Wandering past

This section is about the journeys that others have made before us and the impressions they left behind some leaving traces close to the physical route we are taking today and some who consciously shared stories of their world and our world that have survived, some miraculously for centuries, to reach our own present time intact.

Leaving impressions behind

Even before we started telling each other stories we left our unconscious impressions behind. Like every animal wandering in search of the next source of water or food leaving its muddy prints behind. The earliest human footprints found so far, on the earth of “England”, were in mud by the River Thames 8000 centuries ago when it was about 30 miles further north in Norfolk and we were wandering after animals and seeking shelter in caves in gaps between coldest centuries of ice ages.

Perhaps the people that left those prints also carved or drew pictures on the ground or on trees or the rocks they passed by to say “we woz ere” like we still do today but maybe we will never know. We do know that in some parts of the world protected from the weather we have consciously been making hand prints to leave our impressions behind since at least 400 centuries ago.

And its not just child like hands and feet we left behind. We also told picture book stories of the animals we depended on in beautiful pictures that have survived for tens of thousands of years like these left in the caves of France and Spain at a time when the land around Cambrdige was still emerging from the ice.

As we wander across the the ground on this particular day, we may leave traces behind. Perhaps our footprints will survive if we unwittingly tread on some setting concrete or inadvertantly drop some durable litter that dodges the decaying arrow of time. We may pass tokens of affection left by others who passed this way and now stretched by the living bark of ancient trees, but like many before us we don’t intend to leave that much to last that far behind.

Pictures on walls

Eventually the weather calmed down and the milder more constant weather allowed us to stay in one place for a little more time. Around 8000 years ago not long after the ice started its last retreat northwards, we turned our sticks and stones to domesticating our animals and nurturing the food that they ate too, perfecting ways to cook it into palatable food for ourselves when the anumals were scarce. This took skill and not everyone could be good at everything so by coming together in the larger nests, that we call cities, like ants or bees we started taking on more specialised roles.

We believe that the first cities in the world started down here somewhere, probably in central turkey which was still greener then than it is today as the ice melted in the mountains, and the rains fell on the plains and rivers meandered to the sea.

Here in the honeycomb of rooms that we built at Çatalhöyük nearly 9000 years ago we adorned the mud walls with soot and ochre images of all our familiar animals as in our cave homes millenia before.

These early houses go over four times as far back as the ones the romans built when they settled by the bridge they built by the river at Londinium

Keeping tabs

As we continued to warm up and settle down in ever bigger towns or cities we specialised, trading skills for food and started counting to keep tally of who owed what to whom. Sometimes we needed to buy or sell something now that would leave us in debt until we received or delivered it. As time went on, to save disputed memories of who owed what, we created little tokens with pictures saying what was owed and how much by tokens inside. These ancient “piggy” banks were a shared clay contract that jogged our memories and kept us honest at payback time.

It was not long before the systems used for keeping count of stuff became more generally used for keeping records of anything. Even stuff that happened that could be replayed at will by those that could read the code. The specialist writers started to capture stories that had long been passed down the generations from parents to children and shared amongst friends by setting out picture books on clay for anyone later who could crack the pictorial code.

The first accounting codes used pictures to show what was being counted and notches to tell how many. The tablet below is forty centurues old and list details of what workers were paid for their labour.

And this one appears to list out payment in beer

Probably the oldest scripture found so far

Whether either Shuruppak or the lady Nisaba, whom he claims pressed these marks in the clay for him, existed we will never know. Like many stories written down at that time the concept of authorship was meaningless since the stories told of events in the distant past carried beyond their graves by the wise ancestors who had collectively seen it all before. The mythical Nisaba was worshipped by association with the precious grain, counting of it and writing itself.

Whether the person that pressed the marks in this particular clay tablet pictured above, actually thought the thoughts themselves we cannot know. Perhaps they just copied meaningless marks over from another one made earlier. Some precious framents of the oldest copy yet found, emerged from the earth in Iraq in our last century only to be destroyed by war, but luckily their content had been copied and lives on here.

Whoever, and wherever these thoughts were first thought, people had clearly started using writing, not just to record what had happened and who had paid what to who, but also to tell “people” out there what to do and not do too. The words reach far back in their story teller's past telling of a wise man's message to his son. The unscrambled ancient message goes something like this ...

In those days those distant days, in those nights those distant nights, in those years those faraway years lived a wise man who knew how to speak in elaborate words and passed on his wisdom to his son urging him to value the precious words of an old man.

