Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Some of the oldest surviving Indo-European documents are written in Sanskrit, though Hittite is probably the earliest recorded Indo-European language, with at least one text dated around the seventeenth century B.C. I was surprised that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. When I said the word to myself, I must have been thinking of European more than Indo. In fact, I couldn’t remember just what Indo-European included. Now I learned that it included those languages spoken in most of Europe and in the parts of the world colonized by Europeans since A.D. 1500 and also in Persia, the subcontinent of India, and some other parts of Asia. The year 1500 was beginning to seem recent to me, by now. By now, I had to marvel that only in the past half millennium or so had Portuguese been spoken in Brazil, or, for that matter, English in America.

  Indo-European includes, for instance, Romany, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Ukrainian, Czech, Lithuanian, Haitian Creole, Scotch Gaelic, Welsh, and Frisian, but not, for instance, Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp, Estonian, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongolian, Kalmuck, or Cree (which belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock of American Indian languages). Indo-European is a family of languages that may have descended from an original parent language called Proto-Indo-European, which is believed to have been spoken some time before 2000 B.C. and before writing was known to its speakers.

  “Before 2000 B.C.” was vague, I thought. It covered a very long stretch of time. I had already learned from the French history book, which had started all this, that “modern man” had been in existence since 40,000 B.C.

  If asked, I realized, I could not have said much about the Hittites. And yet I thought I should have known something about them, if theirs was the earliest recorded Indo-European language.

  I learned that the name Hittite comes from the Hebrew Hitti, which in turn comes from the Hittite Hatti. The Hittite language is sometimes considered part of the Indo-European language family. It is known to us from hieroglyphic texts. The Hittites were a conquering people of Asia Minor and Syria with an empire in the second millennium B.C. The aboriginal inhabitants of the land were apparently the Khatti, or Hatti. The capital of the Hittite Empire was Hattusas. Hattusas still exists, in Turkey, though now it is only a village and is called Bogazköy. In the ruins were found, in A.D. 1906, ten thousand tablets bearing Hittite inscriptions.

  I would not have paid much attention to the fact that the Hittites’ neighbors to the southeast, in the Upper Euphrates, were the Khurrites, were it not for the fact that on the page before the entry for Hittites was an entry for a Lebanese American professor and scholar named Philip Khuri Hitti, who had taught Oriental languages and Semitic literature at Columbia and Princeton and written at least four books. I was struck by his middle and last names. I also noticed, looking at his birth date, that the Hittite tablets were discovered at about the time he turned twenty-one. Did this discovery come at just the right moment to determine his subsequent career?

  I stopped and reflected that only as the last centuries of our millennium have crept and halted along have we even discovered the existence of such earlier civilizations as the Hittites. I remembered hearing it said that at a certain point in the past—a few centuries ago? in the Enlightenment? much earlier?—a single human being could know everything—about history? about science?—that was known. In other words, a great deal less was known then. But I’m not sure how far back that was.

  Before Sanskrit, in my encyclopedia, came a listing for San Sebástian, a city in Northern Spain on the Bay of Biscay; and before that, sans-culottides, the last five days of the year in the French Revolutionary Calendar. The sans-culottides were named in honor of the sans-culottes (“without knee breeches”), the lower classes in France during the French Revolution. After Sanskrit literature came Andrea Sansovino, a Florentine sculptor and architect of the High Renaissance whose real name was Contucci and who took the name of the place where he was born. After him came Jacopo Sansovino, an Italian sculptor and architect of the Renaissance whose real name was Tatti and who took the name of his master, Andrea Sansovino.

  I was talking to people about my investigation as it went along—about time, history, and dates—and I discovered that not just I, and not just Christians, but most people seemed to take their bearings from the year 0, the year in which Jesus of Nazareth was (mistakenly) supposed to have been born. (Even the actual birth of Jesus, which I think was in 3 B.C., was reckoned from that mistaken year 0, the year of the birth of Christ.) It seemed to me that the reason for this was not just convenience, but a failure of imagination, or the illusion that because of the zero, something had begun then. I said to myself that people who used Fahrenheit also thought of zero degrees Fahrenheit as some kind of absolute, even though it is not any particular point, such as the point at which water freezes. If the year 0 had been the beginning, two thousand would be many years. But it was not the beginning at all, only a point along the way.

  What about this? What about years computed from a fixed point (like the birth of Christ)?

  I learned that in chronology, an era was a period reckoned from a fixed point in time. I wanted to know what some other fixed points were. The encyclopedia I happened to be using is Western, so it is biased toward information about the West and therefore limited, but some fixed points in time were the creation of the world (Jewish, equivalent to 3761 B.C.; Byzantine, 5508 B.C.); the founding of the city of Rome (753 B.C.; year designated A.U.C. for ab urbe condita, “from the founding of the city”); and the hegira.

