A time of peace and plenty set in for The People. They developed the new field of agriculture, becoming more acquainted with which seeds to plant and how to bring them to harvest; eventually they began to have so much extra that they now needed granaries to store the excess. The carpenters of Korchub shared their secrets freely with the craftsman from Mescida, and both settlements grew with finer and finer buildings. Life was getting so easy that people now didn’t need to spend their entire day finding food and shelter, and could now spend time just thinking, reasoning about the world around them. The first scholars began to appear, and naturally they centered around the soaring ziggurat, and began observing the movements of the sun and stars, and devising the first hints of a calendar. Up till then, time had only been vague exaggerations of past, present, and future.
Meanwhile members of the same group that had hunted the mammoth pressed further and further north. Endless wilderness greeted them at every turn; limitless forests, towering ice-capped peaks, horizon melting grasslands; all these they passed through as they explored and mapped the known world.
It was in this time, when time still had little meaning for the Babylonians, that the northern scouts found a sight that beckoned them forth. Twin pinnacles stood guard on either side of a thickly forested path, forming a natural gateway that seemed to lead to some new land. Naturally, the hunters made their way through.
Beyond they found lands covered in heaps of a substance they had scarecely scene in their entire lives- snow. Entranced by the dazzling white blanket that smothered the landscape, they were astounded ten-fold to see, just beyond a patch of frigid conifers, the tips of towers made by the hands of Man.
The people of the new settlement called it Byblos, and themselves Phoenicians. They had a Queen Mu, who agreed to an audience with a representative of The People. They expressed intentions of mutual peace and goodwill, and left with the beginnings of an alliance discussed. The Babylonians hoped that this new people could eventually become one with them, as it was with the Korchubians now so long ago.
As the two peoples shared knowledge, the Babylonians realized that the mountains that welcomed them had also drawn the Phoenicians to this place many years ago, and now formed the southern boundary of their claim. Their lands were so far from the Babylonians that there was no danger of overlap; miles of endless wilderness filled the vast lands between.
As this was happening in the Far North, the scholars of Babylon perfected the Calendar. By their reckoning, it was now the year 3100, based largely on their computations of their own semi-mythic history. From now on, the People existed in Time.
