Fabulous First Paragraph - The Time Before History - Colin Tudge

Fabulous First Paragraph

The Time Before History - 5 Million Years of Human Impact
by Colin Tudge


Prologue: A Proper History of Mankind

How odd it is to suggest, as historians conventionally do, that the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans were "ancient."  They had advanced technologies for architecture, engineering, and agriculture; they made war, paid taxes, studied the stars, developed the arts and miscellaneous philosophies, and allowed themselves to be organized by priests, generals, and bureaucrats.  If any of us were whisked into their midst we would be struck at first by their quaintness and their foreignness and by the alarming proximity of death, but we would soon feel more or less at home.  At least, we would soon be irked by the same day-to-day necessities of housekeeping and social intercourse that beset us now- and stunned, when we found the leisure to look around, by the brilliance of their technologies and the excellence of their arts and crafts.

The truth is, of course, that those people were not "ancient" at all.



p.17  The pharaonic Egyptians had reached the peak that they did only after several thousand years of civilization.  This point is made by Plato.

Egyptians had at that time been a culture for millenia, with "correspondingly ancient memories and traditions" of about six thousand years, roughly the same amount of time we look back upon and call "history."


This is a great first paragraph by Colin Tudge.

Finally, I see a belief that has seemed obvious to me, reflected in print and expressed clearly.  We have about six thousand years of culture, but currently everything older than modern times is so gauzy it might be called myth.  When did modern times start?  I say modern times began either with Alexander, who made the world ready for the Hebrew/Greek synthesis that created the West, or with Luther, who gave us a successful attempt at breaking the hegemony of Medieval life.  Those are my top two choices: times defined by people.  But of course we could divide time the way we already do, around the person of Jesus, into A.D; even if we now call it C.E.  In any case, history has revolved around that incarnation, as we define history today.