Reflections On The Number 4,000

(image from here)

Oh no, you're thinking, is he going to start writing in this blog six days a week? That's just so much more to ignore! I am not. No, I've been thinking about what I mentioned in this post, which is, I have past four thousand posts on this blog.  It seems like a lot.

But is it?  Four thousand days is just under eleven years (if there were no leap years, eleven years would count as 4,015 days).  Self Help Radio turns 20 next week, & this blog began in 2006, so if I wrote in this blog every day, I would've hit four thousand posts around 2017 or so.

But four thousand years is a lot of years.  Look at that map up there of the what the world looked like around 2000 BCE.  (Four thousand years ago would be 1978 BCE or maybe 1979 BCE since there wasn't a year 0. I have simply forgotten how to properly math.)  That is astonishing.

Human were everygoddamwhere except New Zealand & some very northern places.  (I don't know about Polynesia though & am too lazy to look that up.)  It was the Bronze Age & that would last until around 1200 BCE.  & you can see most of the world was not really working with bronze.  & good for them!

There were only a few Bronze Age cultures, many of which I am ashamed to admit I don't know much about - they're in orange up there.  Fewer still were "state societies" - the Norte Chico in the Andean area, the Egyptians, the Minoans, the Syrians, the folks in the Indus Valley, & Ur III.

According to the Wikipedia page about 2000 BCE, we seem to know most about Egypt, probably because their records were saved in the desert environments, but two things stick out:
1) "The last woolly mammoth goes extinct on Wrangel island."
2) "Horses were tamed & used for transport."
Both seem a bit sad in their way.

Would I like to visit back then?  Hell yeah.  But only if I could bring my own food & drink.  I'm sure I'd get cholera right away from the water.  & I'm sure I'd be very sad to see the abject misery.  & of course everyone would smell terrible. But there's so much about that time we'll never really know. Like, what did their music sound like? Hearing someone sing back then & play music would be incredible.

& it was just four thousand years ago. That's mind-blowing, isn't it? Like, we know quite about about what happened two thousand years ago. But double that? Precious little.

That's what the number four thousand made me think of. Stuff much more interesting than almost anything written in the over four thousand posts on this blog!