This is a partial transcription of this video.
Carthaginians/Phoenicians
The Carthaginians and the Phoenicians as a whole were very mercantile people who flourished in the Iron Age and colonized a huge chunk of the Mediterranean in search of profit, including much of the coast of North Africa, parts of Spain, the Balearics, Sardinia, and Sicily. This was made possible by their seamanship, exemplified by the fact that they explored far-off regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and a contingent of them possibly even circumnavigated the whole continent on behalf of the 26th Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Necho II. Some of the names they gave to the places they encountered are still in use today, like Carthagina, Cadiz, and Ibiza, which they named in honor of the Egyptian god Bes, because Phoenician culture was heavily influenced by Egypt.
They’re also notorious for sacrificing their own infant children to their gods and burying them under stelai in cemeteries known as tophets. I included the Phoenicians and Carthaginians together because the Carthaginians were just an offshoot of the Phoenicians that left their homeland in the Levant. In reality, the Phoenicians as a whole were just a form of Canaanite, which we’ll get to later.
Assyria
Assyria is pretty well known, especially since it conquered pretty much the entire Near East, even including Egypt, between the 9th and 7th centuries BC. The imposing, very finely-cut reliefs and human-bull hybrid gate guardians (lamassu) that once decorated their palaces at sites like Nimrud and Nineveh can be found in various museums around the world. Apparently, they were meant to make foreign ambassadors shit themselves in awe at the king’s power, and after seeing some in person at the Brooklyn Museum, I can see how they’d react like that.
The version of the Assyrian state that dominated the Near East is known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, because it was the fourth version of Assyria, which began as the city-state of Assur around 2025 BC and did pretty well for itself throughout the Bronze Age.
They’re also pretty well known for conquering the ancient Kingdom of Israel and resettling the tribes living there, which became known as the Ten Lost Tribes. But ironically, they’re also the most important non-biblical source on the Israelites, as well as the earliest Arabs, and a whole bunch of other people. But the non-Assyrians who lived under the Assyrian boot - like the Chaldeans who would soon take over Babylon, and the Medes - hated them, so they all revolted at once and the empire collapsed really quickly, with Assur falling in 614 BC. But the Assyrians still existed as a people, and they even have their own church.
Minoans
Famous for being one of the first real civilizations in Europe and precursors to Ancient Greece, the Minoans inhabited the island of Crete and built huge multi-story palace centers like the ones at Knossos and Phaistos, covered in amazing frescoes - which are unfortunately usually pretty fragmentary, which you might not realize since most have been heavily, heavily restored (stuff done for the guy who basically discovered the Minoans, Sir Arthur Evans). But it’s still pretty controversial among scholars.
They’re called the Minoans because they’re around at the same time and place at which the legends of King Minos and the Minotaur’s labyrinth are set. Anyways, it makes sense: they are obsessed with bulls, and from their frescoes we know that they even held bull-fighting tournaments like the ones held in Spain today. Also of interest is the fact that Minoan women were always topless, even though they usually wore really long skirts that went down all the way to their ankles.
They also had two writing systems called Linear A and Linear B, the former of which has never been deciphered, and whatever the hell is on the Phaistos Disc. But they weren’t just confined to Crete: like would-be Instagram models, they went to the island of Santorini - except back then it looked like this. Can you guess what happened to it? Well, a huge volcanic eruption. And the settlement that the Minoans built there (Akrotiri), filled with beautiful frescoes by the way, was buried in ash. But luckily, unlike at Pompeii, its citizens had ample warning and escaped just in the nick of time. But it might have contributed to the downfall of Minoan culture, which also involved Mycenaeans.
Mycenaeans
The Mycenaeans and Minoans come as a pair: you can’t know about one without finding the other. Their major sites include Mycenae (obviously), Pylos, Tiryns, and they even had a presence at Athens and Thebes. Like their classical successors, they were also split up into various city-states.
They were big fans of what’s known as Cyclopean masonry, where they fit huge limestone boulders roughly together, which they used to build the walls of their palace centers - and which later Greeks considered the work of Cyclops.
They also buried their elites in richly furnished tombs, which were often these huge structures shaped like beehives known as tholos tombs, like the magnificent Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.
But the most famous artwork of theirs has to be the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, attributed to the ancient king of Mycenae who figured prominently in the Iliad. But unfortunately it dates to the 16th century BC, so predating the Iliad. But I totally get the urge to assign a name to the face - that’s because these are the people who would have fought in the Trojan War, and that urge to find those ancient heroes led to the discovery of their civilization in the first place.
