ABSTRACT
In the moonlight of a Cypriot summer’s night two women sieve their grain, enjoying some quiet mockery of the tithe collector snoring on a nearby threshing floor. By the pounding roar of a highland waterfall 4,000 km away three men distil moonshine of a different kind, and taste the first results of their defiance with deep satisfaction. 1,500 years earlier, a family were struggling to carry their grain up the narrow steps of a state granary in Egypt, the first stage on its long journey to feed the people of Rome. 2,500 years before that, quarry workers were labouring in the heat and dust, dragging the huge stone blocks which would build the Pharaoh’s pyramid and the new state machinery that controlled their lives. 45 centuries later and 3,000 km to the north-west, other quarry workers were staining the granite with their sweat and blood, building monuments to another totalitarian regime which arranged their death on the quarry steps. Meanwhile a muleteer and his son pause on the edge of a Roman-engineered road in western Anatolia and look up suspiciously at a huge inscription they cannot read.
