Page 8 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Introduction

events, unrelated, take place at the same time is not always
brought out with sufficient clarity for my mind to grasp. It was
long before I realized that the fall of Constantinople to the Turks
(a.d. 1453) and the discovery of America (a.d. 1492) took place
within a single lifetime. This is not perhaps important. But it was

important to the people living that lifetime, and we cannot his­
torically appreciate these people unless we adopt much the same
measure of relative importance as they had.
It is to a large degree a question of scale. Archaeologists
have been for some decades faced with the same sort of problem.
In their drawings of plans and sections, in their photographs of
minor objects and architectural features and town sites, they
used to lay a graduated scale alongside the object or beside the
building. They found that this not only did not help the viewer,
but could even mislead; they recalled too well the shock of dis­
covering that a photographed scale thought to be graduated in
feet was actually in centimeters. Of late, archaeologists have been
introducing something new into their pictorial records—the lay
figure. On site photographs, a single workman will be standing
stolidly, with pick poised, to give a human scale; small objects

are photographed in the hand, or between finger and thumb;
the “average man” is drawn into the sections and plans. A man
is not as accurate a scale as a six-foot rule, but he is easier to
assimilate. The scale of the structure is immediately related to
things human and ordinary.
This book is an attempt to introduce a similar device into
history, to give a human perspective to time scales. We are here
dealing with a thousand years. And a thousand years is, after all,
but fourteen lifetimes measured by the conventional scale of
threescore years and ten. So alongside the tale of this thousand
years are set fourteen “lifetimes”; fourteen lay figures will obtrude
themselves in turn, chapter by chapter, to point the passage of
time between the events recorded. This is, of course, the device of
the historical novel; but here the human actors are for the most
part anonymous spectators of and participators in history, purely
—and it is hoped unobstrusively—present to give the scale of
elapsed time in our journey from 2000 to 1000 b.c.

The year 2000 is a bad place to begin, and the year 1000 a