They also had really cool armor like this bronze panoply, and their boar-tusk helmets. In addition, they carved really, really intricate little designs into their signet rings and gems, and I personally really like the octopi they painted on their pottery.
Around 1450 BC they seem to have conquered Crete, and eventually Minoan culture was assimilated into theirs. But soon enough they collapsed themselves, and like any good civilization we have no idea why. Maybe it was earthquakes, maybe it was new people coming in, maybe they became part of the Sea Peoples which pillaged the rest of the eastern Mediterranean and brought other civilizations down with them. Who knows.
Neolithic British Isles
These are the guys who made Stonehenge. So by virtue of that, these guys aren’t too obscure. You might think it’s odd of me to include them since they lived in the Stone Age, but they were settled farmers and they were centralized enough to build enormous megaliths everywhere, so I’d say they count. The fact that they didn’t have metal tools just makes what they did all the more impressive.
In addition to Stonehenge, they also built a ton of other cool stuff, like long barrows (which are these megalithic communal tombs), Thornborough Henges, and they really liked Orkney for some reason and built a lot of stuff there, like the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. And don’t forget Ireland, where they built huge passage tombs like Newgrange and Knowth.
And it’s unfortunate that their fate wound up being somewhere in between being totally wiped out or being totally assimilated into the Bronze Age culture that came after them, which we’ll get to later.
La Tène (Late Iron Age Celts)
La Tène is just the fancy archaeological term for the late Iron Age Celts. Think Asterix and Obelix. Once widespread across Europe, and even setting up shop in the center of Anatolia of all places, these fierce torque-bearing, often nude warriors fought hard against - but were ultimately conquered by - the Romans (like Julius Caesar, of course). Except in fiercely independent regions like Scotland and Ireland.
People from there - and from places like Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and the Isle of Man - are still incredibly proud of them being the last bastions of Celtic culture, as they managed to hold out (at least ethnically) against the Germanic peoples who overran the Romans. Because so many people (like myself) are descended from Celts and proud of it, and the desire to preserve Celtic languages and ways of life were and are such big deals in Celtic countries, I couldn’t put them any lower on this list.
Easter Island (Rapa Nui)
Everyone knows about the big moai heads on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Everyone remembers Gum-Gum from Night at the Museum, and I actually got to see him in person at the American Museum of Natural History recently, so that was pretty cool. Unfortunately for me - and fortunately for the modern people of Rapa Nui - it’s actually just a plaster cast of an original, not the real deal.
No one knows what possessed the island’s inhabitants to make so many of these enormous stone statues (nearly 900) to the point where they may very well have stripped the entire island of all its trees. But I mean, come on: they were damn good at it.
And it’s becoming more well known that they aren’t just heads: some have incredibly long bodies with petroglyphs carved into them, some also had inlaid eyes made of coral, and some have red top-knots called pukao.
The tradition of making moai, which lasted from 1100 to 1650 roughly, might have been replaced by something called the Birdman cult, which involved this deadly competition where people had to dive into the ocean from the top of an incredibly high cliff, swim to a nearby island, collect the very first egg of the bird mating season, and then come back with it alive, hopefully.
They also had a totally unique writing system called rongorongo, mostly written on wood, which still hasn’t been deciphered to this day. Unfortunately, the island was devastated by contact with Europeans, and almost all the moai had been toppled by 1868.
The Etruscans
The Etruscans figure prominently in the early history of Rome, given their dominance over northern Italy from around 700 BC until they were eclipsed by Rome itself in the 4th century BC. And according to legend, Rome’s last three kings were Etruscan, so of course they heavily influenced Roman culture.
They left behind some pretty spectacular art, like their lively sarcophagus effigies, their vividly decorated rock-cut tombs like the ones at the necropolis of Monterozzi and Banditaccia, and superb bronzes like the Chimera of Arezzo or the Mars of Todi.
As you might have guessed from the names, they were divided up into a number of independent city-states that cultivated fierce rivalries between one another, but they also formed a loose confederation known as the League of Twelve Peoples to promote their common goals. They also established colonies all across Italy, from Campania in the south to the Po Valley in the north.
Their art was, of course, heavily influenced by the Greeks, and they imported tons of Greek luxury goods, but as you can see, they added their own really distinct flair to it all. They spoke a pre-Indo-European language and wrote using their own distinct alphabet taken from the Greeks, and it just so happens to be the direct ancestor of the Latin alphabet we still use to this day.
I’m proud to say that I spotted this little 7th-century bottle statuette inscribed with their entire alphabet (and on Wikipedia) in the corner of a display case in the Met, which has an amazing little sub-floor partially dedicated to them.
