Here I am again, floating around the Sun, circling the Milky Way, trying to divine in my tireless routine its next steps. Between turning and turning on myself, today I have given you to tell you about Out of Africa II, the last great exodus of you humans, the beginning of your great adventure, which began some 200 thousand years ago on the African continent, your birthplace. I'm also thinking of the Cro-Magnon, the first modern European man, who appeared 40,000 years ago, whose cultural advances were dizzying. Finally, I cannot fail to mention the Würm, my last ice age, concluded 12 thousand years ago.
Three emblematic temporary spaces, different and distant from each other, with you as their protagonists.
Ah! But nothing compares with what came next: Egypt and Mesopotamia, the two splendid civilizations that saw their ingenuity, creativity and knowledge flourish on a grand scale, just a few thousand years after they left the caves. I never cease to be amazed that in such a short time they developed an immense capacity to dream and turn dreams into reality. His wisdom and will rose to unimaginable heights. His planning, organization and creativity reached levels never before imagined.
In those lands of the pharaohs, they revealed their admirable works of engineering and architecture, as well as their splendid manifestations of art, advanced mathematical knowledge, coins and other means of exchange, complex social and religious organizations, as well as an avalanche of inventions and discoveries, in an unprecedented qualitative leap. Never before in another age, no species on my surface made such advances.
Between cloud and cloud I turn and remember that in Egypt the problem of land depletion that occurred elsewhere was solved by me through the special characteristics that I gave them with the Nile, which not only irrigated crops from year to year with my prodigious waters, but renewed the fertility of the soils with its content. The river overflowed with clockwork regularity each fall, bringing its collected amber sediments along its long journey. This special silt settled gently on my soils, flooded and fertilized them generously.
It was enough for you to throw some seeds in those fresh muds, wait for the plants to grow and thus you could harvest food in abundance, a condition that was extraordinary for agriculture, especially for the cultivation of wheat and barley, which allowed you to supply the numerous settlements they founded along the banks of the "historic river", as they call it. In this way, their fellow men took solid roots, prospered and evolved into splendid cities.
Most of you know that the Nile Valley, although it stretched for almost 7000 km, was a narrow strip between 16 and 50 km wide, surrounded by extensive desert areas. This arid natural setting did not allow to retain the humidity produced by the annual floods. A few weeks after the waters were withdrawn, my floors cracked and hardened like dry leather. To solve the problem, their ingenious ancestors cleared the marshy banks of the Nile, covered by marshes, tangled reed beds and intricate vegetation, winning farmland from the thick mud. Thus, they were domesticating the waters through complicated engineering works, they learned to build dams, retaining walls, ponds, canalization systems and irrigation.By having water and food throughout the year, they managed to settle and multiply.
As I leave the full moon behind in my unstoppable, slow and uniform rotation, Mesopotamia comes to mind, where they also more than demonstrated their ingenuity and skills, leaving multiple legacies to their descendants throughout three millennia of history. Did you know that there was not a Mesopotamian properly speaking, as if an Egyptian?… well I will tell you that, in that fertile territory, in all that time Sumerians, Akkadians, Amorites, Chaldeans, Canaanites, Babylonians, Gutis, Hurrians, Casitas, Mitani and Persians. Why did everyone want Mesopotamia?… Don't they know? For the "country between rivers", as its Greek ancestors baptized it, was a very fertile region suitable for life, located mainly in the region that today occupies Iraq, between the historic Tigris and Euphrates.
The first sedentary settled in the region, around 10,000 BC, occupying the northern area, as the rest remained uninhabited. These distant relatives of yours inaugurated the Neolithic by practicing agriculture and animal husbandry.
