First Civilizations

The First Civilizations

The first civilizations. Sumer and Egypt, flourished beside great rivers between 5000 and 500 BC. Sumerian village prospered on the flat plains watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, while the flooding waters of the River Nile left fertile silt for Egyptian farmers to sow their crops.

These large societies organized their resources. They developed irrigation systems to direct and control the floodwaters, and store them for later use. They invented the plow and the wheel, which they used for chariots and to make pottery. People made laws to govern society and developed their knowledge of subjects such as mathematics.

New groups in society, such as priests ans skilled craftspeople, began to emerge. The Egyptians and Sumerians exchanged local produce at regional centers, but they also traded outside their own countries for goods they needed, such as timber. They began to keep records of their trade, and early systems of writing developed. The fist civilizations were large and successful. They were the basis for the way society is organized today.

Jewels from afar

Trade in precious stones gave Sumerians jewelers new materials to use. This necklace is made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian from the Indus Valley.

Royal Skin

Egyptian royalty and priests sometimes wore the skins of exotic animals. Princess Nefertiabt wore the skin of a leopard.

Human Civilization. Photo by Elena.

Wind Power

By about 3200 BC, the Egyptian had invented sails to pwer their boats, rather than relying on oars. This enabled them to explore father for trade.

For the Queen's Court

The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut sent a trade expedition wodn the Red Sea to the ancient land of Punt. The Egyptians loaded their ships with frankincese trees, elephants' tusks, ebony, gold, spices and exotic animals such as panthers.

Written Words

Ancient people inscribed pictures on stone and clay to record events, actions, or details of trade. This stone tablet is a very early example of record keeping in Sumer. Its pictures show how much grain was traded. Pictographs, however, soon became more abstract symbols. The Sumerians developed wedge-shaped cuneiform (from the Latin for wedge) characters, which they wrote on clay tablets with a pointed instrument called a stylus. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus or inscribed their tombs and temples with a picture writing called hieroglyphs.  

The Dreamers

The Dreamers

By Stephen Baxter

From the beginning, even when the universe was still very young, there was life.

Life self-organized, from collections of more or less simple chemicals, blindly following the laws of chemistry and physics, guided by mathematical rules evidently inherent in reality. Microbial life, single-cell life, viral life... Some scientists used to think life could have emerged even when the Big Ban glow was still bright, and the whole universe was warm enough to be one big habitable zone.

On world with similar surface conditions, similar kinds of life emerged... Life spread, too, as rogue comets and asteroids blasted the surfaces of the young worlds, and handfuls of bugs buried deep in rock fragments survived chance journeys between the planets, and, more rarely, between the stars. Panspermia bubbles formed, worlds with similar conditions hosting related forms of life, sharing common origins. Across the Galaxy such bubbles jostled, and even permeated; world of warm-Earth life could share stellar systems with worlds of cold-Titan life, as you've seen for yourselves.

And life spread inward too, down into the guts of the world, following deep water flows, mineral seeps, leaks of heat energy, radioactivity... The interiors of worlds, too deep even for the immense bombardments of the young cosmos to do any damage, were warm, safe cradles in those early days, and life got down there pretty quickly – on Earth we found deep bugs all over the world, all of similar species. The deep rock is a static shelter, though, and relatively starved of energy. Life was slow to spread, even slow to procreate. To survive on such thin resources, living things learned to repair rather than to reproduce. But gradually a kind of complexity grew and spread, as the microbes gathered themselves into mutually supportive colonies, and the colonies combind into supercolonies.

A threshold was passed. Consciousness emerged.

The Dreamers. Photo by Elena.

On Earth, most of the biomass of the planet – most of its weight of living stuff – dwells in the deep subsurface rocks. For most of their history, humans never even suspected it existed. And it is aware, a constellation of huge, slow minds. These are the Dreamers. They remember their birth, when the universe was young.

And world after world woke up...

From the beginning the great communities of Dreamers apprehended something of the universe around them.

They sensed the early battering of their worlds by the debris of planetary formation. They were tugged by the subtle tides exerted by their worlds' parent stars and sister planets. They could feel the slow geological evolution of their host world – an evolution shaped from the beginning by life itself; there's evidence that the presence of life on a planet like Earth, for instance, even helps stabilize the formation of continents.

Even multicellular life, when it evolved – infrequently, sporadically – served as a kind of sensory mechanism for the living worlds.

For some worlds, given the right conditions, with an atmosphere reasonably transparent to the parent star's radiation, energy could pour down from the sky onto the land and into the upper layers of the oceans, and the familiar miracles of complex life could come about. Photosynthesis, a chemical means to exploit the energy of stellar radiation. Grand rebuildings of oceans and atmospheres through the injections of such gases as oxygen or methane. The evolution of secondary forms of life – like Earth's animals – to feed off those products. But the outer layers of complex planetary life, so important to creatures like humans, were all but an irrelevance to the Dreamers. They only ever amounted to a trivial fraction of any world's total biomass. And the complex creatures were usually not even aware of the noostrata that pemeated the rocks beneath their feet.

