What we were

Someone crossed the mud here with a child in their arms. The prints are those of a small woman, or perhaps an adolescent, walking fast and straight across the wet flats of a lake that no longer exists. Where the weight shifted from one arm to the other, the feet slipped and splayed. Now and then, beside the adult's steps, much smaller feet appear: a child under three, set down for a moment, then lifted again.

We do not know what this civilization called itself, or what language was spoken on that shore. The place now lies in the United States; the people who walked it lived thousands of years before any nation. What the prints keep is simpler: the weight of a child, and the ache in the arms that makes you stop, put them down, and pick them up once more.

At the edge of a shallow soak, some twenty thousand years ago, a group of people walked across wet clay. The water has long gone. What stays is the shape of their passing.

Adults crossed in both directions. Several men ran side by side, fast, perhaps after an animal. Children walked among them, one no older than four or five. In one place, two small wavy lines curl through the clay: a child's fingers, trailed through the mud for no reason at all.

Above a river that had cut a deep canyon into the Patagonian plateau, the people of this civilization came back, again and again, to the same wall. They ground pigment, red, yellow, white and black, pressed a hand flat against the rock, and blew the colour around it. When the hand came away, its absence stayed.

Hundreds of these absences now crowd the stone. They overlap, small and large, the hands of people of different ages set side by side as if each answered the one before. Around them run guanacos, the animals these hunters followed across the steppe, and scenes in which many small figures close in on a herd together.

This civilization played. In a grave at Ur, around 2600 BCE, someone was laid to rest with a board of twenty squares, its shell faces set with rosettes and eyes, a hollow box that held the pieces and the dice. The archaeologist who found it poured hot wax over it square by square, so that nothing would slide.

The game outlived the city's kings. Nineteen centuries later, at the gate of an Assyrian citadel, a stone bull taller than two men guarded the passage against evil. Between its hooves, someone scratched the same grid into the gypsum, rough and uneven, the way one draws a board when there is nothing else to do and a long watch ahead.

On a thin leaf of wood, a scribe first wrote out the invitation in a neat, practised hand. Claudia Severa, wife of Aelius Brocchus, asked her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to come to her on 11 September, for her birthday: her arrival, she said, would make the day more enjoyable. Greetings to Lepidina's husband; greetings from her own husband and her little son.

Then Severa took the pen herself. The letters change. They lean, they crowd together, they are less sure of themselves. "I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail." As far as anyone knows, the two women were not sisters. This civilization gave that name to a friend it could not do without.

Nanni was angry, and he wanted it in writing. His words were pressed into a tablet of clay no longer than a hand, and they have not cooled.

He had been promised fine copper by Ea-nasir, a merchant of Ur who traded with Dilmun, across the Gulf. When his messenger came to collect it, Ea-nasir set out poor ingots and said: take them if you want them; if not, go away. "What do you take me for," Nanni answered, "that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?" His men had been sent back empty-handed, again and again, through enemy country. From now on, he warned, he would choose each ingot himself, in his own yard.

In the village of the men who cut the royal tombs, someone kept count of who did not come to work. Through a long year of Ramesses II's reign, a scribe took a flat flake of pale limestone, the size of a large book, and wrote forty names down its edge in black ink. Beside each name he set the days missed, and above the dates, in red, the reason.

The reasons are the life of the village. A man was ill; two had bad eyes; one had been stung by a scorpion. Men stayed home to brew, to make ready for a festival, to embalm and mourn their dead. Paherypedjet, who seems to have been the one who healed, was forever away, preparing remedies or sitting with the sick. Ten men were away because a wife or a daughter was bleeding. Others were building their own houses, or carrying stones for the scribe himself. Two men missed nothing at all.

He was not one of us, and he was very close to us. The Neanderthals were another humanity, with whom our ancestors met and had children, and whose traces some of us still carry.

This man lived in the mountains of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. At some point in his life a blow crushed the bone around his left eye. His right arm withered after a break, and he lost the hand. His legs were injured and he walked with a limp. Bone had grown over his ear canals until he could hardly hear.

A potter pressed clay around a face and a person came out of it: heavy jaw, full lips a little apart, eyes that seem about to turn. Not a god, not a type. Someone.

The Moche of Peru's north coast made hundreds of such heads between about 100 and 800 CE, many of them as bottles with a looped spout on top. Some of the faces can be followed from one vessel to another. One man appears as a boy with soft cheeks, then as a young man with red paint on his face, then in his thirties with ear ornaments, the small scar on his upper lip always in the same place. Archaeologists call him Cut Lip. His own name is lost.

She wrote to him after he had died. Her name was not kept; we know her only as the mother of Won-i, their child. Her husband, Yi Eung-tae, had died at thirty-one, in Andong, in 1586, and she was expecting another child.

She did not write in the classical Chinese of learned men, but in hangeul, the alphabet of ordinary Korean speech, the words she would have said aloud. You always told me, she writes, that we would live until our hair turned white and die together. How could you go first?

When a twin died, among the Yorùbá, the family consulted a diviner, and a carver was asked for a figure small enough to hold in the palm. He did not carve an infant. He carved an adult, upright, with a high crest of hair, a person in the fullness of a life the child would not have.

For those who asked for it, the figure was not a portrait and not a toy. Twins were thought to share a single soul, and a twin left alone was in danger. The figure stood in for the one who had gone. So the mother took it home and cared for it as for a baby. She washed it, rubbed it with red camwood, touched food to its mouth, dressed it in beads and cowries. On feast days she danced with it in her hands or tucked into the cloth at her waist.

Under the overhang of a cave in the green hills behind the Kenyan coast, someone dug a small pit in the floor. It was shallow, just long enough for a child of two or three, who was laid on the right side with the knees drawn up to the chest, the way children sleep.

The body was probably wrapped close, perhaps in a hide; nothing of the wrapping is left, only the way the small bones lie tight together. The head had been set on something soft, and when that rotted, the head sank a little. Then earth was pushed back over the child, and nothing moved again. No bead, no tool was placed alongside. What was given was the care itself.

A lord of Texcoco, in the fifteenth century, is remembered less for his wars than for a question. Nezahualcóyotl, whose name speaks of a fasting coyote, ruled the city on the eastern shore of the lake of Mexico from 1431 until 1472. Around his name, songs were sung to the beat of drums, and some of them outlived the fall of his world.

One of them asks whether it is true that one lives on earth, and answers: "Not forever on earth, only a little while here." Then it counts what does not last. Jade cracks. Gold breaks. The long green feathers of the quetzal tear.

In the village cemetery of Hacıosman, in the north-west of Turkey, a small white stone stands among the weeds. Its words are in Turkish. They say that the man beneath it was the last Ubykh who could write and speak the Ubykh language, and that he made it immortal. He chose those words himself.

Tevfik Esenç was born in that village some forty years after his people had been driven from the mountains above the Black Sea, near Sochi, in 1864. His grandparents raised him and spoke to him in Ubykh, a language so crowded with consonants, around eighty of them, that it became a legend among linguists. He went to them. In Paris and in Oslo he sat for long hours with Georges Dumézil and Hans Vogt, repeating words, correcting them, telling stories onto magnetic tape. One of the stories he recorded in 1968 is the story of the exile.