Transcription
I want to show you something. Look at this chart. It's so cool. It shows the six cradles of civilization. Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, themes, the Carol Soup. But are they all legit? Not really. So today, we're going to rank them from S tier to D tier. And along the way, we'll travel back in time to see how cool these civilizations were, what makes them special, and also to give you a better sense of human history and civilization. Plus, I think some of the rankings will surprise you. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Ree and welcome to How Everything Evolved, where we do research deep dives to answer history's juiciest questions. Let's dive in.
Okay, so we're going to be comparing these six cradles of civilization and we're going to kind of rank them based off of two main criteria. The first is how important that civilization was at the time. And so something like Egypt, how legit was it? Did it have writing? Did it have hierarchy? Did it use metal? And also how early was it? Was it before the other civilizations? So that's one piece is how legit it was in the past. And the other piece is how important it was over time. And so you say, okay, Egypt, how important was it a 100 years later, a thousand years later, 2,000 years later. And so we'll see whether that civilization was legit or if it was just a little blip in time that didn't really matter. And I'm mostly going to go in reverse tier order. And so you know what that means? We're going to have to start in the Americas with these civilizations that are not that legit. No offense.
Okay, so I printed out this uh tier ranking, which I love doing by the way, printing out internet things that usually only exist on the internet, but are now on like big paper. And we're going to start with themes, and I also printed out all these, which is kind of fun. The Mech. Where are we going to place the Mech? They're a D tier civilization. I'm sorry. The first thing that makes them D tier is that they started so late, like around 1,000 B.C.E., which is like 2,000 years later than Egypt. So, here's a map of the Mech civilization around 600 B.C.
And you can see their heartland here in southern Mexico. Their civilization was a pretty classic one built near rivers. Uh so you can do all the farming. And the Omex are famous for their huge heads. Look at this thing. It's amazing. Small guy, big head, you know, uh kind of like me. But [laughter] it's a really cool um thing that they made these massive heads. I think there's like dozens of them in the Mech Heartland. And when they were farming, remember that this is in the Americas, so they have worse domesticated plants and animals. They weren't farming grains as much. They were farming. They had some maze. They had some squash and they had some beans. And this is called three sisters farming and it's what most of like Meso America did before colonization. The other issue with the ch besides how late they started is how small of a civilization it was. And so you can look at this by population. You can see oh here's like China. There are millions of people in the Chinese civilization but here's and the carol soup. They got like 10,000 people 100,000 people. Or you can look at the population in cities. You see, okay, here's Carol soup and the Mex are in yellow. They have a few people in cities but not that many. And also the area of their civilization was so small. That map I showed you earlier, it's like almost 20 times smaller than something like China or Indian civilizations. The other issue with the Mech is that they don't even have writing. [laughter] So it's like even though they're 2,000 years after all these other things, they still don't have writing. So for these reasons, Mech clearly D tier.
But what about the next one? Carol Soup. They're pretty cool. I can no one's ever heard of them, [laughter] but they are kind of legit. And so I'm going to put them in the C tier here. And here's why. So I think about the Carol Soup civilization. They're also called the Nord Chico civilization um as kind of like a protocan civilization in Peru. And the first thing that makes them more C tier than D tier is they started so much earlier. They started, you know, 30,000 B.C.E. instead of a,000 B.C. And like many of these other civilizations, we found some of these awesome kind of ancient monuments that they've produced. But the craziest part of the Carol Soup is that they're essentially totally different than all the other civilizations. They're built off of like marine fishing rather than eating like grains and cereal. So this graph shows that it estimates the percentage of calories across these different civilizations. And here's Mesopotamia and Egypt and China and the Mex. They're all roughly the same. They eat a bunch of cereals in yellow. But then you look at Carol Soup and they eat almost all fish. And so instead of being a river valley civilization, they're much more of a fishing civilization. And this is similar to the book The Dawn of Everything by David Greyber where he shows that civilizations could kind of emerge before farming in some ways. And he usually shows the kind of Northwest Americas as this, the Pacific Northwest, because they have these awesome, they're able to sit on a huge calorie stream coming towards them with all these whales and all these salmon, things like that. And so carol soup, these kind of protoinkans were very similar. They got all their food from fish and from seafood rather than from grains. But the carol soup pretty much did nothing else cool. They don't even have ceramics. They don't do art. They don't do writing. They don't have bronze. You know, there might be some signs that they have this really cool writing system called a tupu, which definitely showed up much later around 0 B.C.E. So 3,000 years later is when we have the first real signs of this. It's kind of like a wooden strand, kind of like a protoriting system that the Incans and others used to communicate with each other to keep track of items. So, there might be one piece of evidence that shows that the Carol Soup had this, but probably not. Plus, the Carol Soup were even smaller than the Meme. Here's their population, not very big, 10,000,000 people. And here's like their habitable core area, which is really small. But for me, because Carol soup is 2,000 years earlier and has this really cool marine situation, I put them as C tier above the Mex.
