Checkmate

I have this very big history book, which I had my eye on for some time, but the cost was sixty dollars. Needless to say, this is just too much to pay in order to own a book. But! Much to my delight I saw it was on special sale for thirty dollars!

It's a very big book and has mostly sat on a bookshelf for sometime now. I took it out intending to begin reading it, or at least scanning through, regularly, a couple of months ago, but only finally am doing so now. So yesterday I found myself scanning the index at the end of the book and realized, if I was to just read my way through that first of all, I'd learn quite a bit just doing that, as they list many occurrences and events with their page number after each name in the index. So you really do get a lot of information after each index entry.

I noticed, as I was reading through a lot of names starting with A, down through some centuries, what weird lives some of them lived! Which of course I've heard of before, but not so much at once. Like so and so, son of a king, accused his brothers of something, then defended them against the father, then killed his brothers, then plotted to kill his father, got discovered in some espionage in order to carry it out, and was executed. I mean really? This is how you're going to spend your life? When you could have leisure and enjoyment of days without having to toil like most of the population of mankind. It was his father who had him executed of course.

And there were lots and lots of this type of thing! Married his sister.. murdered his sister.. grand father.. what ever.. slew 40,000 people of a town.. this type of thing, over and over.


I started to notice it all had one thing in common. And that is they all had one branch of government. There was one power in the land.