How many times?

How long do a civilization’s artefacts actually last?

What’s the oldest we’ve found evidence of? Egypt’s masonry is by far the most spectacular. But what of the earliest known civilisation, Sumer? What of the earliest we’ve found fragments of?

What if we were to go back 5,000 years (only marginally older than Sumer – older than our oldest recorded civilisation, the artefacts of which are even now virtually dust).

After only 5,000 years. . .

Now try 10,000. Try 15,000. What would be left of our concrete after only that time, our adamantine towers, our jets, our accomplishments, our electronics, our temples to technology and achievement?

Now let’s try 20,000 years. 40,000. 100,000. Only one fifth of the approximate lifetime of the species Homo Sapiens (evidence of which was found in France – a beautiful and most skilful sculpture of a sabre tooth tiger, it was, easily worthy of the Greeks in their heyday - but nothing more substantial; nothing more significant; a single, lonely sculpture approximately 100,000 years old).

Now let’s go back 250,000 years, one half our species’ approximate lifetime.

300,000 years; 400,000. . .

Over all those years, how many times might we have already been around the block? How many times might we have built some remarkable civilisations, capable of truly incredible things, only to have it all turn to dust? Only to have the very fabric of these constructs fall back into the earth, erased by millennia, by aeons (almost literally).

How many times. . .

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