Dr. Susan Brind Morrow, the eminent Egyptologist, includes in her new book this extraordinary assertion: Poetry pre-dates prose. Buttressed with all of the usual scholarly scaffolding, of course.
I guess we needed a woman to penetrate the living heart of those ancient hieroglyphs. It is reckoned that before the pre-historical Fall, some 4,000 years ago, the world’s great cultures were matriarchal. There was no war. A non-compete clause rested over everything. So it’s no wonder that when we read something like ‘Poetry pre-dates prose,’ the left side of a guy’s brain feels like it’s having a mushroom attack.
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