The Ancients: a story of beginnings
The Ancients
Our own story began when half the world was covered in Ice, and half the world was green. It was green in the land of the ancients, middle earth, which stretches from the Carpathians to the Caspian Sea. In those days there were large serpents and dragon lizards. The people settled the land and slew them, all the dragons disappeared, but still we talk of them in our stories.
Also, in those days, were the Neanderthal people, who were giants. The Neanderthal giants were so strong, that they needed no weapons but their own strength. They followed the herds of animals, and lived in no single place for long. When our people, the ancients, settled their land, the giants disappeared from the world, but we still think of them in our stories.
In the east was the land of China, where the people of the east have lived forever. In the west was the land of Africa, where the african people have lived forever. Beyond that, the Western Ocean, which was the edge of their world.
Of all the wonders of that age, the greatest was this: the star which heats the world, our sun, grew hotter.
When the sun grew hot, so too did the green lands of the earth grow large, like a ripening melon. But then the land of the ancients began to dry up. Marshlands and bogs, lakes and rivers, dried up in the south. When this happened, when the rains in Africa stopped, and the forests themselves died, then farms and meadows in the high hills, and the swamplands below, all alike became desertland. Ten thousand years ago, this happened everywhere the ancients lived.
Seeing the power of the Sun and the heavens above, they studied the ways of the stars, and gave names to each of them, so they could make appeals and sacrifice to the heavens. It was from those days, ten thousand years ago, that we inherited the names of the stars and constellations which we still use today.
Eventually, the land of the Africans turned to sand, and they disappeared into the furthest reaches of their world, to escape the desert. All that remains of their lost civilization is the Great Lion of the Nile, carved from the bedrock and facing the vernal equinox when it rose in the house of Leo over ten thousand years ago. At that time, it was surrounded by forest and streams.
The ancients followed the flocks of wild cattle and left the dry land to the sun.
They followed the flocks north towards the great Ice which covered the top of the world. They went as far as the great Ice boundary, and beyond, for in those days the Ice boundary was moving, too. It left the southern land where it had been since the time of the first people, and moved northwards as the sun got hotter.
Where the Ice had lived, and where it will live again some day, in those days the ancients found a newborn world: young forests full of wild game, newborn rivers full of trout and salmon, prairie with bison and wild deer. They found the giant bear and the great Aurochs bull, whose horns were wider than the king's high table. Elephants lived there, and strange hairy ones they were, covered with long fur coats from living with the Ice.
The ancients settled in the north, wherever the new land was good, while their sons and daughters always followed the Ice northwards, nesting in the new fields which grew in the heat of the sun. The numbers of the ancients grew as the world grew, and they prospered.
There are legends from those days, stories of another world beyond the Western Ocean, under the evening star (Venus) which some called 'Merica. There is often a seed of truth in the old stories. It is true, there was another new world beyond the Western Ocean. At one time, much of it was covered in ice like the land of our ancestors, and it was eventually populated by the ancient ones of China.
After five thousand years, one half of the age of the hot sun had passed. Then the sun stopped getting hotter. The people saw this happen, and tried to work their magic on the heavens. They constructed megalithic observatories, such as Stonehenge, near all the coastlands facing the western ocean, facing the setting sun, from Africa to Norway.
They also built great earth and stone barrows across the land, wherein lay their own dead. The Barrow people were the first of the three great tribes of the ancients in the north. They were followed by the Celtic people from the land of the ancients, who were followed by the Germanic people from the land of the ancients.
When the Celts came into the land of the smaller Barrow people, and seized the land, the Barrow people disappeared. They disappeared from the world, but not from memory. The Celts suspected that the Barrow people still haunted their land, living a new incarnation as little people dwelling inside their mysterious and monumental earthwork barrows, the graveyards of their ancient dead. These became the little people of Eireland, who disappeared from the world, but who reappear in our stories.
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In the south, where the great marshes of Mesopotamia gave rise to the richest farmlands of all time, before the hotter sun dried up the land, the people built the first market city, with its own king, and high priests. This was the city of Ur, and the people there invented writing, which made knowledge increase ten thousand fold.
Here, at the western edge of the dying land of the ancestors, civilization took root among us, and grew. It gave rise to cities, and kings, and armies, and metalworking. From the shaman and prophets of the ancients, civilization gave rise to cultic worship and liturgy, priests and religion. From the hunters and chieftains of the ancients, civilization gave rise to armies and kings, armaments and war. From villages and tribes, civilization gave rise to cities and empires.
Meanwhile, the children of the ancients reached the northern ocean, into which the Ice had fallen. They could go no further. It was the northernmost land of warm and cold. Every year they had one day and one night. Each day lasted six warm months, and the people lived well. Every night lasted six cold months, and the people lived by magic.
Magic was very important in those days. They used the magic to call wild animals to their home, to be food for the people. They worked it with medicine and fire, they tattooed it onto their own skin, and dreamt it in their sleep. For us, it doesn't work anymore, but in our stories it is remembered that the ancients thought they had such skills.
And so we come to the beginning of the time of the ancestors whose names we remember, and whose deeds are known to us. The first ancestors were the people at the edge of the northern ocean. With no more land, but only the ocean of the Ice before them at the top of the world, they turned their backs on it, and faced south. From that day until this, the ancestors have fought their way south, all through the centuries, back to where they had come from.
The day will come when the Ice will return also, chasing us all south like the edge of a shrinking universe.
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