Okay, but what about this one? What about the Indis River Valley civilization in the Indian subcontinent? I'm going to place it in B tier. Okay, these are actual legit civilizations now, at least in Eurasia. And the Indis is cool. Here's them. You know, they started really old, you know, 30,000 B.C.E. cuz they were so close to the start of farming in the fertile crescent just across Iran. And the first funny thing about the Indis is that most people, myself included, thought that they were an Indian civilization. But they're not. It's all in Pakistan. And like other civilizations, it's based around a river valley. This one, the Indis River. And the Indis was cool because they were close enough to the Near East to kind of trade with them. And I love this map because it kind of reframes how you see the world where you see it from the Indis. You can imagine trading with Irk. You can imagine trading with the Levant. You can imagine trading with Egypt over there. The main thing that makes the Indis so legit in addition to them being such an early civilization is because of how many people they had. So you look at this population graph from 4,000 B.C. to 10,000 B.C. and you can see and I don't even have Pakistan on here but India and Pakistan there were so so many people in that part of the world and their population was pretty urbanized. Here's a graph that shows the city population in these six cradles of civilization. And this is the amount of population living in cities with more than a thousand people. And you can see this huge chunk here for the Indis. It's like, wow, what a massive civilization at the time. You can also see their decline, by the way. So, the Indis civilization was pretty famous for these cities with all of this amazing kind of water and sewage infrastructure. But beyond that, their cities and their civilization wasn't that legit. So, here's an example of their writing system, which we actually still haven't deciphered, which is really interesting. Historians and archaeologists mostly call this a protoiting system because it only ever had five total characters at once. They would have these five characters and then they'd have like a little picture, but they would never saw longer sentences or anything like that. For something like Egypt, we have 5 million or 10 million words in the corpus of all these Egyptian books of the dead and things like that. But for indis, it's like we have a bunch of these little things that have five characters after another. So probably just a protoriting system. Though still if you can decipher this let me know. The other interesting thing about the indis is that they had a really large civilization in terms of area but when they declined that civilization didn't stay instead they just moved. So what this chart shows is at the peak of the indis river valley civilization here's all these towns and villages and these major cities like Harapa and Mahindadaro but then eventually once the 4.2 2 kiloar event which was kind of like a drought that moved people away from the Indis River Valley and they all kind of moved east into India and then eventually you know thousands of years later this would form new civilizations in India civilizations like the Maroyan empire and so this response to changing climate conditions is actually really different in the Indis River Valley versus in Mesopotamia because in Mesopotamia what people did is when the rivers changed and things like that then the people were like oh man we want our rivers to be here they built canals and that's how like the state formed And so you can think of this from this great book called exit voice and loyalty. Essentially in Mesopotamia they expressed voice kind of like a democracy. They're like we want the states to provide us with canals. Versus in the Indis instead of expressing voice and having like some big Pakistani you know massive civilization emerge. Instead all the people here they just express exit and they're just like okay we're just going to go and leave and kind of migrate to the southeast.
