The Great Forgetting

A Moment in time...

Archeologists today call it The Great Forgetting...

... it happened around the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten thousand years before present. Humanity changed their ways. No longer roaming the lands, they settled and farmed and built. After a few grandmothers had passed no one could remember any other way. The Neanderthal grew fewer in numbers and eventually faded away.

Millennia passed and villages grew larger to become cities.

Things changed, but the things the people called Shepherds remained and the women of the Marked gave up their tributes as the Moon marked out the pulse of linked worlds.

The Creatures were outside time. For them it did not flow or march or follow the path of an arrow. To the beings the people called Shepherds, time was an ocean with many shores. Shores they could choose to visit and revisit, beaches that were moments in time to other creatures.

The Shepherds swam in time as other beings swim in a river. Upstream or down, from shore to shore were the same to them.

Place a rough stone on a shore and swim to a place where it is a smooth pebble, then swim back to pick up the same rough stone and put it in another place. That is how they changed the people, polished them to better suit their taste.

Like any shepherd they husbanded their flocks, selecting those they desired and weeding out those which did not suit their needs.

On one such beach five millennia before present, the people had built a wonderful place between two great rivers and created something new.

The place was Sumer, where writing and history began.

The moment in time when the alien creatures that cultivated the people were first called SHAKKAN.

Don't Frighten the Sheep…

Alien minds. Do we humans often consider the rich culture of the milk cow? The complex relationships within the herd. Do we understand the individual aspirations of the beast looking over the hedge at the traffic zipping by on the road? What of the poetry in the wind in the hay or the satisfactions of chewing the cud over cropping dandelion leaves with our grass?

They are just cows, biological machines that process green grass into delicious white milk and wonderful dairy products. Sometimes we give them a name, Daisy.