well after the urban elite have solidified into something new. In fact, this diversity of belief becomes an increasing theme in the writings and spirituality specifically of the Israelites, which eventually coalesce into one very influential set of books.



    Bible

    Ellie: But of course, amongst the things that the intellectuals and the religious leaders, etcetera, are

    doing in Jerusalem is writing the Hebrew Bible. 


    Charlie: So the religious practices have sort of been coalescing over this period of time, the Babylonian captivity, the Second Temple period, and simultaneously they're being codified.


    Ellie: Exactly. That's exactly right. And so that brings us to the Hebrew Bible, which is an incredibly important book to world history, like possibly the most important book ever written in world history.

    And so I, I want to talk about it in a couple different ways. I want to start with just a question about vocabulary of sort of like what do we mean when we say the Bible? 


    So the the phrase the Hebrew Bible is the academic term for a set of books which in Judaism is

    called the Tanakh and in Christianity is called the Old Testament. And so depending on exact branches of religious practice, the books contained within this set of books are different slightly, but in a rough sense, the Hebrew Bible is the academic term for these, the sets of books that are incredibly foundational to Judaism and Christianity. The first five books are called the Law or the Torah, and those are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And if you don't know anything at all about the Bible, but you just sort of here things in the world, you might be like, I know there's the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark and Joseph's amazing Technicolor dreamcoat and the sea gets parted. And there's a lot of thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do that. All of that, all of that is in the first five books. And so those first five books are just they couldn't be more, you know, foundational. 


    Those stories bring me to the second way that I want to talk about the Bible. And that is just what's in it. You know, what is its content? What does it contain? So as is true when we talked about the Avesta or when we talked about the Vedas or other, you know, religious texts, the Bible is filled with songs and prayers and philosophy and cosmology and proverbs and laws and lots and lots of writing about how to live and write relationship with the divine, with your family, with your community at large, etcetera. Also in the Bible are many, many narrative stories. And these stories sort of run a broad spectrum from stories where people live to be 500 years old and there's Dragons and retellings of stories like Gilgamesh and the flood. You know, these stories that have been in these lands in the corner of Afro Eurasia for a couple thousand years at this point, all the way to the other end of the spectrum where we have history that's unfolding, you know, not much before it's being written down. So, you know, a lot of that history is like names and dates that are corroborated by Persian history or Babylonian history or the Greeks or whoever you know. So the.


    Charlie: Archaeology, yeah.


    Ellie: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. So it's, it's a it's a wide, wide spectrum. And sort of the newer, you know, the younger parts of the Bible are a little bit more rooted in history than in the older parts of the Bible are, you know, these old sort of mythologized stories, which again, is so normal in religious texts. 


    Charlie: Yeah. Right, right.


    Ellie: And so because it's written over this long, long time period, there's many, many authors. And in some parts of the Bible, the authors change practically paragraph by paragraph, you know, And then in other parts of the Bible, there's like almost an entire book written by one person or there is an entire book written by one person, as far as we can tell. And so all of that makes it like a little hard to sift through.

    Like you, it's kind of sometimes hard to know, like when you're reading about an actual person and like this king who did this and did that, you know, versus like suddenly somebody lives to be 1000 or whatever.


    Charlie: Right, right, right.


    Ellie: The third way that I want to talk about the Bible just super quickly is just when it was written. And so the oldest parts of the Bible, like the oldest songs that are in the Bible were or possibly as old as like 1000 BCE, the song of Deborah, the song of the sea. And scholars of ancient Hebrews say that they are to the Hebrew of the rest of the Torah, like the Canterbury Tales are to us. You know, they sound ancient. And I just think that's cool. A lot of the rest of the Torah gets written before the Babylonian exile. Likely several different voices are writing it. Then after the Babylonian exile, in this time period that we're talking about in this episode, the second temple period, a lot more of the Bible gets written. And that's very clear because those books reference events or they reference people who lived during this time period. So, you know, it's clear that they couldn't have been written earlier than this. And what is true is that certainly by 70 CE, by

    Jerusalem, the Bible, it's, it's at that point that the Tanakh is like more or less one thing that it stays.


    So it takes a while for it to kind of consolidate into something for it to become clear what parts

    stay in and what parts don't stay in. The Bible itself references books that are now lost to us. But roughly by 70 CE, the Tanakh is what it is, and the books that are in it stay in it from then on. And so of course, the Tanakh is the holy book of Judaism. And so this that brings me to, you know, at least summarizes a world religion. And so right now we're going to talk about Judaism.


    Judaism

    In Judaism, in the beginning, an eternal and indivisible God who exists outside of time and space

    creates the heavens and the earth, and that God is usually referred to as Yahweh.And so all of the heavens and the earth exist because of God rather than independently of God. And then God makes humans in his own image, and creation is good. You know, that's very common. Many religions view creation as a corruption from the purity of, you know, the heavens or whatever. And and the creation in Judaism is good. Judaism believes that people are fragile like dust, but also divine because they're made from God. And so we're of the earth and of the divine. God reveals himself to the Jewish people through his actions and words. So they believe in revelation and that God is involved with his people. And so a big tenant of Judaism is an origin story. And this is the story of the covenant or the agreement that God makes with a man named Abraham. Abraham is from the Mesopotamian city of ER, and Yahweh comes to him, and he says count the stars if you are able. As countless as the stars, so shall your descendants be. This is surprising news to Abraham, who has no children. Yeah, and years go by and he still doesn't have children. And so eventually his wife sends her servants to Abraham and they have a baby instead.

    And that baby's name is Ishmael. And then lo and behold, a few years later, his wife does have a baby and his name is Isaac. So there's two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael is older and Isaac is younger, but the son of the wife. And so this, you know, reverberates throughout history. So stay tuned.