About 5,000 years ago BC there was a culture very advanced for its time, called El Obeid, a possible precursor of the Sumerian civilization, located in my lands that you called Sumer. As you know, these intelligent and industrious pioneers developed water conservation methods, they knew ceramics, copper instruments, bricks and the potter's wheel, although the invention of the wheel itself corresponded to the Sumerians, around 3,500 BC, as well as the invention of writing and the first literary manifestations, written on clay tablets with their new and entangled cuneiform characters. The most famous work of his ancestors is the "Legend of Gilgamesh", a poem written at the beginning of the second millennium BC. The Sumerians were great merchants,a true town of merchants and businessmen. When the Egyptians still knew nothing more than the exchange of goods through barter, they had already created a simple monetary system. As for writing, it was born as a necessity to underpin its commercial and judicial transactions.
In one of the many invasions of the country between two rivers, other homo sapiens were present: the Amorites or Amorites, from Syria. This occurred between 2,000 and 1,800 BC, and in a matter of a century, which for me is like a second, they filled Mesopotamia with numerous kingdoms, established a dynasty of kings in Babylon, a city that imposed their dominance. One of its kings was Hammurabí, who began his reign in 1782 BC, and became universal by the famous code that bears his name. The Babylonians bequeathed to you the division of the week into seven days, the day into 24 hours, the hours into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds. After three millennia, and despite your advanced science and technology, you have not been able to find a better system than the one proposed by the sharp Babylonians.The months were 29 or 30 days long, and to make up for the difference with my orbits around the Sun, some years were 13 months.
Each month was consecrated to one of the signs of the zodiac and the additional month was assigned the raven, which was considered a sign of bad luck. Superstitions that they also inherited, both because of the 13 and because of the black bird. The reason why so many of their predecessor peoples chose and fought for those Mesopotamian lands was to obtain that privileged and fertile place as their habitat, because it was located between the two splendid rivers. When in the mountains of Armenia, the source of the rivers, spring began to melt the snow, the waters left their channels, flooded the plains and deposited the fertilizing material. But this was occurring at a time not so convenient as in Egypt, since the grain of wheat was not yet ripe,which forced them to deploy immense efforts to prevent the waters from destroying their crops before the harvests. To complicate matters further, in summer those plains suffered from a suffocating heat that
it charred the plants. Their Sumerian great-great-grandparents did not give up, they squeezed their neurons and as a result they performed great engineering works, tamed the capricious currents of the twin rivers and built complex irrigation systems. In time Mesopotamia became the granary of the East and its fame surpassed distant borders. Even Herodotus was amazed by the great production capacity of these soils, which yielded six or seven times more than the Greeks. Did you know that one hundred years after the disappearance of Babylon, the great Greek historian found no superlatives to describe the generosity of the lands nestled in the Mesopotamian region?
These mega works, the first surgeries that you practiced on my skin, both in Egypt and Mesopotamia, led to the multiplication of men and women everywhere, but on the other hand they were destroying the natural habitat of other species. In the case of the Nile ecoregion, hippos, crocodiles, and an abundant minor fauna were displaced from their natural habitats, which had occupied the banks of the Nile for millennia. While in Mesopotamia the fauna and flora of the two historic rivers ran the same luck. In both cases you began your intervention on me and affected the life that I have hosted for hundreds of millions of years in that thin and fragile vital sphere that you have called the biosphere.
Those early surgeries were nothing but insignificant scratches to me, but since then their activities have increased rapidly and disproportionately. Those ancestral interventions have mutated into an authentic takeover of the planet by you, as if you were the owners of my air, soil and water, and most seriously, of all the life in them. Their hectic activities have multiplied throughout my curves, aggravated in the last century by their greenhouse gas emissions that have led to global warming and as a consequence to climate change. These unexpected events are a novelty for me, especially because of the speed with which they have occurred, which with my geological chronometry are even impossible to measure.These phenomena are a real threat that seem to announce great chaos throughout the biosphere, endangering everyone's life, including yours and mine, because if you don't know it, without you and the other species, no more I would be the same. The Earth is a "living planet", they have said, and in this I agree with you because in truth life and I are inseparable. Without life on me I would not have life either and then I would become a dead planet, like so many others.Without life on me I would not have life either and then I would become a dead planet, like so many others.Without life on me I would not have life either and then I would become a dead planet, like so many others.
They still have time to rectify. With their intelligence and will they could do it. So be it.
