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History Is in Your Nature—and Vice-Versa

A modern (18th-early 20th century) etching of the building of a ziggurat, depicting the people, animals and tools used in the process.
Building of a ziggurat, as imagined in a much, much, much later etching. (This etching seems to have been created to illustrate the biblical Book of Genesis, possibly representing the Tower of Babel.) Source: Wellcome Collection
Ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil, 1250 BCE, from the ancient city of Dur Untash in what is now Iran. Photo by Richard S. Ellis, Dec., 1959. Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.9117133

Select Sources

Environmental history
  • J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
  • Dan Allosso, American Environmental History (Minneapolis: Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project, 2019) at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/648.
Hunter-Gatherers
  • Most of this information can be found in any decent world history textbook. For more information see, e.g., Carol R. Ember, “Hunter-Gatherers” at Yale University, Human Relations Area Files: Explaining Human Culture, https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/hunter-gatherers, accessed 10 Jul., 2024.
Secondary sources about Gilgamesh
Epic of Gilgamesh: Primary source
  • For one of the most recent translations of Gilgamesh, see Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), Kindle Edition.
  • For a free 1998 translation of the story, see The Epic of Gilgamesh, Maureen Gallery Kovacs, translator, at https://people.uncw.edu/deagona/myth/Gilgamesh 1-4.pdf .

By Doug

Doug Sofer, Ph.D., is a Professor of History at Maryville College in Tennessee. He's the creator of You Are A Weirdo, a media project that reaches beyond academia to share how history helps everyone understand the strangeness of now. Sofer hosts a podcast, writes a blog, and has penned a book manuscript on this same theme.

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