Despite that, the Etruscan language still hasn’t been fully deciphered, partially because of how unique their language was. Their origins were hotly debated in antiquity, and a lot of historians championed the idea that they were Lydians who had left Anatolia due to a famine. But in reality, we know that they were probably indigenous and emerged from the earlier Villanovan culture, which is also sort of seen as the first phase of Etruscan culture. They also had really cool helmets.
Eventually, the Etruscans were totally superseded by Rome. They conquered their first Etruscan city (Veii) in 396 BC, and just over a century later, in 264 BC, they conquered the last independent Etruscan city-state (Volsinii). Some of its citizens found themselves participating in the first ever recorded gladiatorial game held later that same year. But eventually, they became citizens of Rome during the Social War in 90 BC.
The Olmecs
Anyone who’s delving into ancient Mesoamerica is going to come across the Olmec sooner rather than later, because they’re Mesoamerica’s “mother civilization,” and they lasted from 1200 to 400 BC, during Mesoamerica’s formative period.
Their three major cities were near the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in the states of Tabasco and Veracruz: San Lorenzo, La Venta (where they built a huge pyramid called the Great Pyramid), and Tres Zapotes.
They’re best known for making colossal stone heads, possibly representing their rulers, and they were very, very skilled sculptors in general. They were also really good at working with jade from really far-off mines in the Guatemalan highlands, which they used to make masks (which you might recognize from a certain anime), and votive axes bearing the likenesses of one of their chief gods - a bizarre hybrid between a chubby human baby and a jaguar. It was really weird to see one in person at the American Museum of Natural History, and you can see that chunks had been taken out of it by later peoples as souvenirs.
The masks, as well, were highly prized by later civilizations. The Olmec started a bunch of Mesoamerican traditions that would survive long after they disappeared, like the Mesoamerican ball game and bloodletting. They may have even invented the first writing system in the Americas, based on the Cascajal Block and other finds, as well as an enigmatic script known as the Isthmian (Epi-Olmec) script, which may represent an intermediary between Olmec and Maya glyphs.
Their immediate successors were also the first to use the Long Count calendar, which you’re probably familiar with if you’ve looked into the Maya. In their day, Olmec influence spread far and wide across Mesoamerica, and Olmec-style art is found hundreds of miles away from their homeland at sites like Chalcatzingo in central Mexico, the Cave of Oxtotitlán in western Mexico, and Takalik Abaj in the southern Maya lowlands in Guatemala, possibly because they were running them or because others just wanted to imitate them.
No one knows why exactly the Olmecs disappeared (maybe because of environmental factors?), but the culture that succeeded them was so influenced by them that they’re known as the Epi-Olmecs, and they continue to occupy Tres Zapotes.
The Hittites
If you’ve ever delved into the Bronze Age Near East, you’ll be familiar with the Hittites - briefly the arch-rivals of Egypt. Ramses the Great’s reputation was built on the famous battle he fought with them over control of the Levant: the Battle of Kadesh. Heck, they’re even mentioned in the Bible.
The Hittite Empire, whose core was referred to as the Land of Hatti by the Hittites themselves, spread over much of Anatolia, the northern Levant, and Mesopotamia between 1650 and 1180 BC. Like Ancient Egypt, its history is divided into Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, and its capital was the grand city of Hattusa.
They didn’t leave behind nearly as many monuments as the Ancient Egyptians, but we still know really intimate details of their history because they were meticulous record-keepers, and they’ve left behind their royal archives, which contain tens of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in Akkadian, as well as Hittite and Luwian cuneiform - the oldest recorded Indo-European languages. Fun fact: just like Egyptian, Luwian could also be written in hieroglyphs.
That isn’t to say there aren’t any cool Hittite sites. There is Alaca Höyük, which has nice big Egyptian-inspired sphinxes, one of which is decorated with a double-headed eagle (you know where that’s going to go). There’s the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, the massive Fasıllar Monument, Eflatun Pınar, and a bunch of rock reliefs absolutely everywhere, which the Greeks interpreted in a variety of weird ways.
Also, Troy was a vassal kingdom under the Hittites for a bit, and they called it Wilusa.
Ultimately, though, the Hittite Empire was a victim of the Bronze Age collapse, and just couldn’t hold up against the constant assaults they faced from the Assyrians, the Sea Peoples, and a ton of other various “barbarian” groups.
The Indus Valley Civilization
From the name alone, it’s pretty obvious where they primarily lived: along the Indus River valley - although they did have many sites elsewhere. The sophisticated, well-planned cities they built, which housed tens of thousands of people, can be found in Pakistan, India, and even Afghanistan.
