It is difficult to imagine the world before the industrial revolution: no electricity, no automobiles, no planes, no power anything. The discoveries and inventions made since then have yielded the hard, durable goods that are now the core of our present culture. We, of course, take all these things for granted because they are the reality of our world after the last two hundred years of marvelous scientific and technological development. The brilliant and daring men and women who made these discoveries are known and revered for their achievements.

Now, take yourself back to the world of five thousand years ago to the early Bronze Age before a calendar was invented, before a counting system was devised, before money or any standard weights or measures were used and before the development of a written language. Today, we use these things as if they had always existed, but before the Bronze Age, they were unknown. Then, you could not even understand the concept of how old you were. Your parents would know you were born during the growing season or before someone else, but they could not know you were 12 years old because the concept of numbers and the definition of a year didn’t exist. Keeping track of quantities of things was done in broad terms using fingers, sticks or symbols pressed in clay.

It would certainly be a stretch of the imagination to think there was no place or way to read about anything. You could learn what  someone taught you verbally, but that was likely to happen only within your own family. Limited communication was achieved using symbols pressed in clay, but these conveyed some meaning only within the limited circle of those who had agreed on what the symbols meant.

While counting and a written language are complicated systems, the understanding of the seasons and the development of a calendar may seem less spectacular. However, considering the people had no understanding of what controlled the seasons, no way to measure anything and no way to record observations, the difficulty of the task was immense. Yet, somewhere during that time period, a brilliant mind conceived of the way to find an answer.

The greatest inventions of mankind, fire, the wheel, counting systems, writing systems and the calendar, are not attributed to any one great individual and, in some cases, not even to a people or a certain time, but each of these inventions came from the mind of some inventive genius. This is the story of one of those people who managed to pull back the curtain of ignorance far enough to let others see further down the path of knowledge.