Prologue

PROLOGUE

BEFORE THERE WERE books, before there were scrolls, before there were walls to paint or clay to press a thumb into, there was a story.

Spoken.
Soft.
Shifting.

A tale told by a fire.
A name whispered to a child.
A hunt remembered in blood and bark.

We were already making history.
We just didn’t know we were writing it.

Because history doesn’t begin with writing.
It begins with deciding.

What matters?
What should be remembered?
Who deserves to be known?
And who disappears?

Before we invented ink, we invented bias.
Before the scribe, there was the storyteller.
And behind the storyteller, a motive.

Not to record.
To shape.

To make sense of what happened.
To make it sound better.
To make ourselves the center.

We forgot most of what ever happened.
What we didn’t forget? We often made up.
But in the making up, we made something real:

A mirror.

History is a mirror held up to the past.
But also a canvas painted by the present.

Every record is a reflection.
Every reflection is distorted.
Every distortion reveals more than it hides.

We didn’t start with truth.
We started with memory.
Then turned it into story.
Then turned it into fact.
Then called it History, as if it were separate from us.

But it never was.