They’re also called the Harappans, after the site of Harappa, the first of their cities to be excavated. But just as famous is the city of Mohenjo-daro, the largest and best-preserved one. And they had even more cities, like Dholavira, Rakhigarhi, and Ganweriwala, as well as Lothal.
They existed from roughly 3500 BC to 1300 BC. I’d say they’re decently well known, and they’re mentioned alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia in a lot of textbooks, mainly because they’re one of the early urban, river-valley-inhabiting civilizations.
They were also capable of producing some pretty sweet statues, like the stone “Priest-King” or the bronze “Dancing Girl,” and they also had a penchant for making tons of terracotta figurines.
They had a written language called the Indus script, which has been found on tons of seals, but it’s never been deciphered.
They also constructed elaborate sewage systems to maintain their cities, as well as baths, toilets, and hundreds of wells. In addition, they were oddly egalitarian: their cities don’t really feature any palaces or royal tombs, even though they were usually made up of a higher part (or “citadel”) and a lower part for the upper and lower classes respectively - Mohenjo-daro famously having a Great Bath in their citadel, possibly ritual in nature.
Their history is divided up into an early phase (when they were first developing), a mature phase (which was their golden age), and a late phase (which featured the decline of their cities and their abandonment in favor of little villages in the Himalayan foothills).
There are lots of theories about why they collapsed: maybe because of the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, maybe because of droughts and the changing course of the Indus, or maybe they all just got rolled into one big shitshow. Who knows.
Nubia (Kush)
By Nubia, I really mean the Kingdom of Kush specifically - not any of the cultures that preceded it, like the A-Group or the Kerma culture.
I feel like Kush is becoming increasingly better known. There have been a bunch of exhibits dedicated to it recently, and I’m sure most people have heard the fun fact that Sudan technically has more pyramids in it than Egypt - which is true, sort of. And apparently Will Smith was going to star in a movie about it at one point, so that’s cool.
Nubian civilization was heavily influenced by Egypt, since it controlled Nubia for centuries during the Middle and New Kingdoms. But it would be unfair to say it’s just derivative of it.
A line of Kushite rulers even conquered Egypt in the mid-8th century BC after it had fractured into different small kingdoms, and that line of Kushite kings became Egypt’s 25th Dynasty, ruling until 656 BC, when they were kicked out by the Assyrians.
Their capital was initially at the city of Napata, next to a mountain sacred to the god Amun called Jebel Barkal. At the nearby cemeteries of el-Kurru and Nuri, they buried their kings under steep-sided pyramids with lavish burial goods.
They built a bunch of other really cool monuments elsewhere too, like the colossi of Natakamani, the temples of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra (which I specifically like because it has an elephant sphinx, which I think is really cool), among many others.
Unlike in Egypt, where female pharaohs were exceptionally rare, female rulers were far more common in Kush, since the throne was inherited matrilineally. Queen mothers known as kandakes (where the name “Candace” is from, by the way) were very powerful, and could assume the throne in their own right.
After Napata was sacked by the Egyptians around 591 BC, they moved further south to the city of Meroë and erected even more pyramids there. And here they even developed their own hieroglyphic script, known as Meroitic.
But eventually Meroë fell in the 4th century AD, and Christianity took hold. The Kingdom of Kush was succeeded by three smaller, staunchly Coptic Orthodox kingdoms: Nobatia, Alodia, and Makuria - the latter two remaining independent and Christian into the 15th century.
Göbekli Tepe
Göbekli Tepe is an extraordinary site on a mountaintop in southeastern Anatolia that might very well be the oldest temple in the world.
It’s made up of a number of circular enclosures filled with enormous T-shaped pillars decorated with all sorts of symbolic imagery, like birds and scorpions and lions and tons of other stuff.
It was built and used somewhere between 9,500 and 8,000 BC—so that’s like 11,000 years ago—based on radiocarbon dating of the plaster and charcoal found there. So it’s by far the oldest thing on this list.
It was made during what’s dubbed the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, which lasted from 10,000 BC to 6,500 BC, when the first-ever villages started to appear and agriculture really started being adopted in earnest for the first time all around the Fertile Crescent.
In addition to being a sanctuary, it was also a settlement site, with a rainwater collection system and big stone vessels probably used for brewing beer.
But there’s still no evidence that the people who made this practiced agriculture, which makes it all the more impressive.
It was only really discovered in the ’90s by the late German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. But because it’s so exceptional, I think a lot of people know it by now.
