Et in Akkad ego

Everyone knows where they were five years ago today. I was sitting at my machine, six months into my first job, when J-Man - surfing the net as usual instead of coding - said suddenly: "Holy Fuck! A plane's just flown into the World Trade Centre!" A sober day, and a more complicated, volatile, uncertain world ever since.

Last night I lay awake engrossed in a book about the language history of the ancient world. Writing having first developed in the Fertile Crescent, the text tracks the rise and fall of three great linguas franca in the three millennia BC: Sumerian, Akkadian & Aramaic. During their long reigns, they provided some cohesion and commonality to an otherwise intensely restive region. Empires rose and fell by the score. Even as culture bloomed, cities were razed and whole peoples destroyed or displaced through continual invasions and uprisings. Stewardship of any particular spot has changed hands so many times as to make mockery of claims to ancestral ownership. War is as deeply rooted and endemic in Mesopotamia and the Levant as civilisation itself. Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turks, etc., etc. are just recent protagonists in a cast featuring hundreds of long-lost tribes, cities and gods. Seen like this, the present crisis is merely the latest iteration of a neverending story that stretches back beyond the written record. Were we really so naive as to imagine that we could arrest more than 5000 years of momentum in a thousandth the time? It would be easier persuading the mountain to go to Mohammed.

'Cradle' of Civilisation? More like 'Crucible'.