We arrive in ancient Rome ... when without warning - it 'falls'. It didn't crumble. It doesn't explode. It didn't crack - it just fell? Hoping to put this minor setback behind us we hurriedly hop the next camel train to Egypt only to find that it's been taken over by the Greeks!

But the insanity doesn't stop! One of my ~~extremely~~ ancient relatives needed a visa for Harappa in the Indus Valley and got knocked back! He tried appealing but found that not only had the Harrapan Immigration Minister skipped town - the entire damn country had vanished along with the whole of Mohenjo Daro, their BFF neighbors in the Indus Valley.

This no less than poor civilization management with fake truth making things worse. The nonsense about Sumer. It was all a media beat-up" The idea of Mezopotamia being dismantled as a failed Alien experiment is a simple urban myth. A lie first spread by the Akkadians then by the Baylonians and in their turn the Assyrians and Hittites.

By all means - call me alarmist, but you couldn'tknow that one of my all-time favorite holiday destinations was Ur in Sumer Mezopotamia and they had been voted 'Best Civilization' for nearly 2000 year? As is common with success in civilizations there were those that resented Sumer's 4.9 rating [almost 1 million reviews] and Akkadians had decided Sumer would not be around for next year's 2004 bce vote.

Gilgamesh, my travel agent from Uruk, told me the rumors about the contest were true and they also told me about their 'frenemies', the Akkadians next door. As promised, in 2004 bce, the Akkadians showed Sumer the door . The Babylonians did the same to the Akkadians etc. and the whole thing became boring, predictable and a seriously distressing mess for Civilization planners of the time.

Aside from the screwing up of my holiday destinations, the whole thing was quite depressing since Sumer had just started a thing they called Writing-Stuff: Something the out-of-towners had no clue about.They couldn't figure out why scratching or sticking things into clay was any kind of a deal when their kids and chickens back home did it all the time. !?

See what I mean? Depressing.