Sand and Time

I’ve just started on Samuel E. Finer’s magnum opus, The History of Government from the Earliest Times. The opener on the Sumerian City-States, set in the desert cradle of human civilisation, is already a piece of classic writing in itself.

It bespeaks a well-researched, elegantly narrated, rigorously analytical account of an utterly vanished, half-forgotten polity from mankind’s dawn. It promises an epic exploration, the likes of which can only be obliquely reflected in the wildest cinema adventures of the famed Indiana Jones and Lara Croft; an expedition to lost cities and once-mighty empires, to crumbled, crumpled cyclopean ziggurats amidst palm-speckled oases, to monumental ruins rising from dune-covered desolation. It uncovers a tantalising glimpse of timeless truth from the long past. It foretells whispers, pregnant with portent and omen, of inescapable lesson for even the farthest future. It makes for a compelling read:

“This History begins with the Sumerian city-states because it has to: these city-states in the south of Mesopotamia are the first states we encounter in recorded history. They first appear c.3500 B.C. By the time their form of writing had developed from pictograms to the true cuneiform script, c.2900-2800, the clay tablets on which it was impressed were numerous enough for Sumerologists to form an impression of the way these states were constituted, and – in very broad outline – how they were governed.

But there are further reasons for beginning with these city-states. Not merely are they the first attestations of the state-form, but the polity we infer from the archaeology and the clay documents is no primitive emergent structure, like some of the African ones described by anthropologists. What is amazing is that here, at the very dawn of recorded history, we should find, not states with few functions and feeble means of execution, nor fragile and exiguous political structures, but the very opposite: states that are organised and administered, so it would seem, to the last degree. It is as if government as we conceive it today had already arrived, fully fledged, at the first moment the records begin to speak. The same miraculous parthenogenesis will be witnessed, not much later, on the banks of the Nile.”

- Finer, Vol I, pg 104 (emphasis is my own).

http://arch-nsha.deviantart.com/art/Ozymandias-200946633