3200 Before Common Era: Writing

“Good morning.” It’s Kushim, proud Sumerian, honored Uruki accountant. Today, Kushim will pray for Inanna’s grace as he shuffles the dusty streets to visit taxpayers. At every house, he sharpens his reeds, wedges the points into wet clay slabs, and indents lines that take a whole day to harden, even in sun.

            It’s the real Year One. The dawn of fact. First moment in history. The beginning of collective memory. From this day forward, we are being recorded.

            Kushim documents the matters of the state, with no statesman present. He documents transactions of the Leaders of the Plow, the Leaders of the Lambs, the Leaders of the Law, and the other leaders, grain-grinders, metalworkers, potters, butchers, bakers, brewers, ditchdiggers, sewage-haulers, taxpayers all. Kushim documents our goods and provisions, our cows, geese, goats, pigs, barley bushels, carven beads, and bits of bronze. He documents the priest-kings’ plots of land.

            In five thousand years, we’ll still be reading Kushim’s words, though the hand he used to write them no longer moves.

3100 Before Common Era: Money

Barley smells nutty, sweet. Its fragrance infuses the air of Mesopotamia. Sumerians have always hulled its seeds, cooked up heady stews, and dried whole stalks to soak in barrels for malt.

            Now the priests of Ninlil shall decree barley the blood of society, and the barley flows in bundles from farmers to servants to merchants: a go-between for services and goods. Before, a singer sang for beer, a cobbler traded shoes to eat a butcher’s meat, a barber sheered a head to dress in shepherd’s wool or sleep the night in bed. But this new priestly sorcery – money – makes exact change out of songs, food, shoes, clothing, shelter, even sex and salvation.

            Money conjures real currency from simple barley, turns all to commodity, and leads us by an invisible hand into debt, talents, debt, shekels, debt, mina, debt, staters, debt, dollars, debt, drachmas, debt, rupees, debt, yen, debt, bitcoin, debt.

3000 Before Common Era: Time

A Sumerian man extends an arm, palm faced outward, as if to motion stop, except he’s measuring. Up and down the middle of the sky, the Sun’s path over Sumer equals twelve hand-lengths. Call those dozen lengths of hands the hours.

            Sumerians also tally hours on the ground. Upright objects in daylight throw consistent shadows. Draw a ring around a twig, divide the circle into twelves. From dawn, the Sun will dial along a dozen hand-length hours.

            For a million generations, every life has led through luck and strife to random death. But now, we’re telling time. We script a human regulation to nature’s open rhythm.

723 Common Era: Clocks

Emperor Ming of Tang could absolutely get used to this. Tick. Whoosh. Tick. Whoosh. A more organic, yet more mechanical, rhythmic accompaniment for his lovemaking. Tick. Whoosh. Far more congruous than the courtly players and their obsequious flutes. This instrument’s pulses even accentuate the giggles and moans of his wives and concubines. Tick. Whoosh.

            Well out of earshot of Ming’s gross, cosmic-and-state-regulated procreation ministrations, past the suits of armor in the main hall of the Palace of Great Brilliance, within the main lab of the Astronomy Department of the College of All Sages, Tang’s most esteemed star-watching mathematicians raise bronze cups of botanical spirits to the problem-solving genius of one of their own, the honorable I-Hsing, whose success inventing the Water-Driven Spherical Bird’s-Eye-View Map of the Heavens has saved them from certain beheading. “To the scholar whose mind is in tune with the Tao!” they toast.

            I-Hsing’s marvel may not accurately calculate the auspicious hour for the conception of Ming’s heir, but Ming’s pleasure at the mere sound of the thing is a boon to the fortitude of his yang. And perhaps his new timepiece will also dampen distracting conjugal asides from the empress. “Tapestries,” she’d said, in the midst of Ming’s thrusts. “What the royal ceiling needs is tapestries.”

            Forget them. From this day forward, Ming enjoys the gentle tinkle of trickling waters, coupled with a periodic clacking of jacks, punctuated by that patient, consistent bell. Ding! No coitus had ever commenced so cadenced.

1450: Capitalism

Off the coast of Morocco, Portuguese sailors discover an ideal land for sugar creation: a mountainous, uninhabited island so forest-filled they name it Madeira, their word for wood. Within thirty years, Portugal’s enslaved African laborers clear the Madeiran woodland and plant green canes from shore to shore.

            Human bodies require and digest many ingredients, but the only fare that feeds our brains is sugar. Our metabolism turns other foods into it. We’re built to crave the sweet stuff. But sugar crops require tending and watering under hot sun, rushed harvesting, and processing in dangerous boiling houses. Machete carriers work alongside mill feeders, prepared to lop off arms in case hands get caught. Scalding sugar sticks to skin like glue, eating into muscle before it cools.

            Because no person should be forced to work on sugar plantations, Europeans decide a slave counts less than a person. And because the fuelwood of Madeira won’t sustain sugar refinement, Europeans sail to seek more sugar islands. Soon their Age of Discovery will find them pillaging the Americas.

            On Madeira, Portugal conceives of humankind’s enduring global system: capitalism. From Madeira, we set the new course for existence, chasing commodity frontiers, using unfree people to clear a land, no matter who lives there, reseed a land, no matter what grew there, strip a land for all that it’s worth, and then move on.

1837: Telecommunications

Ever since we could speak, we’ve tried to be heard from far away. To throw our voices, we’ve learned to pass notes: glints of sunlight off chips of glass, puff of smoke, trained pigeon, flashing beacon, waving flag, horseback, steamship, locomotive . . .

            It’s the 1830s. We’re in charge of ingenious machinery. Our superpowered engines drive on leashes of coal and electricity. Even still, it takes a year for messages to circumnavigate the globe.

            Many scientists, engineers, and businessmen cooperate, incorporate, compete, secure funding, litigate, build up networks of information-sharing innovation, and boast quite loudly. Famine rages in Ireland, Indigenous families across the United States are being forced from their homes, and British soldiers are murdering Aboriginal people in Australia by the millions. But instead of raising money and using machines to solve these evils, the rich are talking about talking.

            Over sending sources of electricity, through insulated lines to receiving indicators and back, along Earth-return circuits – electromagnetism delivers distant words instantly.

            Samuel Morse’s taps in Washington beep in Baltimore STOP He wonders aloud what God has wrought STOP World shrinks as economy expands STOP We can whisper everywhere at once STOP But what are we saying STOP .-- . / -.-. .- -. / .-- .... .. ... .--. . .-. / . ...- . .-. -.-- .-- .... . .-. . / .- - / --- -. -.-. . / ... - --- .--. / -... ..- - / .-- .... .- - / .- .-. . / .-- . / ... .- -.-- .. -. --. / ... - --- .--.