The Invention of History | The Sumerian Saga: Part 1

“For 99 percent of human history, we were ghosts”.

But then what rough beast slouched toward Bethlehem to be born?

A boy with a name. A boy named Sue. An affectionate diminutive, for Sumeria. The time is 7500 years before Now.

And yes, there were scattered fumblings at proto-cities earlier than that, and starting at 7500 YBP exactly is thus only a rhetorical device. (Get all Egyptian for instance if you like, over there on your blog. I promise to read it.)

But an advantageous device, since Sumeria was also one of the first places where Writing, and thus civilized History began, only 5000 years ago at most.

The tiniest scrap of human time and in a way the only scrap of time ever, floating for this brief moment we call now, on a vast sea of ghostly timelessness.

The narrator will explain to you, should you have ears to hear, why you, a mere 3000 generations later, still love the aesthetics of adobe wrought from an otherwise impoverished landscape.

More importantly, why your grandpa traded in the noble role of nomadic savage for that of ruled and enslaved domestic cityzen, for nothing but a mess of barley pottage and the lie of an Education and a ‘better life for his kids’.

His grandfather once spilled his own religion in paint, in caves, but he had to settle for attending someone else’s temple, and paying his tithe to his masters upon every dutiful visit.

I’m sure that daddy called that loving-you, and that you had every reason to believe that’s what it was.

But nevertheless, he was a deeply foolish man, and he sold your ass to some king, in the name of that love. Forget that fact at your soul’s peril.

Human animals, “organized to achieve a single goal”, as ‘workers’, instead of free peoples.

But who organized them, and said what the goal would be?

Forget to ask, and become your grandfather, all over again in bitter cyclic civilized pain.

As you can see, I’m only 14 minutes in.

But that’s enough, to notice how everyone is working so hard, except for those privileged few who are only Overseers.

The lie you were raised with said that the point of living was to become one of Them.

Do you still believe it, even now?