The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

Chess is played all over the world today, but in the sixth century, it was played only in India, where it was invented. Back then, according to legend, there was a king who fervently believed in free will. Dice games irked him; he wanted a game in which players controlled their own destiny. A savant named Sissa rose to the challenge by inventing a game that depended entirely on strategic thinking, the kind of thinking that makes for success in war. The king was so delighted he offered the inventor gold, but humble Sissa only wanted wheat as his reward: one grain for the first square on his game board, two for the next, four for the next, and so on. The game was played on a board divided into sixty-four squares, and when the king tried to comply with Sissa’s request, he discovered that doubling the amount of wheat for each of the sixty-four squares added up to more wheat than the kingdom produced in a year—as Sissa well knew, for he was a mathematician, and mathematics was one of the glories of Indian culture at that time.

Mesopotamia’s many little city-states spawned an entrepreneurial individualism and a competitive pluralism that came to characterize both Islamic and European civilizations—and how could it not, given the geography of its twin rivers?

When people traveled, they tended to go east or west more readily than north or south because the temperature is roughly the same along any given latitude. Along any given longitude, by contrast, travelers eventually go from the steaming equator to one or another of the frigid poles.

Tian reflected an impersonal pattern that simply was the actual ubiquitous reality of a seemingly chaotic universe.

The increasing size of empires correlated to the increasing speed at which messages could be transmitted, which in turn reflected the development of technology and infrastructure.

Then came the Phoenicians’ great conceptual leap. They were maritime traders who were constantly crossing paths with people who spoke different languages. They developed a script associating various marks not to items in the world, of which there are billions, but to sounds humans could make, of which there are only a few dozen. With this tool, the Phoenicians could record how people on some strange shore said hello, and the next time they visited, they could get the interaction off to a good start by saying hello in the local language.

Take hieroglyphics, for example: fine for religious uses but too elaborate for daily messaging needs in a busy, bureaucratic society like Egypt. So a parallel system of simplified glyphs evolved called hieratic. Hieroglyphics were still used for sacred texts, but letters, contracts, government documents, and the like were written in the quick-and-dirty hieratic script.

By the time Rome conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, demotic had devolved into a fully phonetic alphabetic script like the one pioneered by the Phoenicians.

In China, pictograms evolved into ideograms, so that a given symbol might represent not just some material item in the world but an idea such as love or justice. These ideograms might be compared to mathematical symbols. When two people see a mark like 3 or 7,432, they’d say it differently, if one was French, say, and the other Russian, but they’d take exactly the same meaning from it. The idea exists quite separately from the sound. As this script developed, it became possible to express in writing meanings that actually couldn’t be expressed in speech, which is to say, the script became a language in itself.

Thus did mathematics become a language of a sort too, but a language of a very special sort, a language that could cross cultural borders without the meanings changing.

Unfortunately for Smith’s theory, no society has ever been found that operated on barter in the way that he described, for money is not, in fact, an invention. Like language, it’s a spontaneous by-product of human interaction. Money is also not a thing; it’s an abstraction.

messaging can be compared to the nervous system of a social organism, money can be compared to its circulatory system: it creates a network of links through which value can flow from place to place. A material good available in one place can pop up as a completely different material good in another place; only money can make this happen. Money emerges in any community where trade exists—which is every community.

There was no cash involved in these exchanges, only credit—the record of what one was owed: credit thus came into existence before cash. When money emerged, it didn’t replace barter; it replaced calculations of credit and debt.

Money could not have come into existence without mathematics, which emerged in tandem with written scripts, out of the exigencies of messaging, in a world mediated by long-distance trade, which involved interactions of mutual benefit among people in disparate places—which is a long of way of saying that, in the

With this title, he placed himself within a line of iconic figures of history as seen by Chinese historical mythology: first, there had been three supernatural sovereigns, who did things like set the moon and sun on their course; then came the Five Emperors, who did things like invent agriculture and writing and silk; and now came the First Emperor, whose dynasty would rule the Middle Kingdom for ten thousand generations—or so the emperor himself declared

Thanks to China’s ideographic script, officials who spoke different languages and were widely separated in space could work together through written correspondence. They got the same meaning from a written text, no matter how it sounded when read out loud.

The Romans also drafted a body of laws called the Twelve Tables, which were not directives from a deity, like the Ten Commandments, but an explicitly secular treaty between groups of people angling for a way to function as a social whole. No one said these laws derived from the gods. Everyone took these to be laws based on reason and tradition.

And the whole society was permeated by the pagan secular humanism that derived from Greece and undergirded Roman law.

Rome, in short, was Greece without the subtleties. Minus philosophers but plus engineers—and concrete.

person inspired by Laozi’s ideas was apt to seek peaceful solitude in nature, to practice observation and contemplation as virtues, to value stillness.

The two Sui emperors fixed this problem with an inland waterway connecting north and south. The Grand Canal still exists and still performs the function for which it was built. Calling it a canal, though, sort of trivializes it. What the Sui dynasty emperors did was carve a major artificial river into the earth, connecting their two enormous natural ones, the Huang He and the Yangtse. The Grand Canal provided a safe, placid, entirely defensible, and controllable waterway, up and down which barges loaded with grain could float.

Since the entrenched Confucian gentleman-scholars disdained trade, the Sui had a sharp incentive to make Buddhists and their monasteries part of the Chinese constellation.

Sanskrit and its descendants had an exceptional capacity for expressing high-flown abstractions without reference to material realities. The Chinese script, grounded as it was in palpable elements of the real world, tended to render abstractions in terms of terse, observable specifics.

The Sanskrit word for universe was rendered in the Chinese script by a combination of three characters that mean mountains, rivers, and the earth. The Chinese scripted rendition of human ego is a combination of characters that represent wind, light, and one’s native place.

The Chinese translators ended up leaning heavily on characters used by Taoist sages to express Taoist ideas in their writings. For example, the Chinese Buddhists used the term Tao to express what the Indian Buddhists had called dharma. They used a Taoist

word meaning inaction for the Indians’ concept of nirvana.

Inevitably, Chinese Buddhism absorbed some of the flavors of Taoism and imparted various subtle flavors back. Out of this bleshing came Chan Buddhism, a unique...