    Charlie: Yeah, remember Ishmael and Isaac for sure. 


    Ellie: Yeah. So, you know, God has this covenant, he has this agreement. He says, you know, if you follow the path of God, you can have a land and I will show you how to get there. And so this promised land is interpreted very differently by different people throughout history. Sometimes it's literally like a piece of land, and then frequently it's metaphorically understood to mean a paradise. The men are circumcised as a physical sign of this covenant with God. And so of course, you know, it's a tall order to follow the path of God. How do we know what the path of God is? So in the Bible there are 613 commandments, but ten of them are the most important. In these 613 commandments, there's plenty of things like, you know, what types of cloth your clothing should be made from or what types of rocks you should carry in your pocket, you know, but the the 10 that are the most important are like, don't kill people and you know, don't steal and don't believe in other gods besides me. You know, they're very, you know, they're about like huge, important, very like concrete basic things, not like your food or whatever. But in fact, there are 613, you know, laws and we as people sin, which literally means that we miss the mark and we don't necessarily do as God has told us to do. And then the last thing I want to say about Judaism is the Jewish people are waiting for a Messiah. And so Messiah means anointed one. And to be anointed, you know, the kings of a place are anointed. So to be an anointed one means like one prepared to rule. Throughout the Tanakh, there are many prophecies about who the Messiah will be and what they will do. And so he will be a male descendant of David, who's a very important biblical patriarch. And the Messiah will rebuild the temple. And so this will be the third temple period at this point. And the Messiah will bring justice to all nations. And so there will be a time of peace. It will be called the Messianic Age. And, you know, again, throughout the Tanakh, there are many prophets anticipating this time and the arrival of this Messiah. And as we've said when we've talked about many religions and, you know, already we said when we talked about Judaism like this, none of this applies to what any given person thinks. And many, many people think that the arrival of the messianic time is a metaphor. You know, they're not waiting for a specific person, or maybe it will be several people, or maybe it will just be a time. So again, you know, these things are like, in broad terms, you know, waiting for a Messiah. But is it an individual person that's not, you know, agreed upon? And that's Judaism and an inadequate nutshell.


    Charlie: Sounds good.


    Voiceover: Abrahamic religions

    One key term to talk about here before we move on is that of an Abrahamic religion. The three major Abrahamic religions are called Abrahamic in reference to the story Ellie just mentioned. Muslims, Jews, and Christians believe themselves to be the spiritual descendants of Abraham, Muslims through the line of Ishmael, and Christians and Jews through the line of Isaac. They believe themselves to be his predicted descendants, as numerous as the stars.


    Charlie: So, wrapping up the Israelites for now, what else is happening between 480 and 300 BCE?


    Nok Culture

    So now we are going to go to North Central Nigeria and we're going to talk about the Nok culture. OK, sweet. So the Nok culture is one of the early major complex civilizations in West Africa. We're in North Central Nigeria all the way into southern Niger and eastern Benin. And the height of the NA culture is between 500 BCE and 200 CE. 200 CE, 


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah.


    Charlie: So it's long. 


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah. And of course, like all these, you know, the boundaries are arbitrary. You know, this is just when we say the height is, but probably they were stretching well beforehand. But for sure, at least during the timeline of this episode, for sure. 


    Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.


    Ellie: And so if you'll remember back in Episode 1 when we talked about that metaphor of like how how history is like a movie and we all we have is still photographs. The not culture is like the epitome of that metaphor in that almost everything we know about them, we know about them from one specific artifact that we find spread out, and so that is their terracotta.


    Charlie: Like the clay?


    Ellie: The clay, Exactly, exactly. And so they make these very iconic statues, which I'll link you to on the website and I imagine that you'll recognize. And they're the first widespread major statuary in Africa South of the Sahara Desert that we've found. So we'll circle back to the NOC terracotta statuary specifically in a minute. But first, I just want to talk quickly about what we can learn about the NOC people from other types of archaeology, like the little bits we have from other types of archaeology, their general package.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: So as we know, they're in the part of the world that has advanced iron smelting very early. So they're one of these groups that jumped from stone to iron with no Bronze Age between them. And so we have farming tools and weapons that are iron from the kok people. So we have farming tools. You know, they were agriculturalists.


    Charlie: Right, right.


    Ellie: And they grew cereals like Pearl Millet and amaranth. They grew African eggplant and okra and cow peas. We have honey in some of their pots and also sheep, goats, cattle. So, you know, big time agriculturalists. We have hardly any evidence of their actual buildings because they've just eroded over time. But we can tell that they lived in circular houses with thatched domed roofs and that those houses were clustered into compounds. So maybe those were family groups, You know, we don't know.


    Charlie: OK, not gigantic cities.


    Ellie: Yeah, as far as we can see, not gigantic cities, but we'll sort of get back to the idea of like centralized governments and when we talk about the statues in one second.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: We certainly do have evidence of robust trade and things like that. You know, we have shells way, way inland, etcetera. You know, things far from their ecosystems. Archaeologically, we don't have much information about their government or their religious practices, except for guesses that we can make from their terracotta statuary themselves. You know, we don't have writing, for example. We don't have, like, pages of documents about who owed taxes to who, you know. And so let's talk about the terracotta artifacts and what we can learn from them.


    So they're not made on a wheel. They're not, you know, pottery made on a wheel. They're made by molding and carving. The actual clay itself is made with very high concentrations of quartz and mica, which have a very high melting point.


    Charlie: OK, 


    Ellie: So their kilns are incredibly hot and sophisticated. They're built into the ground with a fire at the bottom, and they burn at 1000°C. They would reduce the oxygen inside them, which would make the clay red.


