Dakota Beacon

Human interest stories sell. Many local newspapers carry periodic pieces recounting events from yesteryear. Retrieved from the dusty archives are personal tidbits and scraps of inconsequential history from the surrounding community.

“Ten years ago today the Little Town football team beat the City Slickers in an overtime game.”

“Twenty-five years ago today the old shed near the corner of 5th and Elm burned down. Cause was unknown.”

New Year festivities around our house are fairly subdued. The atmosphere is almost lethargic after the hubbub of Christmas. Inevitably the conversation rolls around to events of the past year. The good times, the bad times, and the ugly, are typically hashed out.

With the old year spent and the new year pending, idleness gives way to speculation, and then to curiosity. “Imagine living with the cartoon characters in BC,” one quipped. “What would we read in the archives of ‘The Tablet’?” Indeed, if there were newspapers a few millennia ago, we would find some astonishing headlines. Now THAT is an understatement.

Browsing through an old copy of “The People’s Chronology” revealed some real eye-openers. This volume comprises in excess of 1200 pages listing significant events by date beginning with 3 million BC and progressing to the modern era.

The future is unknowable, but the past is quite recognizable. How illuminating it is to observe how people adjusted to their environment and adapted to their circumstances over the millennia.

As I skimmed the chronological listings I became oblivious to the present. I spent the next couple of hours delving into the past and digesting factoids.

For example, four thousand years ago, give or take several decades, people had much the same interests as they do today. Agriculture was a big deal 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 well established in Central America as well. Babylonians were using decimals in calculations. Phoenicians were using three and four mast boats with square sails to dominate the seas. Europe remained in the Stone Age.

Thirty-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 the area of Austria, emerged from the Stone Age into the Iron Age following the Near East by about four hundred years. Grain yields in Egypt were as bountiful then as any harvest reaped twenty centuries later.

Twenty-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. The 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 use of the term “drum beat of time” is irrefutable.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed, I eventually closed the volume. Fascinating stuff, this history. The past 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 –

Have a Happy New Year!

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