The Lake Becomes a River

The Boy Scout camp I attended for two unforgettable summers in the Midwest was set on the shores of a cold, silent, and, at that time, still quite remote lake. Canoeing one day at the far end of the lake, the end nobody visited, I found my way under some overhanging branches into the creek that fed the lake. Slow-moving, surprisingly wide, it opened like a broad, low corridor upon what until that moment had seemed like a closed watery room. What I had known as a lake suddenly revealed itself to be a river.

History itself, until surprisingly recent times, seemed more like a lake than like a river. For a man like, say, George Washington, recorded history stretched back effectively no further than the earliest surviving documents from ancient Greece and Rome--in other words, to just a few hundred years before Christ. The colossal ruins of Egypt were thought to be much older, but how much older no one really knew, because no one could read the hieroglyphic writing that covered so many of their walls. In effect, history was a 2,500-hundred-year lake of time, growing slowly at the near end and not at all at the far end.

The lake of time began to become the river of time when the greatest archaeological find in the history of the West, a trilingual stone tablet found at Rosetta, Egypt in 1799, was deciphered in 1822 by the brilliant Jean-François Champollion. As that epoch-making breakthrough led gradually to the full deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic and the extensive translation of ancient Egyptian texts, the West was introduced to men and women whose full, passionate, and even literate lives lay as many centuries before Christ as ours lie after him. The lake of time, instead of growing only gradually and only at the near end, suddenly more than doubled in size, with all the growth coming at the far end.

But however dramatic that quantitative change, the qualitative change was more important still: What had seemed a lake now came to resemble a vast and complex river system. We ourselves were to be located somewhere in the delta where everything flowed bafflingly together.

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