    Charlie: Oh.


    Ellie: So when you think of that like iconic terracotta color, they were like cultivating it purposely.

    Yeah. And so most iconic are these statues of people. There are also a lot of animals, snakes, birds, monkeys, etcetera. But the people I feel like are what you would recognize if you know if you looked on the our website at the pictures of them. And they have these long cylindrical heads, and they're frequently sitting in a posture with their knees up and their chin resting on their knees. Looking out, 


    Charlie: right, I think I can picture that, yeah.


    Ellie: Yeah. And the Nok statuary had punctured eyes, nostrils, their mouth, their ears, which both I think was an artistic choice. Like it just looked realistic to have those be an actual puncture. But also it allowed all the water vapors and other gases that were building up inside the hollow chamber of the statue to exit it during the firing process without cracking the statue.


    Charlie: Sure. Wow.


    Ellie: What can we learn about the actual people, like the actual knock people from looking at these Statues? And so there's a few things we can learn. 1 is just sort of basically about cultural norms. You know, we can look at the clothing that these statues are wearing and we can look at their

    intricate hairstyles or the jewelry that they're wearing, etcetera, and get like a glimpse at probably what were actually social practices. You know, based on that many of these statues have different types of ornamentation and some have elaborate body modifications or like tattooing or scarification. And again, that, you know, offers us a glimpse into. 


    Charlie: The reality of the day-to-day, yeah. 


    Ellie: Yeah, social status practices, you know, with the different types of, you know, ornamentation or maybe ritualized rites of passage with the tattooing and scarification. We can maybe learn a little bit about their social structures because interestingly, these statues are found across a space that is 78,000 square kilometers. Like it's huge and all of the clay seems to come from the same source.


    Charlie: Whoa. OK, Yeah, that's crazy.


    Ellie: Yeah, 


    Charlie: it's all from the same source.


    Ellie: Yeah, it's all from the same place. It's not like everybody just harvests clay from their own garden or something. It's not like that. It's all coming from one place. And so our best guess is that that's evidence for a centralized government or at least a central marketplace of some sort. Just in general, the concept that there is consistency in a cultural practice like that over such a large space is potentially just, you know, that's just evidence of a centralized government usually in the world. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why there would be so much consistency. Looking at the statues, we also have things like a statue of naked prisoners who are like tied with ropes around their necks and wrists. And that's, you know, just likely evidence of slavery, which, you know, is like couldn't be more standard throughout the world, but just in terms of like, the things that we can learn by looking at these statues, you know?


    Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.


    Ellie And then there's just the idea that the statues are so complex and so stylistically uniform, you

    know, both at the same time. And there's so many of them, and they stay the same for hundreds of years. They don't evolve constantly. And that is likely an argument for a specialized class of artisans. There's just a group of people whose job it is to make these statues rather than just, we all like statues. And every village has their own people with their own ideas about how to do it. You know, like that there's probably just a group of people and that this is their job. 


    Charlie: Yeah, 'cause otherwise you'd see massive variations over space over time.


    Ellie: Exactly.


    Charlie: Yeah, material and technique, right?


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. And so it just, you know, gives us insight into some amount of class structure. And the last thing that we can possibly learn a tiny bit about is their like, belief systems. And that's in the way that we frequently find these statues purposely broken and buried.


    Charlie: How do we know they're like broken on purpose?


    Ellie: I know I and the answer to that is that archaeologists can tell that kind of thing. 


    Charlie:  fair enough, 


    Ellie: you know, not very satisfied.

    But I think you can see what a statue.


    Has done perfect sense, yeah.

    Rather than, you know, and then especially when you have so many of them, yeah, you know, then it's


    just like the evidence just builds up.


    Charlie: Yeah.


    Ellie: And so it doesn't tell us much about belief systems, but there's speculation about these

    representing the dead. Or maybe it has to do with, like, beliefs in what can be repaired and what can't be repaired. Or, you know, I mean, we don't really know, but it does seem as though there's a ritualized practice of breaking statues and burying them.


    Charlie: Interesting you said ritualistically broken.


    Ellie: I know there's so much rich ritual rich, so much just ritualistic. Lots of ritual.


    Charlie: I feel like this is almost like a classic vibe at this point, where the less we know about a given culture or group, the more ritual we make out of it.


    Ellie: Well, I know, I know. But then when you have like tattoos and scarification or like the statues are broken the same way, it's like we just don't have a different word than ritual.


    Charlie: Totally right.


    Ellie: We don't know what we mean, but we mean happened regularly and was probably important you.

    Know for a reason, 


    Charlie: Yeah, right. Right.


    Ellie: The Nok culture seems to have declined between about 200 and 500 CE. And all the usual culprits are potential suspects like climate change or, you know, human disruption to the ecosystem. And it's possible that deforestation in order to make the charcoal to use to fire up these kilns. Yeah, exactly. Might have been a variable. But we don't seem to have evidence that there was like a major invade, violent invasion of another group or something like that. Like we don't, we don't at least see that in an archaeological record. But either way, we just have another example of this complex, long lasting, impactful culture that sort of disappears and we don't know why.


    Charlie: I'm starting to get pretty sick of that ending to these stories.


    Voiceover: Nile/Niger 

    In this podcast, there's not usually time to talk about how historians know the things that they know. But there's an interesting phrase that comes up when talking about the knock. It's attributed to the archaeologist George Murdoch. He says that for every ton of earth moved by archaeologists on the Nile, a teaspoon is moved on the Niger. In other words, Murdoch is saying that for a variety of reasons, way more archaeological research is done in Egypt than in Nigeria. Of course, without writing, we just will never have the granular day-to-day detail of the knock that we have from ancient Egypt. Still, Ellie and I are regularly surprised by how extreme this gap is, by how much writing there is about certain groups while it's difficult to find even 1 comprehensive book about many other groups that were living at the exact same time.



