21: The Late Uruk expansion in the north, 3500-3200 BCE (Enmerkar & the lord of Aratta, part 2)

Guest: Kelten

First: the lord of Aratta devises a series of challenges to demonstrate his superiority over our hero Enmerkar, the august king of Unug, who casually invents written language two-thirds of the way through the story. Can he outsmart his nemesis in the mountains? Or, at the very least, ignore his specifications and send him something else entirely?

Then, we continue our mini-series on the Uruk expansion, focusing on the Late Uruk (3400s-3200s BCE). In addition to Tell Brak, we tour the Habuba Kabira metro area on the middle Euphrates, an entire urban area built from scratch in the image of a Sumerian town. 

Then: the Uruk colonial network collapses! Was it climate change? Environmental degradation? The declining rate of profit? Foreign invasion? Internal political instability? All of the above? Let's find out!

Finally, we finish up the story of Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta. Inanna blesses the two kingdoms and, as you should've guessed by now, the gods invent new types of manual labor for humans to perform for them.

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Works cited