| Season 1 - Before The Egyptians Sumer - Show #6  About ten thousand years ago, the people of Mesopotamia began the agricultural revolution.
Instead of hunting and gathering their food, they domesticated plants and
animals - beginning with sheep. They lived in mud-brick and reed
houses, grouped in villages where they tended their crops. They built granaries to store
and protect their grain, and developed a token system to record commercial
transactions and manage accounts. The Sumerians - from ancient Mesopotamia - left behind extensive writings on more than one hundred thousand clay tablets that described their thoughts and opinions regarding politics, economics, law, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and history, to name only a few areas of their wide-ranging expertise. On roughly 5,000 of those tablets they detail their inexplicable knowledge about how our solar system gained its final shape, how life came to be on Earth, and how humanity itself came to be here. We also know from ancient texts that the earliest beers are Sumerian. Beer appears to have been an important part of Sumerian culture; the word "beer" appears in many contexts relating to religion, medicine and myth. The Code of Hammurabi (1800 BC) details stiff penalties for owners of ancient "brewpubs" who overcharge customers or fail to inform authorities of criminals in their bar. |