    Adena and Hopewell


    Charlie: So far in Episode 7, we've covered the Israelites and the Nok culture in Nigeria. What else is going on between 480 and 300 BCE? 


    Ellie: So we're going to go to what's now North America and we're going to talk about the woodland period and specifically the Adena and Hopewell cultures.


    Charlie: OK, cool.


    Ellie: The place that we're talking about is sort of on the eastern half of what's now the United States, all along the Ohio River. So if you are familiar with the geography of the United States, we're in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Southern Indiana, you know, East Central US.


    Charlie: OK, got it.


    Ellie: And so all through that entire region, and in fact all through the entire eastern third of the

    United States are 10s of thousands of mounds of earthen mounds and then some stone mounds.

    And no people, you know, no culture made more of these mounds than the Adina and Hopewell.

    The first thing I want to say about the Adena and Hopewell people is that we don't have writing from

    either one of them. So they very certainly weren't saying I'm an Adena person or I'm a Hopewell person because that was not what they called themselves. And unfortunately, yeah, we don't know what they did call themselves. I mean, this is true about so many of the peoples that we've talked about, including the NOK, you know, 5 minutes ago. But I would say that the dates given for when the Woodland period is, or when the Adina period is, or when the Hopewell period is varied so widely from source to source, like just given with authority. You know, sometimes people would say, oh, the Adina they, they began in 1000 BCE, and sometimes they would say 100 BCE.


    Charlie: Yeah, that seems notably different.


    Ellie: So different, so different. And then where the boundaries are between the Hopewell and the Edina, you know it, it's so vague. And so the only thing I'll say is that the outlines for the woodland period are between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE, so 3000 to 1000 years ago. And then within that woodland period, the Adena culture comes first and then it morphs into the Hopewell culture. 


    Charlie: OK, 


    Ellie: but exact boundaries, I mean, man, they vary from source to source. So in terms of what we do know, you know, without writing, but from archaeology and everything else, the Ohio River runs through a variety of ecosystems. So there's a huge, there's not a ton of flat ground and instead there's all kinds of different ecosystems. So they're just widely adapted to many different ecosystems. And the river is this crucial sort of Hwy. running through at all. And so of course physical goods are traded up and down and all along the Ohio River and its  tributaries, but also, you know, they, it creates this intricate web of cultural exchange and idea exchange, etcetera. So throughout this whole time period and throughout this geographical region, there was many different ways in which people set their lives up. Many of them practice seasonal living, which again means you, you live in sort of semi permanent places for a while. But then maybe there's a different season in which and, and it behooves you in that season to like follow a herd or go to where the fish are running or go to where the nut trees are fruiting or whatever. 


    Charlie: Similar to maybe like the Jomon?


    Ellie: Yeah, it's very similar, yeah, to to many groups. And so for the most part, they lived in homes made out of bent saplings that were covered with woven mats of plants or branches. They're also sometimes, especially in the winter, sometimes people would live in caves, which in this mountainous region that was like a resource that, you know, was widespread in this ecosystem. We don't seem to have. There don't seem to be something akin to palaces, Like there don't seem to be places where, like, the wealthy people lived that's different from where other people lived. And we also don't see evidence, You know, we have burials. We can see grave goods and there don't seem to be elaborate graves of children with elaborate grave goods, which is a sign sort of the world over of like hierarchy, you know, sort of rigid hierarchy

    because the child is already wealthy.


    Charlie: The child is, yeah, born into a different class.

    Yeah.


    Charlie: Yeah, You've mentioned that before. Yeah.


    Ellie: Yeah. And so we'll circle back to burials in a minute. But we do have burials of people who appear to be important and they have the same diet as everyone else, which again, seem is like, you know, kind of an important sign about like how sort of social inequality is working within a, a, a people.


    Charlie: Sure.


    Ellie: In terms of diet, there was a lot of hunting, fishing and gathering. You know, they ate a lot of deer, turtle, bear, turkeys, rabbits, raccoons, etcetera. But also a lot of the earliest domesticates in North America were, you know, during this woodland period like among the Adina. And so they grew barley and not weed and sunflowers and squash as well as did a lot of landscape manipulation to make wild indigenous foods that they wanted to grow, grow. So, you know, we've talked about that. That's like so common amongst all hunter gatherers. They, they call it controlled production of indigenous foods. So, you know, then you, you manipulate the landscape such that it grows blackberries and elderberries and walnuts, etcetera.


    Charlie: And that would be through things like maybe terracing or burning or.


    Ellie: All that. Exactly. Exactly. 


    Charlie: So they're doing both. They're cultivating and domesticating.


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah. Which, again, is quite common. You know, as we've said so many times, the rigid distinction between hunter gatherers and farmers is fake news.


    Charlie: Yeah.


    Ellie: And so the last thing I want to talk about is their iconic mounds, which are probably the most defining aspect of their archaeological package. Many of the mounds, especially of the Adina, are cone shaped and then over time in a non exactly linear way but in an ebbing and flowing way they become more intricate and more complex.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: And so most of the mounds, you know, the mounds of the Hopewell and the Adina have burials inside them. Sometimes they have a single person buried inside of them, sometimes they have several people buried inside of them. And frequently the people are buried with elaborate grave goods. And you know, many of the mounds, especially in the early Edina are the are very simple cone shaped

    Structures. But especially as we go through time, they become these elaborate structures that would have

    required massive amounts of cooperative labor. And So what what does that tell us about their purpose?

