294
at and lament the passage of time, knowing that we personally are implicated in all
that is ineluctable and unstoppable. And that we, ourselves, will each come to an end.
At the height of Sumerian culture, around 2800 BC, in the cities of Uruk, Ur,
Eridu, Nippur, Kish, and Lagash, Sumerians represented approximately 5% of the
world population, estimated to be around 27 million during the third millennium
BC. Its glory days would be long gone by the time of Christ, when our species numbered some 100 million.
2
But in its day, Sumerian cities rivaled other contemporary,
urban conglomerates like Jerusalem, Damascus, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), and Sidon
(Lebanon).
3
It can be supposed that all such “ancient” centers of human activity had
arrived at more or less the same civic and private revelations: that the Self had disassociated from the previous biodiversity commons, like Continental Drift, and, by its
own endless tinkering, pursuit of sufficiency, and power grabs, emboldened the edifice, psychological fortresses, whose focus had surely shifted, obscuring the previously unprepossessing relations between humans and other species. Museums
capture that transmutation. They are living embodiments of a functioning hubris,
part celebratory, part aggression, that is all one would need in terms of our species’
contact information.
That shift from other species is everything in humanity’s most dramatic period of
evolution, from the Mesolithic (Epipaleolithic) to the present. For it is during those
7–9000 years that our territorial expansion and the profound consequences of our
impacts coincided with what we term the Egolithic Age, the very antithesis of the
ecolithic. Many have remarked that this transition represented the worst collective
choice in our entire ontology, the one that would ultimately destroy every Sumer of
the world.
32.2 The Paleolithic Others
That Self, the narcissistic goal of the shift, would be strangely emblemized in the
first photographic portraits of people by Hippolyte Bayard in France (“Self-Portrait
of a Drowned Man,” a direct paper positive in 1840)
4
and by 30-year-old Robert
Cornelius (1809–1893) who sat before his camera outside his Philadelphia store
without moving for probably 15 minutes in 1839, thus producing on daguerreotype
the first self-portrait in American history.
5
Cornelius’ selfie is that of a tenaciously,
2 Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt,
the Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2001.
3 See “14 of the oldest continuously inhabited cities,” by Bryan Nelson, November 29, 2018,
Mother News Network, MNN.com, https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/12-oldestcontinuously-inhabited-cities, Accessed March 23, 2020.
4 A World History Of Photography, by Naomi Rosenblum, New York, Abbeville Press, © Cross
River Press, 1984, p. 33.
5 “This is the first ever photograph of a human – and how the scene it was taken in looks today,” by
Adam Withnall, November 5, 20–14, The Independent.
32 Cave Paintings of the Mind
at and lament the passage of time, knowing that we personally are implicated in all
that is ineluctable and unstoppable. And that we, ourselves, will each come to an end.
At the height of Sumerian culture, around 2800 BC, in the cities of Uruk, Ur,
Eridu, Nippur, Kish, and Lagash, Sumerians represented approximately 5% of the
world population, estimated to be around 27 million during the third millennium
BC. Its glory days would be long gone by the time of Christ, when our species numbered some 100 million.
2
But in its day, Sumerian cities rivaled other contemporary,
urban conglomerates like Jerusalem, Damascus, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), and Sidon
(Lebanon).
3
It can be supposed that all such “ancient” centers of human activity had
arrived at more or less the same civic and private revelations: that the Self had disassociated from the previous biodiversity commons, like Continental Drift, and, by its
own endless tinkering, pursuit of sufficiency, and power grabs, emboldened the edifice, psychological fortresses, whose focus had surely shifted, obscuring the previously unprepossessing relations between humans and other species. Museums
capture that transmutation. They are living embodiments of a functioning hubris,
part celebratory, part aggression, that is all one would need in terms of our species’
contact information.
That shift from other species is everything in humanity’s most dramatic period of
evolution, from the Mesolithic (Epipaleolithic) to the present. For it is during those
7–9000 years that our territorial expansion and the profound consequences of our
impacts coincided with what we term the Egolithic Age, the very antithesis of the
ecolithic. Many have remarked that this transition represented the worst collective
choice in our entire ontology, the one that would ultimately destroy every Sumer of
the world.
32.2 The Paleolithic Others
That Self, the narcissistic goal of the shift, would be strangely emblemized in the
first photographic portraits of people by Hippolyte Bayard in France (“Self-Portrait
of a Drowned Man,” a direct paper positive in 1840)
4
and by 30-year-old Robert
Cornelius (1809–1893) who sat before his camera outside his Philadelphia store
without moving for probably 15 minutes in 1839, thus producing on daguerreotype
the first self-portrait in American history.
5
Cornelius’ selfie is that of a tenaciously,
2 Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt,
the Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2001.
3 See “14 of the oldest continuously inhabited cities,” by Bryan Nelson, November 29, 2018,
Mother News Network, MNN.com, https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/12-oldestcontinuously-inhabited-cities, Accessed March 23, 2020.
4 A World History Of Photography, by Naomi Rosenblum, New York, Abbeville Press, © Cross
River Press, 1984, p. 33.
5 “This is the first ever photograph of a human – and how the scene it was taken in looks today,” by
Adam Withnall, November 5, 20–14, The Independent.
32 Cave Paintings of the Mind