These words date from the times when farming was a new thing and people had not so long ago settled down together, staying in one place long enough to brew ale, hoard stuff and suffer the problems of living cheek by jowl in cities:

You should not steal anything

You should not locate a field on a road.

You should not sit alone in a chamber with a married woman.

You should not build your house on the city square it is too busy

You should not pass judgement when you drink beer.

You should not abuse a ewe; otherwise you will give birth to a daughter. You should not throw a lump of earth into the money chest otherwise you will give birth to a son.

You should not speak improperly it will come back and bite you.

Hunger makes some people ascend the mountains; it also makes untrustworthy outsiders come down from the mountains.

Without suburbs a city has no centre.

You can grasp the neck of a huge ox to cross a river. By siding with powerful men in your city you will get on.

A loving heart maintains a family; a hateful heart destroys a family.

This gift of words is something which soothes the mind .... and these were given to a praiseworth lady called Nisaba who baked them into clay.

These notches set in clay were decoded by someone thousands of years later who had never spoken or written this particular language before but understood languages in general and how they evolve over time and could trace enough threads back to this particular time to decode the script now called Cuneiform and available to us thanks to a team based at Oxford University

Others followed and survived

For the next 17 centuries, based on what we have found so far, ancient writing seemed to continue to keep account of commerce and rulers laying down the law and imparting wisdom to inspire poor people to do good. Sometimes as commandments and sometimes as comforting examples that hard work and doing good pays off in the long run.

Some testaments dating back to this time have survived more completely and are even religiously observed, telling peoples stories of righteous wars, floods famine and exile and how to properly behave. These were stories that people wanted to believe and which stirred up pride and kept ordinary god fearing folk on side. Without the refuge of a religion to bind people to a righteous cause, descant into disorder and riots would surely lead to chaos and starvation for all.

Priests in their temples and rulers in their counting houses wrote the stories that fuelled the power of gods and kings .

Stories telling long tales of epic journeys and battles fought by mortal men performing superhuman feats immortalising them to the status of heroes or gods or the playthings of gods. Epic tales in greek of gods creating greeks and in hebrew of god creating isrealites and in sanskrit of the hindu gods and mortals all survive from around 28 centuries ago from the fertile river valleys of the middle east.

Verses in peotry and prose more easily learned by rote and chanted aloud of gods and men are still religiously observed today, but in Greece at around this time the people started to gain a voice and spirit of their own.

The histories

Papyrus is not as durable as clay still and the fragment above is the oldest that still survives of a chain of copies first written in Greek that have carried the stories told by a Greek called Herodutus all the way down to us today. In his time, Herodotus was one of a very few that could read and write so he read his stories out aloud at public gatherings like the olympic games, alongside stories of Homer or plays performed by actors.

Writing the first known history book he introduced it by saying:

In this book, I hope to preserve the memory of the past by capturing the amazing achievements of both us Greeks and our neighbours and explain how we came into conflict.

He was the first person we know of who sought to capture what had happened in the past in a more “objective” way, not seeking to impose a view although, of course the stories had to be entertaining too. He had travelled to far flung places and gave accounts of amazing animals and strange customs of people all around Europe, Africa and Asia as well as trying to separate his opinions from those of others.

the egyptian king sent out a fleet manned by Phoenicians to sail out of the persian gulf and right around Africa and come back into the mediterranean sea through the straits of Gibralter. They took two years to do it stopping each year somewhere on the coast long enough to grow new supplies of grain before continuing.

He also reports that they came back with a story that he for one did not believe, but he still wrote it down for posterity:

They said that as they sailed west around the southern tip of Africa they had the sun on their right (to the north)

We now know that they would have crossed the equator and those of us that live down under in the southern hemisphere where land is scarce know very well that the sun does indeed shine from the north at midday. We also know that the earth spins at a tilt that gives us the seasons in the temperate latitudes where the greeks and egyptians lived.

He also compared the Greeks who depended on unpredictable rains with the Egyptians who considered themselves more secure because of their mighty river nile continually watering their crops and quenching their thirst. Little details are scattered amongst the tales of bloodshed, heroics, betrayal and revenge wreaked by men starting, allegedly, when a few Phoenician traders put into a greek port to sell their wares and snatched some female customers and made off with them on their boat.

Since one was the King’s daughter it started a series of tit for tat including a few decades later the theft of Helen and the start of the Trojan war also recorded by Homer in his Illiad. These wars continued down to Marathon and the time when Herodotus himself was alive and the great battles between the Greeks and the Persians in the time of Xerxes were raging on the Greek mainland.

 Watch this space for more lives past and impressions left behind …

as the journey goes on