there is a message from national
treasures please check it like you it's
from Earth literally from the ground yet
for thousands of years
it's been like this frozen in time
gazing up at the sky what is it doing
keeping its chin up facing the
challenges of life or does it represent
a more elevated ambition
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is this the first stargazer maybe it's
both 7,000 years old the legacy of the
yungshao culture it dates from the
Neolithic period the new Stone Age a
time when people began to make elegant
ground polished stone tools instead of
crude functional ones to farm and live
together in settled communities in short
to lay the foundations of civilized
existence
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pottery the art the craft of
transforming clay essentially dirt by
means of hands and fire was an
accidental discovery that had been made
tens of thousands of years earlier
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it was a momentous one full of potent
symbolism by playing with mine humanity
suddenly came of age discovered the
power of creation by a process as bright
and hot as the Sun itself cold heavy
clay the dirt into which all living
things decayed became something a new
age had dawned one of speculation on the
big issues of life death and humanity's
place in the cosmos
in fact this jar is just one of many
perplexing and seemingly perplexed faces
that stare back at us across the Gulf of
time heralds of the birth of culture of
human civilization
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but what of this one who is it what does
it mean it's hard to say for certain
even its gender while the upturned lips
innocently imploring suggests the child
the rotund body of the actual jar
suggests a sexually mature woman
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it's a symbolically pregnant combination
literally a spout of the jar is an
oval-shaped mouth and two squinting eyes
so narrow that it was surely made to
serve ritual rather than practical
purposes water life force flowing with
difficulty for mother to child
culminating in the tears of mother and
child alike that accompanied the arrival
of the new life
whatever its meaning whatever its
purpose six thousand years have passed
the flesh-and-blood people who created
it have vanished their village is gone
their rituals forgotten but here it
still is permanent as the earth that
came from as unchanging as the heavens
above the feelings of its creators
captured forever people who suffer the
pangs of birth faced up to the struggles
of life and gazed in wonder at the Stars
people just like us
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