Perspective Shifts

Perspectives are everything. While reading a passage describing the first civilizations, I cringed every time I read "the first in the world." How does the writer know that an event is a first? Technological and relational developments could have been happening concurrently all over the world-the Earth-and the western world wouldn't have known any different and vice versa.

Head of a Tribute Bearer from Khorsabad (710-705 BCE)

What if, when one civilization conquered another, the conquerors destroyed all record of the progress that the conquered people had made? That would leave only the conqueror's records, thus obliterating the history of the conquered. So, when a book says that something is the first or someone was the first to invent something, I suggest you come from the perspective that it may be the first recorded by a people whose records remained intact or the first patent to be successfully approved and PAID for or even the first person to name something that had gone nameless for years. Analyze everything you read and hear with your personal perspective and then utilize a world view--not just a western world view.