Page 168 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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THE WIDE VIEW (I)

J^or five chapters we, the writer and—I hope—the

reader of this book, have been living among the people who in­
habited the world between 2000 and 1650 b.c. The temptation is
strong to write “living down among the people. . . The tend­
ency to “rise above” the scene and events being described re­
quires conscious resistance; it seems proper for us of a later day
to see the events of the far past from a viewpoint which it feels
natural to call “above,” or at least “outside.”
We are, of course, “outsiders.” We were not there. Through
the period with which we are dealing events were occurring in
three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. The space
dimensions were exactly as extensive, and movement along the
time dimension was just as slow, as in our own space and time.
Mesopotamia was as far away from Great Langdale then as it
is now, and a century was a hundred years of 365 days of pre­
cisely the same length as one of our own days. But it does not
feel like that. We sit outside the space-time continuum of the pe­
riod, and see the nations of the world in a moment of time and
the life of a man as a brief flicker of a candle.
This situation of godlike detachment is bad for the soul, and
undoubtedly bad for the judgment. For one thing, it permits us to
use our judgment—and we are not competent to judge. Un­
earthly wise after the event, we see “trends,” and apparently ir­
resistible marches of events, irresistible purely because they were
not, in the event, resisted, or not adequately resisted, or perhaps
not desired to be resisted. In any history covering a large extent
of space and time such trends cannot entirely be disregarded;
nor is it proper that they should be, for they are facts, they did