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S03E02: Welcome to Humanities I: Stored Sunlight: Surplus, Writing, and the Rise of Civilization
Humanities I (213): Week 1
EPISODE TITLE
Stored Sunlight: Surplus, Writing, and the Rise of Civilization
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows and seven thin ones, and by the end of the story the crown owns the entire country. This episode uses Joseph's granary to open up the two things that make civilization possible: a surplus of food, and writing. What a grain of wheat actually is, why every civilization on earth was built on one of four crops, what the surplus buys and what it costs, and why 95 percent of the quarter million clay tablets from Mesopotamia are receipts rather…
The skinny
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