The Big Leap

Prehistory to History

Leisures on Red Bottom, by Fernand Leger (Date: 1949)

Looking ahead

We are almost ready to describe the time and place of administered society as macro-sociation, the administrative take-over of whole governance in 4th to 3rd millennium Mesopotamia, and the accompanying inventions and innovations in techniques and technologies that enabled a civilisational transition. We thus prepare to take the leap from prehistory into history. The candid underlying ‘A’ claim is that the progenitor of progress in recorded history was Mesopotamia’s centralised administration of society.

But the ‘A’ claim brings with it the important caveat in recorded history bearing down on today’s magnificently advanced yet distressingly sheepish, confused, chaotic, and tragicomically self-doubting Western societies as they forget their secular bonds of pride and identity as civilisations founded originally, before the coming of laws and citizen representation, on computable social rules of calculable administration.

W…