    I mean, we again, like, we don't know exactly, but the book that I was reading about them, which is by Susan Woodward and John and Jerry MacDonald, said that it said that maybe like it provided a

    visible and permanent statement of a group's commitment to its own lineage, to any clan or other social entity of which it was part, and to its ancestral claim to the territory it considered to be its own.

    So like. You know 


    Charlie: I love that wait. Will you read that quote again? I love that.


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah.


    OK. So it said they the mounds provided a visible and permanent statement of a group's commitment to its

    own lineage, to any clan or other social entity of which it was part, and to its ancestral claim to the territory it considered to be its own.


    Charlie: Cool.


    Ellie: You know, they were very clear that they weren't saying anything about like the idea of land

    Ownership. It's not like I'm building a mound here, therefore it's mine, but more like the, the mounds that my people build here represent our connection to this land. It's like, you know, this is the land we take care of. This is the land that takes care of us. And other people should know that. You know, it's sort of a diplomatic marker, but also, you know, like a honouring. You know, it's half a boundary, half a church.


    So what's interesting about the grave goods is that especially over time, especially as we get more into the Hopewell and out of the Adina, the grave goods are coming from far away. You know, we have shells and other artifacts from ecosystems that are far, far away from these Mounds. You know, by the time we're at the end of the Hopewell culture, we have stuff from the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico and Yellowstone. You know, the, again, the Ohio River is a highway. So we have blades and arrowheads and pipes, copper jewelry, beads, engraved tablets, arts of all

    Sorts.


    But then as I said, you know, as we get into the Hopewell culture, which some sources would place

    between 500 and 200 BCE, which is exactly, you know, the time period we're talking about in this episode, although some some other sources call that the Aeina. So just make of that what you will please. But either way, roughly in here, some of these earthworks become very geometric shaped mounds. Like it's not like poverty point exactly, but it reminded me of that in the sense that the the mounds almost become a way of like drawing a bigger shape. You know, they're long and outlining something and they become enormous. You know there's a circle mound in which the circumference is 365 meters.


    Charlie: What?


    Yeah, there's a there's an Octagon in Ohio which encloses 50 acres. And the openings of the Octagon, you know, align with the rising and setting points of the moon, 


    Charlie: of course.


    Ellie: Yeah.


    Charlie: of course.


    Ellie: Yeah, that's what's absolutely. I mean, what I, what I just want to say is that these, you know, the geometry of these mounds is wild. You know, they, like people who really know about engineering are just like kind of blown away by how precise they are, you know, over these huge spaces. And they're all aligned with the cycles of the Sun and the moon in all kinds of crazy ways. 


    Voiceover: Hopewell Road

    One more Hopewell earthwork that just boggles the mind is called the Great Hopewell Rd. It's a set of two parallel mound walls that run straight for over 6 miles or 9 kilometers. Over hills and valleys, over streams and swamps. They continue straight. These two mounds seem to mark a wide road or Ave. of some kind that's about 50 meters across. And as wild as 9 kilometers of straight line already is. There's growing evidence that these parallel walls are actually a straight connection between two distant groups of Hopewell mounds, which are 9 D kilometers apart. Either way, 9 or 90  kilometers. The engineering involved in calculating the straight course of the Great Hopewell Rd. is truly remarkable.


    Ellie: Eventually, not in the time period of this episode, but like eventually it's also in this space, like around the Ohio River that we eventually get like serpent shaped mounds and stuff like that.


    Charlie: I was wondering about all that stuff.


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's much later, but but it's it, you know, it seems like the heritage of that must be tied to this time, you know, somehow.


    Charlie: Practice of building these mounds, yeah, surely evolves and changes, yeah.


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. Especially because you got to figure like whoever is living in Ohio in 1000 CE when they're building serpent's mounds is living amongst the Adena and Hopewell's mounds. You know, I mean, they're, they're ancient.


    Charlie: They're ancient.


    Ellie: They're ancient, ancient. They're 1000 years old at that point or or more, which is just, you know, important to remember that it's like, yeah, these are ancient landscapes. You know, forget if they see poverty point which is, you know, 3000 years old by the time.


    Charlie: Right. I was going to ask about that because I'm thinking like, you know, that's not too far from the Ohio. Like surely there were there was some knowledge of poverty point and. Yeah.


    Ellie: The thing is, it's like it. It is far, but not farther than they were all exchanging goods.


    Charlie: That's what I mean, clearly, if you're getting to Yellowstone, yeah.


    Ellie: Exactly right. And so then the last thing I want to say about the Hopewell culture is that we don't have some kind of dire end for them. You know, as we said before, the Adena just sort of morph into what's eventually called the Hopewell. The Hopewell just sort of eventually morph into what we call the Fort Ancient Culture, you know, but there's no there's no catastrophe like we've told so many times and in other places. And again, you know, these these names are given by archaeologists retroactively, you know, they, there's no rigid boundaries anywhere between these these groups of people. And so these mound building cultures of the Adina and Hopewell slowly through incremental change turn into the Fort ancient culture. And that is the culture of this area basically all the way until European contact.



    Classical Age Greece

    So far, we've covered the Israelites, the Nok culture in Nigeria, and the Adina and Hopewell

    cultures in North America. Who is the last group to cover between 480 and 300 BCE?

    So 480 to 336 BCE is the classical period of ancient Greece.


    Charlie: OK, right.


    Ellie: And so we are going to go to Greece and talk about the classical period.


    Charlie: OK, cool.