Yet, through the frantic reactions of the complex forms, animals and plants, to external events like asteroid strikes or stellar flares or supernova explosions, the Dreamers came to know the universe in more detail.

Even then, far back in cosmic time, the Dreamers began to get the first hints of the approach of the End Time.

And then there was communication, between Dreamer worlds.

Dreamers worlds. Illustration by Elena.

Expatriates

Expatriates

A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

By James Wesley, Rawles

Wyndhamites

“Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even mor so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.”

(Aaron Zelman and L.Neil Smith, Hope, 2001.

Wyndham, Western Australia – Late November, Western Australia – Late November, the Second Year

Peter and Joseph snugged up the mooring lines at the pier while Tatang shut down the engine. They began unloading the suitcases from Tiburon, carrying them up a ribbed aluminum gangway ramp, which had rollers at the end to adjust for the tide. A woman from the crowd stepped up the Rhiannon and  said, “My name is Vivian and you're all welcome to stay at our house in Wyndham East while you get things sorted out.”

“God bless you, ma'am,” Rhiannon replied.

They were told that the pier was primarily used for exports of live cattle, cattle hides, lead, and zinc. The barge nearby was laden with zinc ingots nominally bound for South Korea, but the shipment was delayed by the international financial turmoil. The pier operator offered them three nights of free anchorage at the pier or indefinite free anchorage amid the larger group of yachts farther out, where a skiff would be required to reach them. Tatang opted for the latter.

After they had unloaded the baggage and their two GPS receivers, they borrowed skiff from the harbormaster and anchored Tiburon using a permanent buoy at the fore and and a concrete anchor at the aft.

With the engine still hot, Tatang gingerly removed the Mitsubishi engine's fuel pump and wrapped it in rags and then a pair of bread bags. The pump went into his duffel bag. He told Jeffords, “Nobody is starting her motor without this.”

Expatriates. Photo by Elena.

Vivian soon had them and their bags loaded in her Toyota Estima minivan. Rhiannon was impressed with how quickly and with such wordless economy of motion the woman attached the baggage to the car's roof rack with bungee cords. She looked like she had a lot of experience doing it. Her full name, Alvis Edwards, was a broker in both salt and exotic hardwoods.

In just a few minutes, they were at Vivian's home in Wyndham East. It was a large house and one of the few in town that had a swimming pool. The great room was lined with taxidermied trophy heads from three continents – mostly from Africa. A childless couple, the Edwards' passion was big game hunting. Vivian told them that they had taken many hunting trips to Africa, Canada, the United States, and even Argentina. The floor was mostly covered with tanned hides of everything from bears to zebras. The backs of the couches were draped with gazelle hides. Joseph spent a long a long time examining the trophy mount collection of such magnitude before and they were fascinated. Tatang observed that it was like walking into a museum. To Rhiannon, it was reminiscent of living room of the house near Bella Coola where she had grown up, though her old house had a much smaller number of deer, elk, and caribou mounts.

(About the author: Former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and survivalist James Wesley, Rawles, is a well-known survival lecturer and author Rawles is the editor of SurvivalBlog.com – the nation's most popular blog on family preparedness. He lives in an undisclosed location west of the Rockies and is the author of the bestselling Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse; and a nonfiction survival guide, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It).

Phasma

Star Wars: Phasma

By Delilah Dawson

Scanning the sands before them, Siv saw two things. The first was a stranger fence made of meta; wore stretching forever in either direction. The second was a figure glittering so bright that it burned her eyes to look at it.

Without a word, the lead GAV changed its direction, aiming for the figure. Siv couldn't tell from so far back whether it was a structure, a droid, a machine, or something different. Another mystery seen only from far off involved white placards placed at equal distances along the fence, flapping against the metal and making an eerie, toneless song as they were buffered by the wind. Any writing that had been there had long ago been scoured away. The fence went on and on, rising stark against the bright-blue sky, and they didn't slow as they approached.

When they were almost within blaster-rifle range of the bright thing, the first GAV skidded to a halt. Brendol and Phasma's vehicle drew even with it and stopped, as did Siv's. All in a row, engines growling, they stared at the puzzling figure. Phasma pulled out her quadnocs, considered the scene, and handed them down to Brendol. He, too, looked a long time, and when the 'nocs dropped, he was frowning, his whole face bright red and dripping with sweat.

“What is it?” he asked Phasma.

She took her dead. “Nothing I've ever seen before”.

“The way the sun reflects off it,” Torben said. “It burns my eyes.”

