The rest of his lecture seems fine and I'm sure he makes many valuable contributions to his field as a worthy professional, but I was simply blown away by the jaw-dropping ignorance and inanity of the opening statement here by Dr. Matt Stolper for the Oriental Institute. I think it's a good case of someone being an idiot savant, i.e. being incredibly gifted or talented in one area, while lacking in others, in this case apparently never opening a book covering the basic universal history of the world.
While the Persian Achaemenid Empire did encompass a huge portion of the literal, civilized, urbanized people of the world from the 6th to 4th centuries BC, to suggest it was merely missing one other literate, civilized, urbanized people is just bonkers. What a breathtakingly bad statement.
I really wanted to enjoy the rest of the video, but right out of the gate this is just an unnecessary, disappointing albatross anchoring the entire lecture down towards the bottomless pits of the sea. He specifically mentions Greece as the "holdout" missing piece, but the larger colonial Greek world included ancient Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova (Pontic & Bosporan region), Bulgaria (Thrace), Albania & FYROM (Illyria), Libya (Cyrene), Sicily and southern Italy (Magna Graecia, or Megale Hellas), Sardinia, Corsica, southern France (Gaul), eastern Spain (Iberia, Hispania), etc.
That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of other contemporary Classic civilizations in the Western Mediterranean, namely Carthage and Rome, as well as the Etruscans. That doesn't even include Hellenized Illyrians and Thracians who became literate in Greek arts due to colonization, along with urbanized native Iberians influenced by Carthaginians and Greeks. His statement is even dumber considering that Warring States China existed to the east of the Achaemenids, which would be unified in the 3rd century BC into one large empire under the Qin dynasty, then the Han dynasty (which would bring the practice of writing to northern Korea and northern Vietnam). The previous Shang and Zhou dynasty Chinese of the Bronze Age had Oracle Bone and Bronze Script writing at the same time Greek Mycenaeans had Linear B and centuries before the Greek alphabet even existed. While solid evidence for writing in the Indian subcontinent is shaky before the 3rd century BC, the Edicts of Ashoka created under that king of the Mauryan Empire contain a fully developed Brahmi script that likely existed beforehand given the Vedic tradition. Then we have the ancient Zapotecs and Olmecs of Mesoamerica, an urbanized people who certainly had writing by about 500 BC if not earlier judging by the evidence of the Cascajal Block dated to roughly 900 BC.
So according to Dr. Matt Stolper, all of India, China, Mesoamerica, the northern Black Sea region (Pontic Steppe), and Western Mediterranean region didn't exist until Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire? I want to say this is what happens to your brain when you sniff the smug farts of ancient Classical Greek historians all day, but even they acknowledged the very existence of Carthage, Rome and important western Greek colonies like Massalia (France) and Syracuse (Sicily).