Okay, what about the Yellow River? The Yellow River civilization in China is awesome, but I don't think it's quite A tier. It's B tier. The main reason why, you know, the ancient Chinese yellow river civilization is B tier is because it was so late. Look at it down here. It's the green here. It's like all these other civilizations have been around for 2,000 years. Mesopotamia and Egypt. Egypt had gone through multiple kingdoms. They built all the pyramids. They'd rebuilt the pyramids. They've done all these things. And then 2,000 years later, we start to get like the the Shang dynasty and the Yellow River. And here's a picture of the Yellow River. And the Yellow River is called the Yellow River because it has such good silt. And so the water from it is really really good for farming. Here's a picture that shows that Yellow River Valley. And you know, here's Seian and here's Beijing up here. I actually lived here for like seven months. And yeah, this is a very important river valley that could provide food for tons of people. But the craziest graph here is this one which shows overall population by civilization, not just in cities. And you can see, oh wow, the Indis, they were pretty big. They got to like 4 million people, you know, at their height. But then you look at China here. Yes, they started super late, but once they started to build this core civilization, there were almost like 5 or 10 million people in it. The other legit thing about the Yellow River civilization is that they had real writing, unlike the Endis. And so these are these oracle bones and there were I think 150,000 found or like tons and tons of these found not just like the one in like the Carol soup civilization or whatever. And so many of them were found and this is protoChinese script that is written onto like the shoulders and like the bone scapula of ox. Here's an example of one of these oracle bone sites that they found where there are just thousands of these bones with writing on them in these pits. And then eventually this oracle bone writing, you know, over here on the left probably in the bronze era and then later turns into normal Chinese characters. This is a map that shows kind of bronze use over time and you can see you know 5,000 4,000 B.C. it's starting in the near east and then eventually very slowly over time by you know 1,000 B.C.E. or 1500 B.C. do you start to see bronze in China. So, it's hard to be a super legit civilization, especially back in the day, if you're so far away from the center of technological innovation. But yeah, China's legit. You know, if you think about important pieces of the world over time, Africa was so important for us during the homo sapiens time. Eventually, we left and then the near east became super important for us. And then over the next kind of few thousand years, India, but especially China was so important, was just a huge superpower for thousands of years.
Okay, so we have the kind of weak civilizations, the mix, the Carol soups, the legit Eurasian ones like you know in India and China. But now the question is where should these go? Where should Egypt go and where should Mesopotamia go? And I think a lot of people would put Egypt in S tier and they might even put Mesopotamia in just A tier. But actually I disagree. So I'm going to put Egypt in A tier and Mesopotamia and S tier and let's talk about why. First let's look at Egypt and then we'll look at Mesopotamia. But first I want to tell a story about Egypt. If you haven't been to Egypt it's amazing to see the pyramids is so cool. So, this is myself, my brother, and my dad eating food outside the pyramids in 2021. And here's me with a gross beard. And what this shows is how crazy the Egyptian civilization was. It's so based around the Nile that's here. This is like Giza and stuff. And then it's just pure desert, the Sahara everywhere around it. And so, you can go into those pyramids, which is so cool. This is me and then my dad going through this. It's like a tiny little passage. You have to be on your hands and knees crawling through stones, you know, thousands of tons of stone all around you. It's really intense. And you go deep into the pyramid. And once you're inside, you get to one of the tombs. So this is like a tomb that has obviously been raided, but it's like this amazing kind of building like structure, this big cube that just exists with millions of tons of of rock all around it. It's crazy. Here's a picture that shows that where you kind of come in from the side and then just crawl through these tiny passageways to get to these chambers. Here's a picture that shows some of these modern buildings like the Transame pyramid or whatever that are, you know, 250 m tall and stuff like that. So, those are tall, tall things, but they were built in 1972 versus you can see here, here's these amazing Egyptian pyramids that are still like 150 m tall, built in like 3,000 B.C. or 2500 B.C. And they're also much bigger than other pyramids at the time. So here's you know in Mexico it's like no that's a small small pyramid or like this really wide one. It's like okay you made like a mound on the ground. Nice work. And so the great pyramid of Giza really shows an example of state capacity. And so you can kind of compare how hard it was to build this versus these other things through time. And this is taken from Peter Turchin's book the ultra society. And you can see way back in the day go black pepe you know in Turkey or whatever. And it was took like I think 200 person years or 300 person years to make this thing where you have you know 300 people for a year working to build this versus the great pyramid of Giza I think estimated take like 300,000 person years 200,000 person years and so this is like over 20 years you have 10,000 people working every year to build this massive thing and it was only eclipsed much later with something like the Empire State Building or the International Space Station which took like 3 million person years.
