Decolonizing Diaries II. When papyrus invented private property

Human societies today face a crisis that cannot be reduced to the political or the economic:

it is a crisis of relationship.

The disconnection between human beings and the earth,

between community and territory,

between knowledge and life,

is the visible symptom of a historical process whose origins lie far deeper than modern empires.

It begins with a sensation:

that something fractured along the way.

A rift that separated the body from the land,

territory from community,

time from its cycles.

Since then, we have walked like those who have forgotten an ancient name,

sensing that the wound is older than we are.

It did not arise in modernity,

nor in the colonization of the sixteenth century,

nor even with the empires that filled the world with iron.

The rupture is older:

a gradual distancing from the land,

a weakening of the bond,

a forgetting of the rhythm that sustains life.

To understand it, we must descend to the moment when humanity stopped hearing itself through the earth.

There, an image appears:

a freshly cut sheet of papyrus,

light,

replicable,

archivable.

Before papyrus, writing was stone—heavy, ritual, irreproducible.

Stone spoke only on decisive occasions,

and its weight prevented memory from becoming inventory.

Papyrus introduced something unprecedented:

the ability to preserve agreements outside the body,

to record possession without human presence,

to fix in a scroll what had once been a living bond.

The document replaced the witness.

Material mark supplanted communal agreement.

From that moment, land ceased to be a shared space sustained in living memory,

and became an entity that could be “owned” by written proof.

There—more than in clay, bronze, or sword—private property took form:

when the earth no longer needed people to be recognized,

but needed documents.

Yet papyrus presupposed agriculture.

And agriculture presupposed domestication.

And domestication presupposed separation:

between the one who plants and the planted,

between the one who dwells and the dwelled-in,

between the one who takes and the taken.

The rupture is not a date;

it is a gesture.

The gesture of a human being who, for the first time, imagined themself outside nature.

From that gesture arose Sumeria, the archives, the cadasters, the laws, the temples, and titles of property.

And aware of the power of the written record, each empire perfected a manual that would be repeated for millennia:

destroy the memory of the other.

History preserves the trail:

– 212 BCE: Qin Shi Huang orders the burning of books and scholars in China.

– 292 CE: Diocletian destroys texts of alchemy in Alexandria.

– 333: Constantine orders the burning of Arius’ writings.

– 448: Theodosius II commands that pagan texts critical of Christianity be burned.

– 979: Almanzor destroys books of the Great Library of Córdoba.

– 1242: Louis IX burns twenty-four cartloads of Talmud in Paris.

– 1258: Mongols destroy Baghdad’s House of Wisdom.

– 1499–1500: burning of Granadan manuscripts in Spain.

– 1562: Diego de Landa burns Maya codices in Maní

.

– 1610: destruction of the works of Juan de Mariana.

– 1933–45: Nazi book burnings across Germany

.– 1936–39: widespread book burnings under Franco.

– 1976–83: 1.5 million books destroyed under the Argentine dictatorship.

– 2015: ISIS burns thousands of books.

– 2019: contemporary burnings motivated by various ideologies.

The list is long.Too long.

The archive became power, and burning it, a weapon.

And the shockwave reached Abya Yala with the accumulated weight of millennia.

Yet where the impact was deepest, t

he ascent began.

Across Abya Yala endure calendars that remember time’s circularity,

weavings that teach that life is sustained by relation,

philosophies that affirm the earth has a heart,

and knowledge systems where the word is not archive, but breath.

The peoples who resisted the last wave of rupture preserved what papyrus erased and Grandfather Fire transformed:

the certainty that the land cannot be owned.

It can only be conversed with.

Accompanied.

Thanked.

Listened to.

This is why the return begins there:because they embody continuity—not due to being “older,”

but because their bond was never severed.

From that living center, the path opens again:

toward the Andes, where justice is balance;

toward the Altiplano, where knowing is breathing;

toward the forest, where walking is remembering;

toward the maize fields, where grace sustains life;

toward the Mapu, where duality seeks embrace;

toward every territory where the land still bears a name.

And as the return unfolds, the fracture begins to heal:

through reconciliation with the present.

Connection relearned.

Relationship refelt.

Territory reheard.

The world rewoven.

The circle completes itself when we understand that the problem was never writing,

nor technique,

nor agriculture,

nor private property,

nor the sword,

nor the horse,

nor gunpowder,

nor gold,

nor church,

nor even God.

The problem was the forgetting of the bond.

And the response is not to undo, but to walk back.

Not to interrupt, but to re-member—to bring back together what was separated.

Not to return to the past,but to return to the center.

Like any deep wound, it must be opened again so it can heal cleanly.

Like a bone that set crooked, it must be broken once more so it may mend true.

It hurts...

But there is horizon.

There is a path guided by a memory older than the wound.

The Earth is still here, waiting.

The heart beneath the soil still beats.

Memory—fragmented as it may be—remains alive.

The path is no longer linear.

It folds,

adjusts,

breathes.

And it has begun to return.