    Ellie: So the first thing I think we should do is catch up a bit on Greece. So if you'll remember, back in Episode 3, we talked about the Minoans living on Crete and how Crete sort of eventually gets taken over by the Mycenaeans. And then in Episode 4, we talked about the Bronze Age collapse, which was that, you know, disastrous series of events that swept across the entire Mediterranean world.


    Charlie: Right.


    Ellie: The Bronze Age collapse hits Greece hard. You know, maybe as much of 1/3 of the population dies or at least disappears. Maybe some of them moved during that time. So it's like this sort of catastrophe.


    Charlie: OK. 


    Ellie: Then for the next several 100 years until about 800 BCE is what's known as the Greek Dark Age, which, you know, just means that it was probably a good time to be alive and not a time that historians care about for whatever reason during a dark age like that. What's frequently true throughout history is that the time before the catastrophe, the time before the thing like the Bronze Age collapse becomes sort of mythologized. You know we we have like a good old days dream about the time before the disaster, which makes perfect sense.


    Charlie: Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of when you're talking about Confucius and the Spring and Autumn period going to the Warring States period. He's we're looking back at the early Spring and Autumn period as like the good old days and the kings were great and all that.


    Ellie: Yeah, the kings were just etcetera, you know, like I want to learn from them. Yeah, totally. And so in this case, during this Greek Dark Age, they're looking back at this time period of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, and they're telling those stories, and they're telling them over and over again, you know, around their fires for hundreds of years. And the story sort of morph into these things that still have threads of history running through them and are also very mythologized. You know, there's a lot of magic.


    Charlie: King Minos and Odysseus and that sort of thing, OK.


    Ellie: Exactly, exactly 


    Charlie: makes sense.


    Ellie: And so that whole time period of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans becomes known as the Greek Heroic Age.


    Charlie: Of. Course, 


    Ellie: yeah, Time of heroes, right. Like when we had huge palaces and minotaurs lived underneath them, you know, and, and the, the Bronze Age collapse, you know, memories of that sort of coalesce into stories about the Trojan War, you know, and the, the stories of the Trojan War like couldn't be more familiar and they couldn't be more foundational to Greece.


    Charlie: Right, right. This is Homer and the Iliad Odyssey, right?


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah. And so like if you're a king in Greece, later on you can explain how you're related to Achilles.


    Charlie: Sure, you you better be able.


    Ellie: To you better be able to exactly.


    Charlie: I see.


    Ellie: And so, of course, boundaries around ages are a little bit, you know, hard to put any kind of pinin. But as we sort of exit this Greek Dark Age, city states begin to coalesce and grow all throughout this Greek land.


    Charlie: OK, 


    Ellie: Eventually they get an alphabet from the Phoenicians. They add vowels to it. And that alphabet is more or less the alphabet that, you know, we are using to write our script for this podcast still to this day, you know, in variation. And then, you know, we get this kind of blossoming in writing because of that alphabet. If you know, again, alphabets make a much broader section of the population literate suddenly.

    So, you know, we get things like the Ilia and the Odyssey get written in the seven hundreds. We start to get, you know, huge blossomings and like math and philosophy and music, etcetera. The Greeks begin to sail all around the Mediterranean and the other, you know, small seas that are in the area. And they basically are like colonizing right around the the beaches, you know, right around the rim of these bodies of water. Plato describes the Greeks as living like ants or frogs around a pond.


    Yeah. So they're like in, you know, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Albania, Libya, you know, they have colonies eventually by the five hundreds from Spain, you know, to

    Ukraine. Like it's a big, big thing, but just again, right around the edges. So what's interesting about that is we've said that the, you know, the Greeks have done this. So one question is like, who are the Greeks?

    And that is a classic example of it depending on the eye of the beholder very dramatically. And so these are city states, and all they do is war with each other, just like all they do is try

    to take each other out. And so in so many ways, all that really makes them all the same is that they all speak Greek, they all worship the same gods.They sort of have a cultural package in common.

    But in terms of like, do they have a national state identity? Like, no. And not only that, but they're each other's like, biggest adverse 


    Charlie: mortal enemies.


    Ellie: Yeah.

    Yeah. Frequently.And so again, they also sometimes come together and, you know, Sparta and Athens fight off the Persians like we talked about in Episode 6. But the rest of the time, all Sparta and Athens do is try to kill each other, you know?


    Charlie: Got it. It's a bit like reminding me a bit of like when you were talking about Mesopotamia and the city states of summer and a cod and things like that. They're we call them all Mesopotamia, but all they do is fight with each other.


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so there are a few things that give the Greek sort of a cultural identity, and those are things like the Olympics. And so the Olympics are like an opportunity for them all to, like, fight with each other without actually killing each other, you know, to just compete with each other. And they, you know, again, speak the same language, worship the same gods. And then they have interesting things in their kind of cultural package in common. Like many, many of these city states are democracies. And so, you know, we've had like 800 conversations about like, anytime you see the word first, like, be suspicious, you know, anytime somebody says this is the first. But since this is the first time they called it democracy, which is still what we call it, Greece certainly gets the credit. And so were they really the first big group to ever, like, give the people a right to help make the decisions? I have no idea. But in the sense of how how it was organized, you know, Athens gets gets sort of credit so.


    Charlie: Totally. Also, like, obviously modern criticism is like it wasn't that a democracy in any way shape.


    Ellie: I mean, but like what is?


    Charlie: But it was more it what is is fair, and it was more than other things.


