I. Fontana
Bronze Age Tools
At first, we ate mostly yams. No one knew what to do about this. Some changes were made, not without resistance, and we learned to eat many different things. While others still wore the same old masks, we wore new ones, and drew magic symbols of power on ourselves. We spent a lot of time worrying about luck. Even the rocks and trees had propensities, for evil or for good, and we tried to guess which was to be which. Things happened on their own, and we did what we could not to be left behind. Not everything could be explained.
Hey, we can’t lose, some guy said, and we started overrunning whatever populations could be reached. We demanded great sacrifices, took captives as slaves, and built or ordered the building of huge monuments of stone to overlook the irrigated fields. We needed numbers, and we found them.
Sometimes we went up to the top of the ziggurat, and used astronomy, watching the moon move from full to crescent, to nothing, and cried out, in voices like newborn babes.
We became Assyrians. As Assyrians, we did what we were known for, and I grew old, with seven daughters, as a merchant of bangles in Ib.