And this isn’t the only site of its kind: other sites in the region are also filled with the same sort of T-shaped pillars, like Karahan Tepe. And Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites further afield have revealed just as fascinating stuff, like this tower from Jericho in Palestine, which might be the oldest piece of monumental architecture in the world.
Also found at Jericho are these skulls covered with plaster to imitate the faces of the people they once belonged to, which have also been found at a bunch of other sites.
And I can’t mention the Pre-Pottery Neolithic without mentioning these weird statues straight out of a fever dream, made of plaster and reeds, from a site named ’Ain Ghazal just outside of Amman, Jordan - which I just really love for some reason.
Canaanites
“Canaanite” is the catchall term for the Semitic-speaking peoples who inhabited the southern Levant during the third and second millennia BC, during the Bronze Age.
They’re mentioned tons of times in the Bible because they’re the people Joshua had to kick out of the Promised Land so that the Hebrews could settle there after the Exodus. Even though, in reality, the Hebrews - along with all their weird neighbors like Moab - were actually most likely ethnically Canaanites themselves.
The Phoenicians were also Canaanites, but I didn’t want to group Classical North Africa with the Bronze Age Levant, so that’s why I divided them.
They were heavily influenced by the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, and they were the real crux of Bronze Age trade networks. But as I alluded to, they weren’t a united whole: they were divided into a ton of different, often warring city-states.
Some important ones being Hazor, Gezer, Megiddo (where the word “Armageddon” comes from), Lachish, Beit She’an, Byblos (where the term “Bible” comes from), Tyre, Sidon, Shechem, and Ugarit (but Ugarit was so unique that I actually have it listed here separately).
Most of these were under the suzerainty of the pharaoh during the Egyptian New Kingdom. Although right before that, during Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period, a group of Canaanites known as the Hyksos actually conquered Lower Egypt for a time.
The Kingdom of Mitanni and the Hittites from the north also had stakes in the region, and the aim of a lot of the campaigns directed by great New Kingdom pharaohs like Thutmose III and Ramses II were meant to combat their influence in the region.
I think the most telling signs of Egyptian influence are these strange pseudo-Egyptian clay anthropoid coffins, and the fact that their gods (like Baal) famously often wear Egyptian headdresses, and just the sheer amount of Egyptian stuff found in the Levant.
But eventually the Egyptians just had to pull out during the Bronze Age collapse, when they were being swarmed by the Sea Peoples. And at this point, at the beginning of the Iron Age, the Canaanites coalesced into various kingdoms like Judah, Israel, and its many strange neighbors - which I’m not going to cover.
The Scythians
These Eastern Iranian nomads played a huge role in the history of Siberia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Near East, and even India - so they had quite a far reach.
They’re divided into two closely related groups: the Scythians, who dominated the Pontic Steppe between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC, and the Sakas of the Asian steppe, who lasted a bit longer.
They’re especially well known in Eastern Europe for the huge role they played in its history, so that’s why I put them here.
They were known far and wide as fierce mounted archers who lived as nomads across the Eurasian steppe.
Interestingly enough, according to my man Herodotus, the Scythians in general never washed their bodies. Instead, they would just throw hemp on a fire enclosed within a tent and immerse themselves in the vapor—which they obviously also got high on.
They left behind huge burial mounds (kurgans) filled with lavish burial goods, like the Arzhan kurgans, the Pazyryk burials, and the Issyk kurgan. And they sometimes set up stelai depicting the deceased next to these kurgans.
Due to the preservative effects of the Siberian permafrost (which has famously preserved woolly mammoths), and the fact that they deliberately embalmed their deceased, a bunch of Scythian mummies have been discovered. They’ve attracted a lot of attention because some of them were covered in tattoos, which some people have actually replicated on themselves.
While the Scythians were in what’s now Ukraine, the Sakas also formed kingdoms in the Tarim Basin, like Khotan and Kashgar, and became Buddhists.
Some even made their way to India, and after crushing the Indo-Greek kingdom, these so-called Indo-Scythians formed kingdoms in northwestern and South Asia. One of these, whose rulers were referred to as the Western Satraps, lasted until around 400 AD.
But far before that, Scythian dominance on the Pontic steppe came to an end in the 3rd century BC, when they got BTFO by the Celts, Germans, and Sarmatians.
But they still ran two little kingdoms in the Crimea and along the Danube, both called Scythia Minor, where they became sedentary and Hellenized. But after a few centuries they were eventually just assimilated by their conquerors.
