How the World Made the West

Kindle Highlights

A Single Sail

The name of Shu-ilisu, a translator of the “Meluhha-language” spoken in the Indus Valley, is preserved on a tiny cylinder seal found in Mesopotamia and dating from c. 2300 BCE: Louvre Museum AO 22310.

Their lives were not in their own terms primitive, nor distinctively poor: they had not read the great European intellectuals of the eighteenth century, and they did not know that history was supposed to be a march forward toward urbanism, commerce, and the law.

Pioneers took local wild grasses with small, easily dispersed seeds and by careful and repeated selection they nudged them into producing fat, firmly attached grains, easier for humans to harvest, eat, and process into flour but now in need of human intervention to reseed.

The first journeys through the Levant happened overland. Those donkeys must have trudged across the Sinai Peninsula and up the Levantine coast before turning inland toward the rivers.[21] Even slow and indirect connections can have dramatic effects, however, and they may explain the writing system that appeared in Egypt in the late fourth millennium, now called hieroglyphic from the Greek for “sacred writing.” It is entirely unrelated in formal terms to Mesopotamian cuneiform, but the appearance of written language for the first time in the world at more or less the same time in two different places would be a remarkable coincidence.