History part 1: Farming to Persia

The other night I attempted to stop S from leaving to his room by lying on top of him, intending for this to delay him for about five minutes. Somewhere in the ensuing discussion he realized that I didn’t know anything about the Californian Missions, or actually almost anything else in world history. And he thought I might like history, since it helps organize and make sense of many things about the world (contrary to my impression that it is a whole bunch of unorganized statements about names killing other names and random anecdotes and dates attached to names, which sounded bad for knowledge compression). So he told me about it. It only took about six hours. Here is what I remember of the story (after a few more shorter discussions, but before looking anything up now, so probably false in many ways—I want to see what I remember):

History (of civilizations) can arguably be divided into three eras (or maybe this is just Western civilizations? Definitely something happened in China in all this time, but we didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure if it coincides era-wise). 

The first era stretched from about 4000BC to 1200BC and is fairly hazily understood. It started around when agriculture did. It is hard to know exactly when agriculture started, but we can actually pinpoint where very well, because genetics tells us that many modern agricultural species come from the same tiny part of the world. There are also the ruins of an extremely old city there. 

The writing around these ruins is in a strange pointy looking alphabet that is also used briefly on the front page of EconLog, and was apparently big in this first Era, and it’s sort of surprising that I haven’t come across it. Its letters somewhat correspond to ours and recognizably resemble them, and similarly for some other important alphabets. Wikipedia shows a table of these, and also the words from which the letters were derived. The original letters represent simplified pictures of the words. For instance R is a head. I am pretty sure that I have drawn the letter R as a head on shoulders before, when it needed decoration, which somehow makes me feel closer to my very distant ancestors—that we independently make the same mental connections reminds me that they were people with very specific familiar internal experiences.

There were a bunch of smallish empires (or whatever you call units of political control at that scale) in the general vicinity of Greece and the Middle East. They all sort of fell apart in around 1200 though it’s not entirely clear why. There was a massive volcano eruption which might have caused it. There is also some lasting reference to sea-men appearing, but nobody is sure what that is about. There were also some other things. Anyway, everything sort of fell apart for a bit, and there weren’t large units of political organization.

Incidentally, the mega-volcano is quite beautiful now. It is the one in the photo you often see of white buildings with domed blue roofs overlooking the sea. Actually there is a massive cliff leading down to the sea, and the sea is actually in the middle of the volcano, which is a terrifying circle big enough to nearly meet the horizon. If we ever want to go to a really pretty place, maybe we will visit.

When things regathered themselves at the start of the second era, some of the new empires roughly corresponded to ones that had been in similar places in the past. For instance, I think Greece did. At any rate, many of their stories came from that earlier time.

Sometime pretty early on in Greece’s history, Persia was a large and militarily successful empire to their East, which had never lost a war. It was run by Cyrus, then Darius, then Xerxes, but I’m not sure which one we were up to when they decided to attack Greece. 

(Darius was not the son of Cyrus, but upon Cyrus’ death apparently he suggested they decide who should be in charge by having a horse race, where the rider of the first horse to neigh got to be ruler, and then he fairly predictably set out to teach his horse to neigh on command, and got leadership. I get the impression that many of these early stories are pretty much made up, though this one at least sounds physically possible.)

Actually, history is long, that’s enough for now. Maybe there’ll be Part II another time, if everyone can hold out on telling me how much I have embarrassed myself so far.