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah. So exactly what it meant was that the free men could help make decisions, which is still way more people than can help make the decisions in almost any other place. So, you know, like Gold Star for them, you know, but nevertheless, like, but it just is important to remember that when we're talking about democracy, slavery is also a huge part of the Greek economy. And that's common, you know, that sort of standard the world over. Unfortunately, it's not unusual about the Greeks at all. But it just is important to remember when we're talking about the origins of democracy that, you know, slavery couldn't be a bigger part of this economy.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: And so as we talked about in Episode 6, Persia invades and is sort of epically and surprisingly fought off in 480 HBCE. And this kind of begins this time that's called the classical age. And this time is still mostly marked by all these city states warring with each other, and Athens and Sparta especially warring with each other and both sort of making the argument we need to unite against the big, bad Persian. So everybody should unite under me. And I'll tell you all what to do and keep you safe, you know, pay a lot of tribute to me. And then our army will be big, you know, that kind of thing. And so at various points in these wars, various Greek city states, like, side with Persia, you know, they are like Persia, come help us take out this other group, you know, So Greek identity is very much based on, like, Persia as the bad guy. But in fact, at any given moment, they're totally working with Persia, which, again, is like a pretty normal story, like wherever you are.


    Charlie: Yeah.


    Voiceover: Greeks

    This is a moment of contrast because unlike Poverty Point or the Bantu expansion or the Assyrians 

    most people, myself included, have a lot of knowledge about the Greeks bouncing around in their heads. I thought it might be helpful to play some of those things into their World History 24 context and talk about that influence for a minute. It's during the years roughly spanning episode 6 and this episode 7 that the Parthenon is built in Athens. The militarism of Sparta is at its height. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are philosophizing. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Aeschylus are writing literature. Not to mention Homer and Sappho just a few 100 years earlier. Kleistenes lays out the principles of democracy. Herodotus, AKA the father of History, writes his unreliable account of the Greco Persian Wars. Pythagoras and Euclid map out geometry and Archimedes shouts Eureka as the list goes on and on. 


    You can't deny the Greeks did some cool stuff, but this doesn't fully explain their outsized influence over the world today, especially the English speaking world. After all, lots of these civilizations did cool stuff. But think about it. You can run a marathon, have an Oedipus complex, take the Hippocratic Oath, build your home with Doric columns or Spartan simplicity. You can look up at the night sky and see Cassiopeia or Orion, or look inside your body and find an Achilles tendon and a Hippocampus, or walk downtown and government buildings and prestigious universities Look Greek. It would be a Heraclean effort to name all the Percy Jacksons, Hades towns, Songs of Achilles, and three hundreds that dominate movie theaters, stages, and bestsellers lists. It's not simple. But this linguistic and academic influence comes to you via a long chain of empires that we'll talk about, each preserving and revitalizing the Greek legacy in different ways. America, the British, the Caliphates, the Romans, the Seleucid, and the Ptolemaic empires. But this chain certainly begins with a conquest story, the one Elie's about to tell the story of Alexander the Great.



    Ellie: So we said a few minutes back that this period, this Greek classical age, ended in 323 BCE. So what happened in 323 BCE that sort of brought this age to a close? And the answer to that is the death of Alexander the Great and the cracking of the massive empire that he created.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: So at the time of Alexander the Great's death, Greece, such as it exists. You know, the Greek Empire is as giant and as influential as it ever is. So that's the story that we're going to tell right now.


    Charlie: Got it.


    Ellie: The story of Alexander the Great very, very much highlights the question of who is a Greek.

    And it very much highlights the question of do the people who are alive at the time get to decide who a Greek is, or do sort of we, looking back, get to decide who a Greek is? So, you know, keep that in mind as we talk and it will make sense. So there is a Kingdom called Macedon, and that Kingdom is in the land that's now occupied by the modern countries of northern Greece and a little bit of the Republic of North Macedonia and a little bit of Bulgaria. 


    Charlie: OK, 


    Ellie: So this Kingdom of Macedon is ruled by a man named Philip the Second from the years of 359 to 336 BCE.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: So this King, Philip the Second takes over an enormous empire, including most of what, you know, is sort of more traditionally considered Greece at the time. And the Greek city states do not take this threat seriously until it's way too late. And part of that is because they're sort of dismissing him as like this upstart king from, like, nowhere important. And so Philip the Second very much views himself as Greece. You know, Macedon, it competes in the Olympics, for example. And again, the fact that he wants to conquer them in no way makes him not Greek. All the Greek city states do is conquer each other. You know what I mean? That's just standard. But it's just worth knowing that like Sparta, Athens, Thebes, you know, these city states that are very like, traditionally like Greece, you know, do not consider him Greek. In fact, Demosities, who's this brilliant orator from Athens? You know, he's a very famous Athenian. This is his quote. He has nothing to do with the Helene's, which is like the word for Greeks. He's not even a barbarian from a place that one could speak well of, but a pestilence of a Macedonian from a place that used not to be able to provide even a slave worth buying.


    Charlie: I feel like that that quote highlights both the fact that Greece was obsessed with slavery and howGreece is such a nebulous historical idea.


    Ellie: And that they’re snobs. Yeah, exactly. So regardless of whether or not they view him as a pestilence of a Macedonian, he takes over Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, the Republic of North Macedonia, and a huge amount of Turkey.


    Charlie: OK.


    Ellie: And then he's murdered and he leaves this empire to his son, who is, you guessed it, Alexander the

    Great.


    Charlie: Alex.


    Ellie: So this young person, Alexander, grew up being tutored by Aristotle and largely being left to defend

    the home front while his father was out conquering an empire. And so then, you know, he, he gets a little older and his dad dies and his dad is murdered very Publicly. And who murdered him? Who knows?

    It doesn't seem out of the question that it was like Alexander's mom or him or whatever. But either way, Alexander's like, how dare someone murder my father? I bet it was you or you or you or you who happened to be all his competitors, and he has them all executed. and then suddenly Alexander is like the ruler of this massive, massive empire.


    Charlie: Totally.


