I am of course speaking on a much, much grander scale.
The pagan european view is that time is a cycle, which is of course congruent with the four seasons present in europe, and other concepts like reincarnation apply in the same way, with a rebirth of the man just as nature "Dies" in winter and is "Reborn" come spring.
Now the semitic view (And this includes christianity) is that time is simply always going, it started and it will continue until the end. This is of course congruent with the desert, same season, same weather all the time. It is one continual thread of time
i am also asking this to ask another question :
Do you believe in ages? will this age of technology and "democracy" ever go away? will we ever retvrn to tribes, then to monarchies?
Will people some "Ages" from now, perhaps after civilizations collapse, live as we did 500? 1000 years ago? Will people in the future again be ruled by kings, with no access to modern technologies, or is the world truly only as long as we have documented?
The sediment comes from a few things: Some wisdom of experience, observed and passed down. Some form of eugenic selection of the traits that both prospered during the boom and survived during the bust. And some maturation of ancestral blood memory.
Think of the Trojan Horse. It seems so obvious that that was suspicious. But the Trojans did not exist a world that had a memory of the Trojan Horse. Now it's a standard part of our vocabulary, *thanks to* the fall of Troy.
Conquerors and authoritarians of the past, like Napoleon and Augustus, have tried to secure their legacy by having their sons inherit their position. And it has always failed. Thanks to the American experiment, we see a glimpse of a better way, but this system is revealing it's fatal flaws as well. I hope we'll someday a man rises who finds glory and seizes the mantle of father of the state, but understands the folly of inheritance of that mantle, and finds a new way. Then that system will find itself collapsing for as yet unforeseen reasons and humanity will once again learn something about itself.
One civilization is ground into dust for the cement that builds the next, and by this process we will reach greater heights and fall greater falls until perhaps one day we achieve the true glory of our potential.