Okay, so that's a love letter to the pyramids of Egypt, but they were also legit in so many other ways. So, first when you look at populations of cities over time, the biggest cities, you can see that yeah, at the beginning they were in the Levant and a little bit of Mesopotamia, but then the biggest cities were in like the New Kingdom in Egypt, 60,000 people, 75,000 people. Really amazing. And so, the main reason I give Egypt points is because they were so legit during the Bronze Age. You know, you can imagine us to Alexander the Great is we're closer to him than he is to the stars of the pyramids, you know, and so during most of ancient history, Egypt was so important and they were such a hub. They did all this bronze work. They did all these wars. They had writing before they were one of the first places where writing emerged. But the thing that I take away from them is that they didn't persist that long because they weren't very close to the new horse lands in like the great step where we got chariots and then we got iron and cavalry. They weren't that close to that. And so around, you know, the end of the bronze age, beginning of the iron age around the year zero, they kind of lost their power. And so they got, you know, beaten by the Neoasyrians, they got beaten by the Persians. And then when you think about whether Egypt is an important place today, it's like not really. Not compared to India, not compared to China. They weren't even that important during the rise of the Roman Empire or the rise of, you know, the Islam Caliphates. And so Egypt was super important and was amazing, but I don't quite put them as S tier because of that.
And this brings us to our final civilization, Mesopotamia. Oh, ancient Mesopotamia. So cool. The OG, they're totally S tier. They just nudge out Egypt just barely because they were both more important earlier and equally important at the time and then more important later. So first off, Mesopotamia was earlier than Egypt. So you can see here this is the fertile crescent 7,500 B.C.E. and you can see it was around here and then Mesopotamia got farming like much earlier than Egypt. I think Egypt got like 5,000 B.C.E. or something. There was Mesopotamia right after this. They were already farming and stuff. They also had all the other legit things that you need to be an ancient civilization. They started early 3000 B.C.E. They did writing. They did bronze. They had lots of hierarchy. These amazing palaces in like Uric and things like that. And also Mesopotamia had writing. One of the first forms of writing, Sumerian ununiform. That's so amazing. It I think that they this graph doesn't totally show up right. I think that Mesopotamian writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs kind of emerged independently from each other even though they were pretty close. But yeah, you can see how writing started here so long ago and then eventually became things like the Phoenician alphabet, which became Aramaic, which became all of these important scripts that we use today. And then the other important thing about Mesopotamia is that not only were they really important during the Bronze Age, but they were important afterwards in the Iron Age and in kind of classical antiquity. You can see here, here's the Persian Empire, one of the first like real empires around 5,000 B.C. And this is Mesopotamia here. And so these kind of mass Iranian empires, these Persian empires, which then later became things like the Islamic Caliphates, they started around Mesopotamia and they weren't really so much Egyptian cultures.
So yeah, here's how I had stack rank. The civilizations, the American ones are D and C tier. The ones the Indian China are B tier, Egypt is A tier, but Mesopotamia is S tier. And finally, I thought it'd be fun to show what when you ask ChatBT in kind of thinking mode or pro mode to evaluate civilization index, it thinks it mostly agrees with me. You know, you have the mech and Carol soup pretty low over here. Mesopotamia really high. It puts ancient Egypt only at 64, which is interesting. Mostly agrees on Indis, but it puts ancient China really high at 91. And the reason for this is because I put Egypt higher because it was kind of more important earlier during the Bronze Age. While for them they were like, "Oh, ancient China really important eventually became more important. Had tons of people there had really important bronze things." And so I think that's why the AI is like, "Oh, China's important." Or maybe it's just because Deepseek was trained to uh [laughter] to think China's important. Thanks as always for listening. If you have any questions or if you disagree with me or agree with me, let me know in the comments below. I read every comment. And next time what we're going to look at is, you know, we've kind of looked at these cradles of civilization up here, you know, as writing starts at the start of history at the beginning of Bronze Age. And then we're going to look at the rest of history and say, okay, what happens in the Bronze Age? So, if you want to see that video, subscribe here to be notified when that happens. Or if you want to learn how we got to this place, how we got civilization in the first place, how we got farming, check out this video for more. Thanks. Invite.