Page 9 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Introduction

bad place to end. Three hundred years before 2000 b.c. the first
of the great conquerors, Sargon of Akkad, had pushed to the
Mediterranean from the land of the Two Rivers, showing the
way for all future empires, while bronze was well on its way into
Stone-Age Europe. And at the close of our story in 1000 b.c. the
Assyrians were only beginning an expansion which was to end
with the establishment of another empire in the Middle East,
while the use of iron was beginning its spread from the east over
Bronze-Age Europe. But anywhere at all is a bad place to start
and a bad place to end. In this book we are not trying to follow
a single thread or a single pattern in the embroidered damask of
history; we are trying to view the whole cloth, the whole weft
and woof, all the threads and patterns which go to form the long
tapestry of mankind’s story, and wherever we cut this cloth we
cut across a multitude of patterns. Nor is there any special virtue
in the years 2000 and 1000 b.c.—except that they are convenient
dates for us to remember, and that a thousand years is a con­

venient length of cloth out of which to make a book.
This book is not meant for professional historians or profes­
sional archaeologists. But as some of these estimable people will
be forced to read it for review purposes, it is seemly that I apolo­
gize in advance to them—to the historian because I tell him
nothing new and because I take sides on questions where the
responsible historian sits on the fence, with the perfect justifica­
tion that the ground on either side of the fence is a morass with
no certain footholds and that only from the fence can the foot­
holds be reliably charted—to the archaeologist because I have
frequently used the term “people” where he would use the term
“culture.” I am aware that he uses the word “culture” not as jargon
or expertise, but precisely in order not to beg the question of
whether a distinctive collection of artifacts, which is what he
finds, presupposes a distinctive people. I have simply, and nn-
scientifically, begged this question, as I have begged innumerable
questions throughout.

My defense is that I have tried to give the situation as it
probably appeared to the people living at the time. They knew
whether what we now only know as a “culture” was a people or
not; they knew which side of a now disputed historical question