The Early Cycladic Civilization
This civilization existed in - and gets its name from - the Cyclades: a group of islands in the Aegean just off Greece which are rich in minerals, ores, and fine, fine marble.
It emerged in the Early Bronze Age around 3200 BC, and it’s divided into two phases: the Grotta–Pelos period and the Keros–Syros period, when it reached its zenith and the population boomed. These are also known as Early Cycladic I and II.
They’re best known for mass-producing these strangely abstract marble figurines, the most common type of which is a full-length female with folded arms: the so-called folded-arms figurine, which comes in all sorts of different varieties, made in different places at different times.
But they made some other types of figurines too, like this harp player. Their faces look eerily blank, aside from their noses, but traces of paint on them suggest that they were once actually painted.
Less well known, but just as interesting, are these elaborate “frying pans” they made out of terracotta and stone. And no one knows why they made them.
At the end of the Early Cycladic II period, old settlements were abandoned and new, heavily fortified ones built in remote locations took their place. And this also coincides with male figurines with baldrics and daggers being produced, which suggests that there was some unrest - possibly due to conflicts over resources and trade.
But their sites weren’t just ravaged in antiquity: Early Cycladic sites have suffered from intense looting because private collectors are desperate to add the figurines to their collections. And for the same reason, the market has also been flooded with tons of forgeries of them.
So we don’t know exactly which context the vast majority of these figurines came from, though a lot of the excavated ones come from graves. And some of the ones displayed in museums may very well be modern forgeries.
The Nabataeans
These guys were Arabs who lived in what’s now Jordan, Israel, the Sinai, and northwestern Saudi Arabia, who were organized into a single kingdom: the Kingdom of Nabataea, whose capital was the city of Petra - most famous for featuring enormous funerary monuments cut into the very walls of the sandstone canyons where the city was built.
You’ve probably seen it if you’ve ever watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusader, because its most famous building, known as Al-Khazneh (the Treasury), was where the Grail was. It was most likely a mausoleum dedicated to the Nabataeans’ greatest king, Aretas IV, of the early 1st century AD.
But it actually got its name because the Bedouins of the region believed it was filled with a pharaoh’s treasure, and that’s why the urn at the very tippy top is riddled with scars from their bullets.
The Nabataeans were able to build such amazing monuments because they were stinking rich off of taxing the incense (think myrrh and frankincense) caravans linking southern Arabia with the Mediterranean.
And they only built Petra in the middle of the desert because it was along that caravan route. They built incredibly elaborate waterworks - cisterns and aqueducts - to make it more hospitable.
They also built other impressive cities, like Hegra further to the south in what’s now Saudi Arabia, and Avdat now in Israel.
Their kingdom was already thriving by the late 4th century BC, but its first known king ascended the throne in 168 BC. From that time until its fall, it was notable for playing a very important role in the politics of neighboring Judea, and for managing to fend off the Romans for centuries.
But of course it was eventually annexed into the Roman Empire in 106 AD under Trajan, then becoming the province of Arabia Petraea.
Thereafter it underwent a steady decline, because it didn’t have the same significance to the Romans - or to the incense trade - as before, and it was eclipsed by Palmyra further to the north.
Teotihuacan
Some people were surprised by the fact that Teotihuacan is this far down, because among people familiar with Mesoamerican history it’s very well known - and of course anyone living in central Mexico knows about it.
But if you asked any random person on the street about it anywhere else, they’d probably have no idea what you’re talking about.
It was a spectacular ancient city just 40 km northeast of Mexico City. And long after it was abandoned, the Aztecs were so in awe of it that they referred to it as the “birthplace of the gods.”
Teotihuacan totally dominated Mesoamerica and had one of the biggest populations of any city in the world at its height between 400 and 600 AD, holding between 100,000 and 200,000 people.
It was a very well-planned city comprised of a complex grid filled with multi-level apartment buildings. But the two most notable structures at Teotihuacan are of course the two enormous pyramids there: the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The former is the second-biggest pyramid in all of Central America - which makes sense; just look at it.
The site’s third-largest pyramid, the Temple of the Feathered Serpents, is covered in, you guessed it, feathered serpents, and hundreds of sacrificial burials have been found beneath it.
The city is also famous for having produced huge quantities of distinct greenstone masks, and for the beautiful murals painted onto its more upscale residences. Somewhat strangely, these don’t really ever depict anything political, and no inscriptions were written in Teotihuacan, so we don’t really have a clear picture of what their government looked like - or even if they had kings.
