Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

The very first bubble known to man took place far back in the days before history.  Yes, all the way back before the writing and mathematics and plasma television screens that constitute our idea of modernity,(only a few short centuries beyond the time when hitting someone with a stick was a perfectly acceptable way to communicate your irritation over their refusal to help with the dishwashing) they had their own great rise and devastating burst of the very first bubble.  This has come to be known to scholars as the Great Clay Pot Crisis of Really Long Ago, BC.

Clay Pots were a marvelous innovation.  You could put things in them, and store them away underground for months or years.  When you needed something you could climb down and grab a pot of it, instead of the previous method of transporting by hand the individual rice or wheat grains.  Although this made the rice and wheat grain unions very unhappy it was generally agreed that the new clay pot technology was a wonderful benefit to prehistorical society.  Clay pot makers became very rich and very powerful and the selling, buying, and trading of clay pots came to be more and more central to the primitive markets which existed way back in the Long Ago, BC era.

Naturally the clay pot makers and traders saw that they were amassing great wealth and rather than being pleased about this and proud of their vital role in society they grew dissatisfied with the huge fortunes and yearned for ever greater quantities of gold and beads and frankincense.  They began making shoddier pots, in the hopes that they would break more easily and force people to replace them.  Then they increased the prices on the high quality pots so as to earn a better profit margin.  Their next avenue was into the decorative pot market, useless pots that were very nice to look at but broke so easily that this was actually promoted as a sign of their refinement.

For many years this cycle continued, until one day when a rice merchant when down into his cellar and discovered to his horror that a large percentage of his pots had broken and much of his rice was ruined.  This began a wave of panic as more and more merchants and farmers and honest tradespeople and ordinary citizens began to find breakages and spoilages in their own storage sellers.  The clay pot makers responsible were rounded up and publicly executed or tortured, new standards for clay pot making were developed with a mandatory death penalty for anyone responsible for sub-par pot making, and in a few short centuries the total breakdown of civilization that followed was but an unpleasant memory and a well regulated market in clay pots had been established, to the relief of all the citizenry.

Soon after, of course, bronze was discovered.  Clay became obsolete and the stage was set for the Great Bronze Scandal of Slightly Less Long Ago, BC of which we know almost nothing.