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

by Tamim Ansary

We live on the same planet but in many different worlds.

We’re not fifty people in a cave anymore; we’re eight billion people spread all over the world. None of us can have the perspective of all eight billion.

Through constant intercommunication, we built up shared assumptions about deep matters such as time and space, life and death, good and evil. We lived and died in symbolic landscapes woven of our ideas, and as far as we knew, those landscapes were the world itself.

it would be meaningless to begin any sentence with the words “just before the big bang.” There was no such thing as before; there was only after.

That’s the story of life in a nutshell: individuals live, reproduce, and die, but life as a whole expands, branches out, and gains complexity. At least, so far, it always has.

True language begins when words can join with other words to form an infinite variety of meaningful combinations.

The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally.

Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.

Always, however, the awesome powers conferred upon us by language posed a problem.

you can’t have a narrative until you have “yesterday” and “tomorrow”

Anyone who had not gone over could not now go; anyone who was over there already could not now come back.

Its current flows steadily north, but over those friendly waters, a breeze blows constantly south. People who put a boat into the water could raise a sail to go south and take the sail down to go north.

The newcomers had no fixed place of origin coded into mythic memory and no impulse to go home, only to go on.

If you draw a line from the Nile delta to the Huang He delta and then go north from anywhere along that line, you get to the historic heartland of pastoral nomadism.

Nomadic women meanwhile invented key items we don’t usually think of as inventions: trousers, a garment with separate sheaths for each leg, and later shirts and shirt sleeves, all of which made it possible for nomadic men to ride horses.

some people embarked on long-distance trading as a way of life.

they knew people who knew people who knew those people. Word got around.

What was the one thing of which everything was made?

Each of those thousands had to contribute their own small bit to one larger plan.

Those thousands had to function like the limbs of a single decision-making brain.

Money is also not a thing; it’s an abstraction. No one trades a cow for a coin because they want the coin. They trade the cow for a coin so they can trade the coin for a wagon.

in the social universe, everything is connected to everything.

in the long run the pen really is mightier than the sword.

the Romans did enshrine an abstraction as the highest authority in the land, higher than the senate, higher than the consuls, higher than any human being.

In Rome, theoretically, no one was above the law.

Romans did bring the nobody-above-the-law idea into the world,

In short, the Chinese used their productive and commercial prowess to acquire from the Xiongnu the horses they needed to fight the Xiongnu. Life is complicated.

These Buddhist sculptures looked sort of… Hellenic.

Buddha was all about detaching from this material world.

by the fourth century, Mithraism had died out completely,

Spices were generally things people wanted, not things people needed.

thousands of rebels had been crucified before Jesus, and thousands more would be crucified after him.

German was actually the Roman word for these tribes. It denoted something like “gangs of hooligans up north who are always making trouble.”

Like China, India had no tradition of jealous gods demanding exclusive worship.

person could worship Buddha, make a nod to Shiva, and honor a multitude of lesser deities. No one saw it as heresy, because heresy had no meaning in a universe defined by multiplicity.

digging out the underlying principles that animated material reality.

Many English words that start with the syllable al (alcohol, for example) contain the ghost of some long-ago enterprise by some now-forgotten Muslim intellectual. Everything is connected.

North America had no animals that could be domesticated. It had no sheep, no goats, no cows, nothing that could be herded.

Information and ideas tend to spread throughout any social pool as people talk to people.

Eventually, the Normands settled on the coast of France, an area that was thenceforth known as Normandy.

They set up benches outside their shops to do business. The Italian word for bench is banque, so these guys were called banquers. Today, we call them bankers.

Arabic numerals and arithmetical calculations used in Dar-ul-Islam—place value, decimals, long division algorithms, algebra, and much more—quickly spread through Europe, along with various business methods of the east:

In the fourteenth century, this monstrous disease must have felt like the end of the world to people in the midst of it.

unlike a military invasion, an epidemic doesn’t damage infrastructure: it kills people but leaves roads, buildings, canals, and such intact.

The Crusades traditionally refers to nine distinct military campaigns carried out between 1095 and 1272. Those campaigns were only one part of a much bigger story,

independent armed bands who roamed the countryside, looking for “work.” They called themselves free lances, and the longer they roamed about, the more trouble they made.

Around 1440, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg figured out how to do just that, with an adaptation of a wine press

Then in the fourteenth century, they added the magnetic compass to their tool kit, and the compass changed everything.

The baccalaureate still exists. Today, it’s called the bachelor of arts degree or BA: the standard generic college degree.

Why would people do all this for the emperor? Well, because the emperor was a scary brute who supplemented moral instructions with terror.