Page 457 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE BEGINNING OF AN ERA

VER ALL the world many individuals of many nations
glance briefly at the sunset of an ordinary day, and do not know
that by our reckoning the sun that day is setting upon a millen­
nium. It is an ordinary day in an ordinary year, and the sun will
rise again tomorrow. And life will go on.
A thousand years have passed since we watched the sunrise
of another ordinary day, and now the sun sets on a very differ­
ent world. Thirty generations lie between the people upon
whom the sun of the Second Millennium b.c. rose and those upon
whom it sets. And the people have changed. Over much of the
world the language and the physical type, the dress and the
equipment have changed completely. Especially the equipment.
Whereas the knives and nails and hammers and saws that we use
today are recognizably the same as were used in King Alfred’s
day a thousand years ago, the people of Europe in 1000 b.c. use
swords of bronze where a thousand years before their ancestors
used flint spearheads, and in the Near East the farmers use sickles
of iron where their forefathers used bronze. Our own millennium
of progress has seen not a single new domestic animal, but the
horse and the camel—and perhaps the llama—have come with
the Second Millennium b.c. And it may be that the Sword is as
great an innovation as the Bomb.
Looking back on thirty generations (as no one alive in
1000 b.c. could have done) we can trace trends and movements,
and perhaps even causes and effects, whereas in the preceding
chapters we have only recorded events.
At the opening of the millennium there exist in the Middle
East civilized cities and peoples, with an economy based on
bronze and a tendency to coalesce into three or four larger units,