Emergence 3.0
A Novel – In One Page Per Day
Day 145, Friday
May 25th, 2018
Chapter Five: City
Encampments became villages, and villages became towns. The human
communities were growing, coming into greater contact with one another,
realigning themselves both through necessity and by choice.
Towns grew into cities while people migrated into the urban centers for
trade, and work. Individuals pulled away from their families, from their clans
and tribes, and pulled into new relationships with merchants, and farmers, and
herders of new and different breeds of animals.
They clung together in ever greater numbers, both for protection, and
opportunity. Learning from each other news ways of life, the rituals and
practices that each group had developed around their totem animals, their
symbiotes.
They farmed, they built granaries and the foundations of the city flowed
from there, from wellsprings and ziggurats.
The granaries became temples, where the people prayed for and received
their daily allotment of feed. Where they stored the fruit of their labor up
against times of conflict, drought, disease and famine.
The temples became towers, ziggurats, great platforms that touched the
sky, and from which the sages plotted the movement of stars across the heavens.
These became the seat of priestly royalty, and the place from which laws flowed,
that bound human beings to their place.
Families dispersed, becoming ever less important.
The division of labor ensued.
What became paramount were the relationship the individual had to
neighbors and teachers, to systems of patronage and clientage. The individual
had the potential to become both everything and nothing, a god-like figure or a
slave, to be named in the annals, recalled and remembered, or to be utterly
forgotten. To achieve immortality through the songs and sagas of the people, or
to become dust and nothing at all.
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