An extraterrestrial member of the Enterprise starship. Photo by Elena.

The two leaders hopped down from their vehicle, and Phasma gestured to her warriors to join her while Brendol consulted his troopers. Even with the quadnocs, Siv couldn't tell what the bright thing might be, and she had the sharpest sight among the Scyre folk.

Gosta sidled up to Siv and tried the quandoncs herself. 

“Stranger,” she muttered. “It's too lumpy for a machine, but too shiny for a living thing.”

Brendol put a hand on Gosta's shoulder. “You're still injured. You stay here and guard the GAVs. Everyone else, have your weapons ready.” He pulled his own blaster and fiddled with the switches on the side. “This is not normal.”

“Well, what is, these days?” Torben said, hefting his club and ax.

The troopers went first, blaster rifles up and ready, their boots slipping through the sand. Phasma came next, Siv and Torben flanking her. Brendol came last, his blaster shaking in his hand as sweat dripped down his forehead in a way that Siv found nearly blasphemous when she glanced back. Gosta clearly hated staying behind, but she held her blaster and took her place in the back of her behicle as the others crept up the hill. Defying Brendol had somehow become as ridiculous a thought as defying Phasma.

The whole thing seemed silly to Siv. If the mysterious object was a machine, it either was deactivated or had been tracking them all along. If it was an animal, it was stupid or slow, as it hadn't budged. She couldn't think of anything else that could pose a real threat, and yet Brendol commanded them to sneak up on it? Still, her leader was following his orders, and so she would follow Phasma.

Closer and closer they crept in plain sight, every blaster aimed, every bit of metal reflecting in the sun, and still the glittering thing didn't make and move whatsoever. Soon Siv could make out the true shape of it, and it reminded her of a statue she'd seen in Arratu, a piece of claywork vaguely in human form, apparently representing some much-loved Arratu of time past. The shape was lumpy like that, and yet the material wasn't anything she'd seen before.

Ultima

Ultima

By Stepĥen Baxter

Soon they had their fields laid out and plowed. It was hard work. The lack of draft animals, and a paucity of machines away from the richest ayllus, meant there was a reliance on human muscle. But for all they grumbled, Romans were used to hard work.

There seemed to be no seasons here, as far as Mardina could tell from interrogating baffled locals, though, she supposed a cycle of shorter and longer days, a “winter” created by selectively closing some of the light pools, could have easily been designed in. But then, much of the Incas' original empire on Terra had been tropical, where seasonal differences were small. This did mean that growing cycles, and the labor of farming, continued around the year; you didn't have to wait for spring.

Yet life wasn't all work. They might have to pay the mit'a, bu the legionaries soon learned they didn't  have to go hungry. If you fancied a supplement to your vegetable based diet, you could always go hunting in the rain forest, where there seemed to be no restrictions on what you took as long as you were reasonable frugal about it. There were big rodents, which the ColU called guinea pigs, that provided some satisfying meat, even if they were an easy kill. Smaller versions ran around some of the villages.

The lack of alcohol was one enduring problem. It seemed to Mardina that the local people didn't drink, in favor of taking potions of different kinds. Chicha, the local maize beer, was officially used only in religious ceremonies. After a time Quintus turned a blind eye to the illicit brewing of beer.

It grew wild in the forest... Photo by Elena.

The production of coca was part of the mit'a obligation. But you could grow it anywhere – it grew wild in the forest – and everybody seemed to chew it, from quite young children up to toothless grandmothers. Some of the legionaries tried it, taking it in bundles of pressed leaves with lime, and a few took to it; they said it made them feel stronger, sharper, more alert, and even immune to pain. Medicus Michael officially disapproved, saying that the coca was making your brain lie to you about the state of your body.

With time, the villagers started to invite the Romans to join in feasts to celebrate their various baffling divinities. The adults passed around the coca, smoked or drank various other exotic substances, played their noisy pan pipes, and danced what Mardina, who did not partake, was assured were expressions of expanded inner sensation, but looked like a drunken shambles to her. The children would hang lanterns in the trees, and everybody would sing through the nigh, and other communities would join in until it seemed as if the whole habitat was echoing to the sound of human voices.

The local people would always look strange to a Roman or Brikanti eye, Mardina supposed. The men wore brilliantly colored blanket-like tunics, and the women skirts and striped shawls and much treasured silver medallions. But they grew tall and healthy. Sickness was rare here. The medicus opined that most diseases had been deliberately excluded when the habitat was built, and it was kept that way by quarantine procedures of the kind legionaries had had to submit to  on arrival. And, if you ignored the forest-bird feathers that habitually adorned the black hair of the men, and the peculiar black felt hats with wide brims that the women sported, the people could be very attractive with almost a Roman look to their strong features.