Page 21 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE CITIES

| hf. first rays of sunlight of the Second Millennium

b.c. strike almost horizontally across the Arabian desert. They
glow pearly white through the low mists that overhang the newly

sown fields on either side of the Nile, which still runs strongly,

though now back in its own bed after the autumn inundation.
Above the mists the villages of square reed and adobe houses,

each on the mound that raises it over the floods, are places of clear­

cut light and shadow. Already they are stirring, thin pencils of
smoke arising from the fenced yards, and the geese cackling

against the muted sound of rubbing-stone on quern where women
are grinding millet for the morning meal. Sleepily, and pulling his

whitish linen loincloth around him, a man steps out of a doorway

and looks towards the sun and the dissipating mists.
It is a morning like any other morning. For him it is not the

beginning of a millennium; not even the beginning of a year. It is

in fact almost exactly a month since he celebrated New Year’s
Day by his reckoning, and he is not to know that an era will begin

precisely two thousand Gregorian years later. But the inundation

is over; the fields have been plowed and sown with millet and
barley and flax, as they have been sown after the inundation since

the beginning of time; and now will follow the period of compara­

tive leisure, with planting of vegetables and fishing and fowling,
until the strengthening sun and the falling river make watering of

the growing crops a long and wearying prelude to the harvest.

So has it always been. So it will always be.

It has not always been so. The Egyptian farm laborer, stand­
ing in the morning sunshine on the outskirts of his village on the

upper Nile, knows nothing of the time, probably even then five to