The entire story of ancient Mesopotamia, told slowly and quietly: the first cities, the first writing, the first laws, and the people who left their names in wet clay.

It begins with a man called Nanni, who four thousand years ago wrote a complaint about a copper delivery - the oldest complaint letter we have from anywhere in the world. It ends with the last person alive who could read cuneiform, and the men who worked out how to read it again seventeen centuries later.

Every image in this video is a photograph of a real object or place, and its source is named on screen when it appears. Nothing here is AI-generated. The opening view of the ziggurat of Ur is our own 3D reconstruction.

Nothing to remember. Nothing to keep up with.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Nanni's complaint - a cold open
1:46 Between the Rivers
3:57 The First City
6:13 The Tablet House
8:35 Bread and Beer
11:36 The Kings of Ur
14:07 The First Empire, and the First Author
16:58 The King Who Ran
19:56 The Letters of Mari
22:31 The Copper Merchant
25:16 Hammurabi's Judgements
28:43 The Women of Sippar
31:13 Reading the Sky
33:57 The Palace at Nimrud
36:51 The Siege of Lachish
39:43 The Epic
43:02 The King Who Could Read
45:38 Babylon's Last Kings
48:29 The Last Tablet, and the Key

SOURCES
Every fact is drawn from museum collections and published scholarship - the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Penn Museum, Britannica, and translated primary texts including ETCSL (Oxford). The full source list, and the credit for every image, is in the pinned comment.

IMAGE CREDITS
Images are used under free licences: Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access (CC0), public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Full list in the pinned comment.

Narration only. No music.