For hundreds of thousands of years, the human race wandered the Earth in tiny, scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. They lived off whatever food they could scavenge - and then moved on or starved. But then, in the lands of the Fertile Crescent that arcs from modern-day Egypt through Syria to Iraq around eight or nine thousand years ago, something remarkable happened. People discovered that instead of gathering edible plants growing wild, you could plant their seeds and make them grow wherever you wanted them. Instead of hunting animals across the plains, you could pen them in a field, breed them to order and slaughter them whenever you needed meat. This was the Neolithic Revolution: the invention of agriculture. No longer would mankind be content to accept whatever Nature's bounty offered them; instead they reached out to take control of the Earth and shape it to suit their requirements.posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:45 PM on February 25, 2011
The results were both good and bad. Agriculture offered security; instead of living hand-to-mouth, a farming society could plan for the future. Since they made their food come to them instead of going out in search of it, they could establish permanent settlements - build houses and temples, and start accumulating possessions beyond what they could carry with them. Extensive fields and crops and vast herds of sheep or cattle provided far more food than a hunter-gatherer clan could dream of - and that allowed the population to grow by orders of magnitude. Rather than family groups of no more than a few dozen individuals at most, Neolithic people could establish large settlements: villages and towns of hundreds, even thousands of inhabitants. This large population in turn led to specialisation. Instead of everybody having to hunt for food, now a society could support craftsmen and priests and merchants and artists - not to mention kings and tax-collectors and soldiers, which would be the downside of the new large and more complex society.
This trend reached its peak in the muddy plains of lower Mesopotamia, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The land here was richly fertile, but the climate was arid; too dry to grow crops. Until, that is, the inhabitants, who called themselves Unĝ Sanĝ Gígga - the black-headed people - discovered the secret of digging irrigation ditches, and turned the desert green. The task of organising public works on a massive scale boosted the development of laws and government and religion, and there in the land of Šumerû - Sumeria - the world's first civilisation took root.
Unfortunately, the concentration of tens of thousands of human beings all in one place proved an irresistible temptation to demons. The first cities such as Kish and Uruk offered them an all-you-can-eat buffet. Vampires, once the lowest and most despised form of demon, flourished in this new environment. They could take human form, mingle with the crowds undetected, and feed at their leisure.
It was to counter the threat of vampires that a group of powerful sorcerers came together, some time around 6,000 BC, in the small coastal city of Ur. These men - and they were all men - were mostly drawn from the priesthood of the many fiercely independent city-states of Sumeria, who had devoted their lives and wealth to the study of magic. While some of them dabbled in politics, most of them saw it as a distraction from the pursuit of true power... and they worked in secret, knowing that both ordinary people and kings alike would react in fear and hatred if the nature of their work was discovered. For that reason they called themselves the Lú'ene Ğissu'ak - the Men of the Shadows, or Shadowmen.
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this appears to be someone's buffy fanfiction.
am i wrong? i would kind of like to be wrong.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 12:37 PM on February 25, 2011 [14 favorites]