The coolest thing about studying very ancient history is the realization that you are starting both at a new beginning and also deeply in medias res.

You are right there at the beginning of cities and written language and entities recognizable as "governments" and record-keeping and all sorts of other things.

And yet you are millennia removed from the first large-scale organized societies, towns, building projects, non-nomadic agricultural practices, arts such as painting pottery, poetry/storytelling, language itself, and societal tropes and stereotypes and concepts -- concepts such as "greed" or "happiness", as well as social structures such as rulers and slaves and merchants and everyone in between.

What a strange time it must have been: writing was new technology at the time, and yet people were very much the same as they had already been for thousands of years prior, and of course are much the same as they are today. Add to it the substantial climactic and geographical changes that have occurred in the millennia since then, and the combined result is both uncannily familiar and extremely alien.

It's also fascinating to consider what changed and didn't change in the intervening thousands of years, and at different rates and in different directions in various parts of the world. Ancient Sumer would have been just as alien to a citizen of Roman or Sassanian Mesopotamia as the Meosopotamia of classical antiquity would be to someone living there today.