Guest: Kelten

First: Our hero Enmerkar, grandson of the sun-god Utu, demands tribute (in the form of labor and precious minerals) from the anonymous lord of faraway Aratta, with the blessing of his lover (and Utu's sister), the goddess Inanna.

Then, we look at the Late Uruk period in Iran, starting with Susa and its role in the invention of writing (and possibly in the colonization of the Iranian highlands). Chogha Mish was a centrally planned city (like Habuba Kabira, next episode), and Godin Tepe and Tepe Sialk were home to Uruk outposts. Was this colonization? Or something else entirely?

Then, after a quick history of Egypt up to the mid-3000s BCE, we look at Mesopotamian and Iranian influences on Egypt's Naqada period, when it acquired many of the characteristic features of later pharaonic society.

Finally, we meet the eponymous lord in his highland fastness of Aratta, who bets the entire proverbial farm on his contest with Enmerkar. As the proverb goes: he who acknowledges a contest can be the outright winner, like the bull which acknowledges the bull at its side!

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Works cited