Page 46 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

from east to west, the westerners making do with gourds and bas­
kets and fashioning such clothing as they need from bark. But
even in the west they are no benighted savages. They have their
village councils, their division of labor, their songs and legends

and art forms; they have recited histories and genealogies going
back hundreds of years into the past. We must not assume that
they knew nothing of themselves merely because we know noth­

ing of them.

In three other parts of the world, each of them an area com­

parable with Europe in size, there were at the beginning of the
millennium groups of communities which farmed the earth for
their livelihood. Each of them, too, must have had its histories
and legends, its separate languages and nations, its wars and

kings and dynastic struggles. And each was composed of indi­
vidual men and women, working and playing, making war and

making love, worrying about next year’s harvest or the need to
renew the house roof or to keep the gods benevolent. Each of them
knew that his own community was the center of the universe, was

actively conscious of the neighboring communities within a few
days’ journey, and was vaguely aware of the total extent of the
farming area to which we, in our wisdom, ascribe him (though

he himself would have protested that the distant peoples of
“his” area were completely foreign, in customs and language
and appearance—as different as a Labrador lumberman and a

Mexican cattle rancher). And, with more or less interest, de­
pending on how close he lived to the center of his area, he would

know that there were other people outside the pale who had other
ways of life, hunters or herdsmen, nomads or city dwellers.
In one of these areas, stretching from the headwaters of the
Ganges across northeast India to Burma, Siam, and Indochina,

the inhabitants were as actively aware as were the European
backwoodsmen—and perhaps the African gardeners—of a liter­

ate “industrialized” civilization on their borders. The nearest
towns of the organized kingdoms of the Indus valley lay in con­
siderable numbers in the hill country between the Indus and the

Ganges, and one or two new towns had recently been built close
to the upper Ganges itself. Traders and prospectors must have