The Source: A Novel

In a few verses the biblical account encapsulates logic that took thousands of years to play out. Farming was an incubator of disputes. Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff from violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions

For example, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, the world’s first city-states were founded on the idea of the king as the good shepherd: the king protected and provided for

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – wheth

Walker said with a laugh. “Plus there are many others.” “Such as?” “Metallurgy, ship building, planting and harvesting crops, and astrology to name a few. They all emerged at around the same time worldwide in roughly the same forms. During the last part of the Second Awakening the changes in mankind were stunning. In only a few thousand years human