But either way, they heavily, heavily influenced the Maya. And people from Teotihuacan were able to install themselves as the rulers of the great Maya cities of Tikal and Copán, hundreds of miles away from Teotihuacan. This was during the 4th and 5th centuries. But we still don’t know if Teotihuacan really formed an empire per se.
In the mid-7th century, the dwellings of the ruling class in particular were recurrently ravaged and razed, possibly reflecting an invasion or even an internal revolt. But either way, the city was eventually abandoned.
Tiwanaku
Like Teotihuacan, it’s a single grand city - and a civilization to boot.
It’s located on Lake Titicaca, one of the highest lakes in the world, in Bolivia. It emerged sometime between 200 BC and 200 AD, but it was preceded by other major city-states in the Lake Titicaca basin, like Chiripa and Pukara.
It’s 12,600 feet above sea level, and the Altiplano (or high-altitude plains) surrounding the lake are pretty inhospitable. So to circumvent this, the people of Tiwanaku used something called raised-field agriculture, which was able to sustain a higher crop density than usual and kept the crops warm during the Altiplano’s frigid nights.
And despite how banal it sounds, the surplus food this system created was the thing that fueled the monumental building projects which defined Tiwanaku.
A bunch of them are clustered into a ceremonial center once separated from the rest of the site by a big moat, like a large, badly eroded pyramid known as the Akapana. It featured big drainage canals which made it resemble an artificial mountain spring, which sort of reminds me of that thing from Mad Max, you know.
It also features a semi-subterranean temple whose walls are lined with stone heads - like that temple from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except they don’t shoot poison arrows, luckily for the tourists.
This temple is also where a huge 7m-high statue known as the Bennett Monolith once stood. For decades it was displayed in La Paz, and it’s now in the site museum - notably holding a snuff tray for sniffing hallucinogens.
And finally there’s the Kalasasaya, a huge temple complex featuring more colossal statues and the magnificent Gate of the Sun. As amazing as they are now, imagine them once covered in gold.
Outside the ceremonial center there’s also another pyramid called Pumapunku.
Tiwanaku formed one of the first empires in the Americas, reaching its zenith between 500 and 1,000 AD, when it created tons of colonies and trading posts and just proliferated its culture absolutely everywhere across the region it was in.
One of the main goals of this empire-building was to secure various luxuries for the elite, like coca leaves - and we literally have statues of Tiwanaku elites chewing coca.
Ultimately, the city was able to sustain a population of up to 70,000 people, even though, as mentioned before, it’s 12,000+ feet above sea level.
It greatly influenced the succeeding Inca. And while they were around, they were rivals of the Wari Empire.
But it collapsed around 1,000 AD from an onslaught of various Aymara kingdoms and a severe drought - which also helped bring down the next civilization on this list.
The Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans)
I put them here because they’re pretty well known in the American Southwest, where they lived. More specifically, they lived in the Colorado Plateau, where the four states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico come together.
They’re well known because they left some pretty amazing monuments behind - most famously, the massive and incredibly evocative defensive cliff dwellings they created, which are now located in various national parks, like Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park.
They’re incredible multi-story complexes that once housed hundreds, even thousands of people.
They’re also one of the primary prehistoric archaeological traditions in the Southwest, along with the Hohokam and the Mogollon, a region also referred to as Oasisamerica. (You know, like Mesoamerica.)
I’m pretty sure the Anasazi are the best known of the bunch, given all the monuments they left behind.
In addition to the cliff dwellings, they created so-called great houses, the largest of which being Pueblo Bonito, with 700 rooms in it and once standing at five stories tall.
They also built vast road networks connecting them all, which facilitated the transport of far-flung luxury goods like macaws and turquoise.
Their lives were centered around usually semi-subterranean ceremonial structures called kivas, some of which, called great kivas, are truly vast.
They emerged as a distinct civilization in the 12th century BC, but they started actually building pueblos around 750 AD.
But eventually, in the 12th and 13th centuries AD, they abandoned their established communities, probably due to a mixture of the climate becoming more arid, environmental degradation, as well as Numic- and Athabaskan-speaking migrants.
In fact, the modern Pueblo object to them being called the “Anasazi,” because it’s a Navajo word meaning something like “ancient enemy.”
But whatever happened was pretty horrible. For instance, at Cowboy Wash in Colorado, seven dismembered bodies were found that may very well have been cannibalized.
Ultimately, they were forced to migrate towards the south and east, further into New Mexico, where the modern Pueblo live.
They also made really cool pottery.
The Nazca
The Nazca lived along the harsh desert coast of southern Peru.
They emerged as a distinct culture in the 1st century AD, succeeding the Paracas culture.
