Monologue Transcription

Do you hear it listeners?

Before the alphabet, before the codex, and before kings claimed the voice of gods, there was another city, buried in stone, carved in bone, stored in the bodies of the dead and the breath of the living. This was the city of tombs, and today it whispers to us. Modern minds pretend to be immune to the past. They scroll through the noise, swiping at oblivion, but underneath it all, beneath the gigabytes, beneath the irony, there's still a hunger to be remembered. But let us look backward. It began with structure, fortified language shaped into thought, grammar. With it came connection, a bridge between minds once divided by fear. Signals became sentences, meaning cross the boundary between species. And once we could command, we did. First beasts, then fields. The mimicry of the wild gave way to mastery. The city of beasts fell silent, and the city of tombs began to speak. At first, this city spoke in bones. We buried the skulls of our dead beneath the hearth. We built homes atop our ancestors, layer upon layer of remembrance. When words were scarce, skulls were sentences. Each household became a grammar of ghosts. Then came the monuments, gobekli tepe, not a temple, but a treaty, a piece carved in stone between the fading city of beasts and the rising city of tombs, a contract that said, we will no longer worship the animal, we will name it, cage it, cultivate it. The gods of fang and feather became symbols instead of kin, and there the factions formed. The agriculturalists, who worshipped the flood and built for eternity, and the pastoralists, who followed their herds across the wind. In time they found their paragons. Egypt, the patient builder of tombs. The Hittites, the riders of chariots and storm, and between them Mesopotamia, a hinge of river and desert, where the plow met the spear, and the first empires learned to speak both tongues, and the chariot reigned supreme, a god of motion drawn by conquered beasts, power radiated through trade routes and temples, each link another promise of eternity. But the promises grew heavy. Behind the wealth, opulence. Behind the palaces, slavery. And behind the shining bronze, debt and famine. And yet, it was information that doomed them. Their empires spoken symbols no one could share, and their scribes guarded meaning like treasure. When the storms came, and trade faltered, when cities burned, those walls of language became tombs themselves. The Bronze Age collapsed. The chains of exchange snapped one by one. Palaces emptied. Scripts went dark. And for centuries the world forgot how to speak to itself. And if you listen carefully, you can still hear the whispers. Our own networks buzz with the same illusions. We built our bronze anew. We call it infrastructure, capital, and mutually assured destruction. Every age believes it has found the ultimate weapon. But even Oppenheimer's atomic world can crumble when the next great detonation is made of information. When the chariots ruled, the infantry learned to march. When the palaces hoarded script, strangers invented letters. And when the web grew too tangled, it burned. Yet the lesson remains, every civilization believes its connections eternal, its wealth, its weapons, its words unbreakable. But permanence is most fragile illusion of all. The city of tombs learned that once, and we will learn it again. -