    Ellie: And so, of course, one of the things that makes Macedonia not Greek in the Greeks eyes is that they have inherited kingship at all. You know, Alexander just gets this Kingdom. It's not like there's going to be an election or something. And the Greeks very much disapprove of this. But nevertheless, he's unfazed by that. And it's like, I'm going to go take over the whole world, especially Persia.  They took us over or they tried to take us over 150 years ago, but I'm mad about it still. We're going to go get them. So he just starts like this huge campaign and I mean, this is like one of the most famous like conquering journeys ever. And you know, like the world history and everybody from like Napoleon on is like obsessed with Alexander the Great views him as an example. He very famously never lost a battle.


    Charlie: Right.


    Ellie: I've no idea if that's true, but probably not.


    Charlie: Yeah, probably not.


    Ellie: But in terms of world history 24, all we need to know is that Alexander spends his life on a series

    of campaigns conquering what he views as the known world, creating this massive Greek empire and spreading the Greek language all through it. You know, spreading these ideas that have arisen during this classical age, all this sort of Greek culture through his massive new empire.


    Charlie: Right.


    Ellie: And so we've said so many times in this podcast, like the history of the intersection of Afro

    Eurasia is just a story of 1 empire swallowing the previous empire and expanding and expanding it. You know, like all the way back to episode 2 with like summer and then the Acadian Empire is bigger than it, you know, and then it's.


    Like. Egypt, Assyrians, Babylon, Persia. You know, and like each one, you know, overlays the last one and makes it bigger, you know? And so Alexander the Great's empire is the latest in this. And his empire stretches all the way to India. You know, he sort of famously fights battles, like against elephants. And it's all very, like, epic and bloody and whatever, you know? And so he's, yeah, he spreads all through that whole massive region, renaming every other city, Alexandria, you know, which several of them still are to this day, Alexandria. And he's mostly viewed as a conqueror, although also sometimes he's viewed as a Liberator. Cause of course many of those people are already being subjugated by someone else. So they're kind of like happy to throw off the Persians and instead be ruled by the Greeks for a minute or whatever. And then having conquered that entire entire thing, he dies almost immediately, like within the year.


    Charlie: Whoa. So only so he he conquers all that space, and then he dies. And then he dies.


    Ellie: Yeah, he dies saying whoever's the strongest, you know, can have the Kingdom, which, you know.

    Like 


    Charlie: probably doesn't go so well.


    Ellie: Yeah, it's. Yeah, like a disaster to say that to, you know, like all your second in commands, you know, so instead of this cohesion, the Empire immediately fractures just instantly.


    Charlie: Interesting, so that whole space that he like unified is now split again into smaller empires.


    Ellie: Exactly, exactly. And this begins this whole time which is called the Hellenistic period, meaning the Greek ish Period. You know many of these empires are now ruled by generals of Alexander the Great's. You know, they're very Greek. And so Greek thought, you know, Greek philosophy, Greek art, Greek math, etcetera, is sort of interacting with Jewish intellectuals in the Levant, you know, with the Persians, with the  Egyptians, with Buddhist and Vedic intellectuals in India, you know, etcetera. It's this very rich period of cultural exchange and idea generation.


    Charlie: This Hellenistic period.


    Ellie: This Hellenistic period. Exactly. Exactly. And so Alexander the Great's conquest of mainland Greece and his subsequent death does in fact end the Greek classical age, like in actual Greece. And, you know, sort of ironically, they're like partying in the streets because this foreign invader has died who obviously has nothing to do with them.


    Charlie: Right the pestilence of the pestilence.


    Ellie: Of the Pestodium. Exactly, exactly. And I say ironic because of course, like in fact, in so many ways, the reason that they're that all those ideas and all that art and etcetera that was generated during the classical age exists and remains so important is like because he spread it all the way through this gigantic Hellenistic world.


    Charlie: Mm, hmm. I see. OK.


    Ellie: And so there's also one other important reason that the accomplishments of the classical age of Greece are so widely remembered. And that is because sort of throughout this whole episode in the background, Rome is growing and Rome eventually becomes sort of obsessed with the Greeks, with Greek identity, with Greek culture. They view them as the height of sophistication. They want to tie their own origin story to Greece to sort of give themselves, like, sophistication and, you know, intellectual and cultural clout. And so we'll talk about that in the next episode. But just know that sort of as Greece is falling, Rome is in the background. And Rome really sort of preserves a lot of like what we think of, you know, as kind of our

    collective memory of Greece.


    Charlie: Interesting. OK, well, that seems like a pretty good place to leave the episode. I suppose we'll pick up right there in Episode 8.


    Ellie: Absolutely, for sure.


    Outro

    Charlie: And with that we come to the end of our 7th call, which we covered the years from 480 to 300 BCE. We covered the Israelites, the Knock, the Adena and Hopewell, and the beginning and end of the

    classical period of ancient Greece. In our next episode, we'll cover the years from 300 to 100 BCE.

    From India, Ashoka the Great spreads a local religion across Asia, making Buddhism a world religion. The shortest Chinese dynasty, the Qin, unites the Warring States and starts connecting the northern fortifications into a wall you may have heard of. Meanwhile, a small Kingdom in the Italian hills starts to expand and win a lot of wars. We'll end the episode with another famous campaign as Hannibal sets out from Carthage, bringing his army and war elephants across Spain and over the Alps on an epic quest to destroy Rome 



    Charlie: Bye Ellie


    Ellie: Bye Charlie. 


    Charlie: 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.

Alyssa Alarcon Santo https://www.alyssasantodesign.com
Previous

Hour 6 | 575 - 480 BCE
Next

Hour 8 | 300 - 100 BCE