Dakota Beacon

Human interest stories always sell. Often, at the transition of the year, local newspapers carry stories recounting events from times past. Retrieved from dusty archives are scraps and tidbits of inconsequential happenings. They might read something like this. “Ten years ago today the Little Town football team beat the City Slickers in an overtime game.” Or “Twenty-five years ago today the old shed near the corner of 5th and Elm burned down. Cause was unknown.”

With the old year spent and the new year pending, it is like that around our house. “Subdued” would be a good word to describe the changing of the years. We keep it simple. A quiet atmosphere prevails after the Holiday hubbub. Inevitably the conversation evolves to events of the past year. The good times, the bad, and the ugly all qualify for review.

Languor gives way to speculation driven by curiosity. “Imagine living in an age along with the cartoon characters depicted in BC,” one person quipped. “What would we read in the newspapers if there were any newspapers a few millennia ago?” Indeed, we might find some astonishing headlines. THAT would be an understatement.

Browsing through copies of “The People’s Chronology” and “Chronicle of the World” reveals eye-openers. These volumes each comprise more than 1200 pages listing noteworthy events by date beginning with 3 million BC and progressing to the modern era. See, history has been with us a long time.

The future may be unknowable, but the past remains quite recognizable and well documented. How illuminating it is to observe the way people adjusted to their environment and adapted to their circumstances over millennia.

Skimming the chronological listings, I became oblivious to the present. The next few hours I spent delving into the past and digesting factoids.

For example, four thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries, people had much the same interests as they do today. Agriculture was important in most regions of the world. Watermelon was cultivated in Africa, figs in Arabia, tea and bananas in India, and apples in the Indus Valley. Agriculture was also well established in Central America. Babylonians were using decimals in calculations. Phoenicians were using three and four mast boats with square sails to dominate the seas while Europe remained in the Stone Age.

Three-thousand five hundred years ago Aryan nomads from the Eurasian steppes invaded the Indian subcontinent. Egyptians used geometry to survey field boundaries. Chinese were weaving silk.

By 998 BC, about three thousand years ago, the Celts in Austria, emerged from the Stone Age and breached the Iron Age following in the footsteps of their Near East cousins by about four hundred years. Grain yields in Egypt were as bountiful then as any harvest reaped twenty centuries later.

Two-thousand five hundred years ago, around 498 BC or so, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that “India is the farthest known region of the inhabited world to the East”. At the same time, ironically, China was developing into a great civilization. Conversely, tribes in the Caucasus Mountains were practicing cannibalism.

Government giveaway programs are nothing new. Two thousand years ago, not long after Christ’s birth, the number of Romans receiving free grain rose from 150,000 to 320,000 in the space of fifty years. Most of Rome’s imported grain came from Egypt and North Africa.

In AD 1003 the Norse mariner Thorfinn Karlsefni left Greenland with three ships for a 3-year visit to the northern continent in the Western Hemisphere. His attempt to establish a settlement proved unsuccessful. Indians preferred fresh fish to lutefisk.

It is amazing how unaware we are of the passage of time when thoroughly absorbed with contemporary bobbles and gadgets. Ultimately, the term “drum beat of time” seems irrefutable. To cite a 3200-year-old document written by a very wise guy, “There is no new thing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Feeling a bit overwhelmed, I eventually closed these volumes. Fascinating stuff, this history. It has been with us a long, long time.

As a New Year dawns, our own challenges confront us. What will we add to a clean slate making our own marks on the continuum of time? Ponder that. Meanwhile, ponder this –

Have a Happy New Year!

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).