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In my later years, when my knees ached from mountain paths and my hands were permanently etched with clay, I traveled fewer miles but thought more of patterns.
From the delta of the Nile to the Harappan fields, from Cyprus’ pine hills to the cedar stands of Lebanon, from the copper mines of Oman to the lapis veins of Bactria, I had watched the same technologies echo:
Pine-resin smudging of pots.
Rice-water or other starch broths used to treat clay.
Grogs made from cherished, deliberately broken wares.
Logographic marks shared between scripts.
Gold carried from two or three particular river systems to feed the gods of a dozen cities.
Small shrines that held the bones of exiles, holy men, and wanderers, all of them telling the same stories with different names.
If you sift my world through the sieves of your time’s science, you will find:
Carbon nanotubes embedded in Black Bone sherds from multiple regions, aligned along former smoke fronts.
Glutamate residues and other organics in the microstructure of rice-water-treated ceramics.
Isotopic fingerprints of Himalayan and Nubian gold in royal graves across continents.
Iconographic convergence of Indus, proto-Egyptian, and Levantine symbol sets in the most mundane of things: receipts, jar marks, shipping tokens.
You will call this trade networks, diffusion, technological transfer.
For me, it was simply the road—a road whose stones were debts and whose dust was broken, reborn clay.
Aaron Baker
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