The Invention of Yesterday

The author offers a sweeping history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major cultural movements--Confucianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and Nomadism--and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their intertwinement that is the defining feature of the world today.rld today. nFrom language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age nTraveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. nMany thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. nThrough vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.