  But I had to stop. Did I know what the hegira was? The word comes from the Arabic hijrah, meaning “breaking off of relations.” The hegira was the flight from Mecca of the Prophet Muhammad, driven out by angry businessmen, in September of A.D. 622. The Muslim era is dated from the first day of the lunar year in which the hegira took place (July 16, 622).

  I went on: another era was reckoned from the founding of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece (776 B.C.; time in Olympiads); another from the proclamation of the French Republic (September 22, 1792). The French Revolutionary Calendar was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, named after vintage, fog, frost, snow, rain, wind, seed, blossom, pasture, harvest, heat, and fruit. The remaining five days, the sans-culottides, were feast days.

  I was confident that I knew what a calendar was, but I looked it up anyway. I discovered one thing, at least, that I had not known. The word calendar comes from a Latin word meaning “moneylender’s account book.”

  Before calendar came Robert Calef, a seventeenth-century Boston cloth merchant known primarily as the author of More Wonders of the Invisible World. My amusement turned to respect when I read on and learned that his book attacked Cotton Mather, condemned the view of witchcraft then prevailing, and had a salutary effect throughout New England. After calendar came calendering, a finishing process for paper, plastics, rubber, and textiles; followed by calendula, an annual with flower heads that are yellow to deep orange and a popular garden flower in Shakespeare’s time—what he called “marigold.”

  The term epoch was apparently often confused with era in writing. I did not know specifically what epoch meant, but I was to learn later.

  Before era came Er, Judah’s first son; before that, Er, the chemical symbol of the element erbium. After era came Eran, Ephraim’s grandson; the era of good feelings, a period in U.S. history after the War of 1812 when people were anxious to return to a normal life, forget political issues, and strive for unity as a nation.

  I noticed that in my exploration of history, I kept coming up against religion, often the Christian religion but sometimes another religion: Judaism (apropos of the creation of the world), Muhammadanism (apropos of the departure of the Prophet). My encyclopedia was full of names of characters from “our” Bible.

  Religion was defined as not only the service and worship of God or the supernatural, or a personal set of religious attitudes, but also a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.

  I thought: People needed their systems of belie
fs in order to make sense of a world of facts? Or what? I was close to a thought but not there yet.

  I found myself considering the turn of “our” millennium with some dread, not because I was a believer in any particular religion or any particular calendar, but because I was afraid of people who believed, certain of whom tended to do insane and violent things in the name of their beliefs.

  I began to wonder why I was pursuing this investigation. Maybe I did not really want to find out how long a millennium was. Wasn’t that a little too silly? Maybe I did think the world was going to end at the end of this millennium, and these years would be my last chance to study the history of the world. I had never paid enough attention to history. In school, I had never liked the subject history, because it offered no clear answers, as math and the sciences did. I had gotten poor grades in history.

  Or was the real goal of my investigation to retreat into the millennia of the past, so as to make the present millennium less present? Was I afraid of the present millennium?

  I went back to my history of France, maybe for reassurance. There was a calm and friendly tone to the book. The author was just as amazed as I was by the vast stretches of time he was describing. He kept expressing them in different ways: Neanderthal man remained essentially unchanged for sixty millennia! For six hundred centuries!

  Sheep were first domesticated in about 5000 B.C. The first use of their fleece for wool is dated at about 4000 B.C.

  Could this really be true? That a thousand years went by—about the same number of centuries as between the Norman Conquest and now—before people understood how they could use sheep’s fleece?

  I made a short list for myself going up the millennia:

  The first signs of the transformation from hunters to farmers (in France): about 7000 B.C.

  The first villages and transhumance (in France): about 5000 B.C. (Transhumance was, and still is, the movement of sheep up into the mountain pastures for the summer and back down into the valley pastures in the fall.)

  The first use of the fleece of sheep for wool: about 4000 B.C.

  The beginning of Greece’s long Neolithic period: about 4000 B.C.

  “Important cultures” had developed in Greece by about 3000 B.C.

  The unification of Egypt under one ruler: about 3000 B.C.

  The age of the great pyramids in Egypt: about 2500 B.C.

  In India, the Indus Valley civilization, one of the earliest, and highly sophisticated, flourished: about 2500–1000 B.C.

  The Minoan civilization and the Mycenaean civilization had disappeared by about 2000 B.C.

  Was it pure coincidence that so many “great” civilizations began or flourished between 3000 and 2000 B.C.?

  The Mayan civilization began about 1500 B.C.

  First dynasty (Shang) in documented Chinese history: about 1500–1000 B.C.

  Confucius lived around 500 B.C.

  The Incan empire began around A.D. 1200.

  Apparently Greece’s long prehistory, its Neolithic period, began about 4000 B.C. Where, in the course of a Neolithic period or after, would a hat be likely to develop? How would I make an educated guess about the development of that hat? Could I start by supposing that Greek civilization would have to be advanced enough to have “travelers” rather than nomads? But I was not even sure what Neolithic meant. At least I was now beyond confusing Paleolithic with Ice Age, as I had done when I first started my reading.

