You Never Saw Ancient Civilizations Stringing Holiday Lights
It is only natural to look back at man’s ancient history, its succession of empires — the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians — and wonder what exactly it is that makes for a long-lived civilization.
It is a state that all peoples naturally aspire to, if only we could crack the code.
How is it that some dynasties stack the centuries on top of one another like pancakes at a Boy Scout breakfast in the church basement, and others are over in the passage of a mere few decades?
Even the briefest survey of history supplies the answer.
While societies of great duration have many differences between them they share one striking similarity: they do not as a rule string holiday lighting on their homes or offices.
They do not climb on rickety ladders or stepstools which haven’t been unearthed since this time last year and which have spent the ensuing year moldering away at the critical points of the load-bearing parts, nor do they climb up and over roofs so as to hang by one hand over sheer breathtaking drops and string the lights along the edging from above, if you can conjure up such an irrational thing.
“Let’s just imagine the lights this year!” says the family man with desperate enthusiasm to a thinning audience. “It will develop the children’s capacity for wonder! Haven’t we always talked about how important that is? I’ll simply paint a word picture of this imaginary display for them as we sit around the fireplace, warm, and resting safely upon the flat earth.”
But that is not the way of civilizations destined for history’s scrap heap.
Citizens of these other and entirely more ancient civilizations I was talking about — I’m back to them — do not stick their fingers into outdoor electrical sockets to see if they are still live, nor do they reach too far to the right or to the left while atop the highest rung of the ladder to string the lights upon the final right-most or left-most nail and fall into the bushes — again, either to the left or the right — in a graceful arc perfectly suitable for demonstration in geometry classes at the middle school level.
They do not skitter across and along the highest reaches of the house, nor count the seconds it takes to free-fall down a metal ladder rung by rung, hitting each with the underside of the chin, until they have reached the last of the rungs, something they have always kind of wanted to know, this ‘how many seconds’ business. Kind of. Well, not all that much.
Avoiding these kinds of behaviors naturally extends the time your people spend off the injured reserve list, or at least that of your male people, and when you get enough of that you stand every chance of sending your civilization into extra innings.
No, these long-running multi-season civilizations leave no record of any such folly, which just goes to show.
You may study as many hieroglyphics as you wish culled from any century of the great Egyptian epochs, you will not see among the catalogue of bird-headed men, cats, owls, sunbursts, and single narrow eyes looking out at you any rendering whatsoever of holiday lighting being strung.
I’d like to make the point too that it would not be that hard to render.
Simply an image of a man, be he bird-headed or not, falling backwards off a ladder while clutching a strand of lighting and then swinging from it, would do the job; just a few taps of the chisel could get it across nicely.
What I’m saying is that it’s the type of thing that attracts notice and if it was at all common in the culture, would be a natural for the ancient artist to picture, along with the other natural catastrophes such as plagues of locusts, flooding Niles, and snake infestations. Which tells the careful scholar that it wasn’t present in the culture at all.
Now this is a civilization that lasted some thousands and thousands of years, mind you. The best thinking in the field now supposes that you could have visited the kingdom at any one of those years and not found a man anywhere stringing holiday lighting.
To expand the reach of this thesis, there is not to my knowledge a single image of The Sphinx, any one of the Great Pyramids, or The Parthenon, or the Pantheon, or the Circus Maximus, or the statues of Easter Island strung with holiday lighting, either of the blinking or steady-state variety.
Generations have wondered at the message of the mysterious arrangement of massive granite slabs known through the centuries Stonehenge. It is occult in origin? A statement of religious awe? A notice for free parking (with pass) for alien spaceships? Perhaps. But could it not be something as primal as “run, my friend, run, before someone gets the bright idea of putting you on top of a ladder to decorate me with holiday lights!”
Well, draw your own conclusions. Mine is that this is what makes for an enduring culture.
There are so many other fruitful things to occupy one’s time in the whole ancient civilization biz and if you are not doing the one — testing one bulb after another to see which one is burnt out to the tune of 268,000 of them per strand — then there is a lot of time freed up to do the other.
The men folk have taken the time freed up and are in the field harvesting or on a hunting expedition or heading down the river to expand the element of trade.
They are not homebound with a plaster cast on their ankles or splints along their right femur.
It is hard, to take another instance, for a people to send a proper army onto the field of battle when half your men are suffering from displaced hips, fractured knees, or shoulder sprains.
In the race between cultures these little things can make the difference.
You don’t have to draw a one-to-one correspondence between light stringing and the number of players hobbling off the field leaning on the team trainer to make your point.
Certain men of a heightened sensitivity can have all their motivation and get-up-and-go undermined just by the thought that they might be called upon someday to string holiday lighting. It’s the uncertainty that gets to them and takes the edge off of their performance generally. We see plenty of that even today. Even in this house in fact.
The Phoenicians are a go-to example of how to avoid this pattern of self-destruction, not because the current writer know a thing about the Phoenicians, but because the current writer is certain that no one else does either.
You may drop casual reference to these fine people in almost any conversation on any topic, saying more or less what you please, and get away with it.
If the topic is that of male grooming you can say, “well, it is a rich topic. Take the Phoenicians. It is known that they were the first civilization where the men shaved every morning while standing upside down.”
No one can really cite the history book or public television special where it is pointed out specifically that Phoenician men shave standing right side up like the rest of us, so what you say must be true.
Nor does anyone particularly wish to convey that in truth they don’t know a thing about the Phoenicians and in fact couldn’t point on a map to the spot where they called home.
They cannot imagine why you would be trying to fool them in any manner on this topic, as you make no effort to sell them Phoenician time shares, oil wells, or cherrywood salad bowls carved by native Phoenician craftsmen.
By all indications you seem to have a disinterested third party attitude about the whole thing, making for an audience with willing ears.
You may say as well that these fine people, that the Phoenicians arm-wrestled elephants for fun, invented the old fashioned kind of can opener that punches a couple of triangles into your can of beer, or that they were the first to come up with the idea of fantasy football leagues.
Where you are supposed to have come by this information is never quite questioned, but it is assumed I suppose, that you read it on a string of hieroglyphics somewhere.
It is all the same to your listeners. Within this admittedly small crowd at this gathering, you are the acknowledged Phoenician expert and what you say on the matter goes.
In any event, the people of Phoenicia, wherever that was, survived so long as a civilization because, as we now know, they didn’t string holiday lighting.
“We can learn a lot from these ancient civilizations,” you say meditatively as you borrow someone else’s pipe and puff on it in a thoughtful manner, “indeed we can. We are wise indeed when we take their counsel.”
