But if Uruk was the first town, ie pre-dates Jericho, then we're talking 10,000 years. And there are towns in Turkey that are older than Jericho with sophisticated stone work. So, the events that inspired the Saga of Gilgamesh probably originates from the middle Ice age. Way before Nineveh.


keep to the Fen Causeway

This led to a collapse of the existing "Heroic" Greek civilisations of the middle bronze age. Several of these kingdoms appeared to have died out, Sparta probably being one of them. The later Spartans were supposedly arrivals from the Balkans who took on the mantle of the original but who were apparently unrelated to them.

But whatever the theories, however much there is interesting linkage in the fossil record, we lack anything like real proof.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Grain is special, but for a different reason. It is easy to standardize -- to plant in rows or paddies, and store and record in units such as bushels. This makes grain an ideal target for taxation. Unlike underground tubers or legumes, grain grows tall and needs harvesting all at once, so officials can easily estimate annual yields. And unlike fugitive wild foods, grain creates a relatively consistent surplus, allowing a ruling class to skim off peasant laborers' production through a tax regime of manageable complexity. Grain, in Scott's lexicon, is the kind of thing a state can see. On this account, the first cities were not so much a great leap forward for humanity as a new mode of exploitation that enabled the world's first leisured ruling class to live on the sweat of the world's first peasant-serfs. As for writing, that great gateway to history, Scott reports that its earliest uses suggest it was basically a grain-counting technology. Literary culture and shared memory existed in abundance both before and after the first pictographs and alphabets -- consider Homer's epics, the products of a nonliterate Greek "dark age" before the Classical period. Writing contributed a ledger of exploitation.

'Virtue-signalling' -- the putdown that has passed its sell-by date

As the Boston Globe columnist Mark Peters has pointed out, "virtue-signalling" has existed in isolated pockets since at least 2004, but was popularised (not, as he claims, invented) by James Bartholomew in the Spectator in April 2015. If you've heard the phrase recently, it's most likely being used according to his definition [...]

"Virtue-signalling" is also a neat, pithy phrase, with - and this is the killer, really - a social-sciencey air, as though it's a phenomenon recorded by behavioural economists and factored into nudge-unit projections of how many men pee standing up. (As of January 2016, however, a Google scholar search for the term yields only a handful of citations related to the work of a single religious studies academic.)