  I had vaguely thought “Paleolithic times” were the same as “the Ice Age.” I had also thought there was only one Ice Age. I realized later that perhaps I was confusing Paleolithic and Pleistocene, because the Ice Age most familiar to us is also called the Pleistocene Epoch. Now I understood that remark about era and epoch being incorrectly used in writing. Epoch was a term belonging to geological time. In geological time, an epoch was a smaller unit within an era.

  Paleolithic, on the other hand, meant “ancient stone age” and referred to a stage of civilization, so that one people could be in their Paleolithic stage and another in their Neolithic stage. Paleolithic related to the second period of the Stone Age, characterized by rough or chipped stone implements. Neolithic was the latest period of the Stone Age, characterized by polished stone implements. Of course, a people could be in their Paleolithic stage during the Pleistocene.

  Neolithic was a stage of cultural evolution or technological development also characterized by the existence of settled villages largely dependent on domesticated plants and animals, and by the presence of crafts like pottery and weaving. The termination of the Neolithic period was marked by such innovations as the rise of urban civilization or the introduction of metal tools or writing.

  Then I imagined that the Greek hat was developed late in the Greeks’ Neolithic period, with the rise of urbanization. I was perhaps wrong, but because I imagined the Greek “traveler” would be going from one urban center to another, I thought the development of cities and the development of travel and travelers, and the hat, would all have come at the same time.

  The earliest known development of Neolithic culture was in Southwest Asia between 8000 B.C. and 6000 B.C.

  I was confused. Did this mean the most advanced early culture was in Southwest Asia? Or the earliest known advanced culture? Maybe this would become clear to me with more reading.

  Was this earliest known development of Neolithic culture connected to the melting of the ice at the end of the Ice Age?

  The ice melted (the last glacial period ended) about eleven millennia ago. The human diet changed to include more plant food. The land, relieved of the weight of the ice, rose in places.

  How could the land rise? Was it floating? Or was it not floating but had been compressed by the weight of the ice? Or was it able to rise and fall because the center of the earth is liquid?

  I thought: You couldn’t form settlements (enter your Neolithic period) unless you could grow crops, could you? Or maybe you could. Would the earliest development of Neolithic culture have to be after the end of the last Ice Age? You couldn’t turn from hunting and gathering to farming until plants began to grow, could you? During the Ice Age, there was only tundra. But I was a little unclear what tundra was, exactly.

  I discovered that the word tundra comes from Russian and is related to the Lapp word tundar, “hill” (not an Indo-European word). A tundra is a level or undulating treeless plain characteristic of arctic and subarctic regions.

  But what grew on the “plain”? What grows on tundra now, in summer anyway, is an abundance of mosses and lichens, and some flowering plants. The tundra supports a small human population, including Samoyeds.

  So was I right to see a pattern? The ice melted, then within two or three thousand years Neolithic cultures began, then over the next three or four thousand years various different civilizations became highly developed?

  I left off thinking about the complexities of the highly sophisticated civilizations and returned to the peace and emptiness of the Ice Age.

  During the last Ice Age there were apparently some trees. They grew up only in protected spots. More generally, mammoth bones were burned for winter fires. (The cutting of the Grand Canyon took place chiefly during the Ice Age.) Temperatures in summer averaged 54–59 degrees Fahrenheit, with evening frosts. That seemed to me mild enough, especially on a south-facing slope in the sun.

  Many Ice Age human footprints, always of bare feet, have been found in the clay and sand floors of caves. The people must have been walking in mud, since if there had not been mud, there would not be footprints. The floors were wet and the bare feet were walking in the wet.

  Maybe I was wrong not to be interested, just then, in the epochs or eras of earth’s history before humankind appeared. But, right or wrong, I liked to see the first appearance of humans, and especially the first signs of humans making art. There was something refreshing about this.

  The earliest evidence of art-making, I learned, dated from about thirty-two millennia ago. The art-making became increasing
ly refined over the next twenty thousand years.

  I realized that I would not have been able to say, before looking it up, when prehistoric cave painting was being done. I wondered if other people had a more accurate idea, if only my own ignorance was at fault. I asked various people to name a date. I was given a range of answers: “sometime B.C.” (from a woman in the health-care field); 2000 B.C. (from two painters, separately); 5000 B.C. (from a writer and teacher); 20,000 B.C. (from a jazz pianist cum astrologer); 50,000 B.C. (from a writer); “oh, hundreds of thousands B.C.” (from an English professor). For some of the believing Christians I talked to, it seemed to me, any portion of the time before the year 0 became a murky area mostly filled by stories from the Bible. Even for non-Christians, in many cases. Until they remembered the Egyptians. They knew the Egyptians had been building their pyramids before the birth of Christ.

  I would have liked to go back to some of those places on the earth in which Homo erectus had lived. Until recently, some of those places remained relatively untouched. Now this was no longer true, I knew, and my only access to them in their original state was through my imagination.