The Early Days of Civilization

Having spent some time pondering the Iliad this evening, I started thinking about ancient civilizations and such. I used to be deeply fascinated in my younger days with really, really ancient civilizations, the stuff that represents the very earliest of civilization such as the Sumerians, the Minoans, and Shang-Dynasty China.

What fascinates me was how different life was then. Everything we know in our civilization now did not exist then. I am not just talking about technology, but more importantly, ways to look at the world. People were just bringing themselves out of earlier, more primitive times, and the world was still a nasty and very dangerous place compared to now. And yet, people banded together, traded, created art, and pondered life. I can only imagine the kinds of ideas they had back then concerning life, and wonder how different (or similar) to what people think about now.

On the one hand, people are people, so they probably had domestic problems, young love, fear of death and poverty, and other challenges, but on the other hand, their way of expressing these things was entirely different. Language differences aside, their notion of poetry, religion and so on were completely different. People back then really had a different way of thinking than people now.

I do sometimes wonder if 8,000 years from now how people will look upon the world now. Science-fiction usually likes to ponder life decades or centuries later, but 8,000 is really difficult to fathom. How could a Sumerian farmer 8,000 years ago ponder the Internet. First he’d have to know about electricity, then computers, but also the kinds of raw materials we use. Also, the use of the binary number system would be foreign to him, as early Sumerians used a base-60 number system (not even a decimal one!). Then the very notion of corporations (another alien concept) talking to one another (in places the farmer would never have heard of) in seconds would seem incredibly bizarre.

So what will life in 8,000 from our time look like? I simply won’t speculate because like the Sumerian farmer, I simply can’t conceive of the technology and mode of thinking people will have then. It will be something entirely alien to what we are now.

Over time, my study of Buddhism overshadowed this love of ancient history, but sometimes I love to go back and study those ancient first civilizations that we owe our current one to. A lot of what we are and think is derived by these ancient groups over many, many generations, but also it’s sobering to see what we think of truth now may not have been the case then either.

Namuamidabu