They created amazingly vivid pottery, which is one of our only windows into their mythology and ways of life. It bears images of bizarre beings like the creatively named “Anthropomorphic Mythical Being,” the “Horrible Bird,” and the “Mythical Killer Whale.”
They also really liked head-hunting for some reason, and you can spot decapitated heads on nearly every bit of pottery they made.
But of course they’re most known for being behind the Nazca Lines: enormous geoglyphs, most famously depicting animals, but also depicting humans, plants, and insects - along with spirals, and even just massive linear designs. (Their forbearers, the Paracas, also built geoglyphs.)
How are they built, and why?
People look at them and think that it would have been impossible to make them without being able to see them from the air, which has fueled a bunch of conspiracy theories. And it’s true that they were only really rediscovered by pilots in the 20th century.
But all they did was clear the stones covering the desert surface to create certain patterns, using simple surveying tools.
The real question is why they were built. A bunch of theories have been put forward to explain it: that they were processional pathways, ceremonial centers, a massive astronomical calendar, that they follow underground aquifers, and of course that they’re runways for alien spaceships.
But with the exception of the alien landing-strip theory, the jury’s still pretty much out on that one. No one really knows why they built them.
Until 450 AD, the culture was dominated by a ceremonial and pilgrimage center known as Cahuachi, and it was loosely controlled by some sort of theocratic authority.
After 450, the culture sort of collapsed, and Cahuachi was abandoned along with the old religious order. This marks the end of what’s known as the Early Nazca period.
By 550, the Nazca reemerged with local warring chiefs in charge. Warfare starts being the main focus on pottery, and head-hunting somehow became even more important than before. They also mummified the heads.
They also started building something known as puquios, which are underground aqueducts built as the climate was becoming way more arid and rivers more unreliable. Those corkscrew-like depressions you see on the top are actually access shafts.
The Nazca culture collapsed for good sometime between 750 and 800 AD, possibly due to the effects of El Niño flooding exacerbated by deforestation. And eventually, the region they occupied was taken over by the Wari.
Lydia
Lydia was a kingdom and region in western Anatolia which flourished in the 7th to 6th centuries BC. It’s most well known for minting the world’s first proper coins out of a natural alloy of gold and silver called electrum.
It’s also known for its last independent king, Croesus, who was the richest man in the world in his day. His dynasty, the Mermnad dynasty, was founded in a really bizarre way, and it’s one of the first things mentioned in Herodotus’s Histories.
The last king of the previous dynasty, Candaules, thought his wife Nyssia was the most beautiful woman in the world, and to prove it to his friend and bodyguard Gyges, he pressured him into hiding in her room to watch her undress.
Nyssia found out, and understandably was a bit angry. So she offered Gyges two choices: murder Candaules and usurp the throne with her as his wife, or be executed. (She claimed that he raped her.) Let’s just say Gyges pulled a real Griffith and killed his friend in exchange for power - starting Lydia on its path to becoming a great empire by campaigning against the neighboring Smyrnians and Ionians.
Plato, on the other hand, told a different tale: that Gyges instead usurped the throne using a magical ring that was able to turn him invisible - which might sound familiar.
Croesus was the last king of Gyges’s dynasty, and even though he expanded Lydia to its greatest-ever extent, he was defeated by Cyrus the Great of the Persian Empire in 547 BC at the Battle of Thymbra. After his capital Sardis was captured, Lydia was incorporated into the newfound Persian Empire.
Croesus famously asked the Oracle of Delphi whether or not he should go to war against the Persians in the first place, and the oracle responded by saying that if he did, he’d destroy a great empire. And Croesus went ahead with the war, not knowing that his empire would be the one he’d go on to destroy.
Besides its coins, Lydia’s greatest legacy is constituted by the hundreds of truly enormous burial mounds they built near Sardis, especially at a site called Bin Tepe.
Three mounds in particular dominate the site: the Tumulus of Alyattes (Croesus’s father), which was supposedly mostly funded by prostitutes; Karnıyarık Tepe, the burial chamber of which hasn’t ever been located; and Kır Mutaf Tepe.
Lydia also had a language which was used up until the 1st century BC that’s only been partially translated.
Carthaginians Phoenicians Egypt Assyria Minoans Mycenaeans Iliad Trojan War Troy Crete Sea Peoples Etruscans Olmecs Hittites Indus Valley Civilization Nubia Göbekli Tepe Canaanites Baal Scythians Sakas Early Cycladic Civilization Nabataeans Petra Hegra Teotihuacan Tiwanaku Maya Inca Anasazi Nazca Lydia Herodotus Plato