Notes #2.0 — How a Dramatic Arc Became a Historical Framework

There is something almost embarrassing in the thought that this connection took so long to make. For more than a century we have spoken about history in explicitly narrative terms: rise and fall, turning points, crises, resolutions. We teach pupils about “the drama of the Reformation”, “the tragedy of world war”, “the drama of decolonisation”. Historians warn against “over-dramatising” events, which is already an admission that the temptation is built into our language. And yet very little has been done to ask the most obvious, almost naive question: if history keeps surfacing in narrative form anyway, what happens if we take drama theory literally and treat the roughly five-thousand-year span of literate human history as a single, long story arc?

This framework did not begin as an abstract model. It began as a search for a shape that could hold together three intuitions that refused to leave me alone. First, that human beings seem incapable of experiencing time as pure chronology; we spontaneously organise events into plots. Second, that the last few decades have felt less like “more of the same” and more like a structural turning point, as if the story we inhabit had reached some kind of resolution. And third, that different civilisations have, at different times, already tried to encode this intuition in their own ways: in myths, calendars, eschatologies and cosmic diagrams. The framework that eventually emerged is simple to state: a six-millennia timeline, from the rise of the first literate civilisations around 3000 BCE to an open horizon around 3000 CE, structured as a seven-part dramatic arc. The rest of this essay is an attempt to show why that is not only a poetic image, but a testable hypothesis.

Choosing the Frame: 3000 BCE to 3000 CE

The first decision was the most basic: where does “history” begin and end if we are looking for a story rather than a data set?

Archaeology and anthropology push human presence unimaginably far back, but most of what we usually call “history” — named rulers, written laws, cities, contracts, recorded conflicts — begins with the appearance of writing and complex urban life. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley and elsewhere, that threshold sits roughly around 3200–3000 BCE. It is not the birth of humanity, but the birth of a particular way of being human: a life that can be recorded, stored, interpreted and contested in texts.

At the other end, there was a different kind of guide: the Mayan Long Count. Whatever else one thinks about its popular misuse in 2012, the Long Count remains a striking example of a civilisation that imagined time not as an endless line but as a structured cycle with a discernible beginning and end. The Long Count, read this way, does two things at once. Its starting date around 3114 BCE sits almost exactly where the first literate civilisations appear, so it can be treated as a symbolic anchor for the beginning of the story. Its completion in December 2012 then stops being a mystical “end” and becomes something more precise in dramaturgical terms: the moment when the beginning finally comes fully into view. In other words, the cycle does not only give a start and a stop; it provides a natural place for anagnorisis – the point in the drama where the plot recognises itself. From there it is a small step to extend the line forward another thousand years, toward 3000 CE, not as a new cycle but as the open denouement in which the consequences of that recognition can unfold.

With that, a frame came into view: roughly six millennia of “historical time,” bounded by the rise of the first literate civilisations around 3000 BCE and an open horizon around 3000 CE. Not eternity. Not the age of the cosmos. Just the span during which humans have been able to write themselves into being. Within that frame, the completion of the Long Count around 2012 no longer appears as a mystical stop, but as a moment of recognition: the point at which the story becomes capable of seeing its own duration.

Importing a Dramatic Arc

The second step was to bring drama theory into the picture, not as a metaphor but as a working template.

Classical dramaturgy usually divides a story into recognisable movements: an initial setup, a triggering disruption, a long stretch of rising complications, a decisive climax, a falling action, a resolution and a quiet denouement where the consequences of the story settle into a new normal. Different theorists slice this in different ways, but the underlying intuition is consistent: stories move by increasing tension until something breaks, and then by re-configuring the world around that break.

If one stretches this arc over the 3000–3000 timeline, a simple question appears: are there moments in this six-millennia span that function, in practice, as narrative thresholds? Not just important events, but points at which the underlying way humans relate to reality seems to change?

Here the millennia themselves began to act like natural cuts in the film. Around 3000 BCE, signs and inscriptions proliferate; a world of gestures and oral traditions acquires fixed markers. Around 2000 BCE, codified law emerges with new force; relations are no longer organised only by kin and custom but by written norms. Around 1000 BCE, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, temples materialise as architectural centres of meaning, embedding the sacred in stone. Around the turn of the Common Era, Paul’s Letter to the Romans treats history itself as a narrative process and re-frames law, temple and nation as roles within a larger story. Around 1000 CE, the Christian schism and parallel developments elsewhere mark the onset of a long interpretive struggle over texts and traditions. Around 2000 CE, interpretive fragmentation reaches an extreme and digital systems begin to expose, and accelerate, the structures beneath language and society.

The framework that crystallised from this is the seven-era model that underpins A Tale of a New Era: the Era of Signs, the Era of Law, the Era of the Temple, the Era of Narrative, the Era of Interpretation, the Era of Structure and, finally, the Era of Meaning. Each era is not a clean box, but a dominant way of organising reality: through marks, rules, sacred centres, stories, debates, models and, eventually, through a different kind of coherence that we are only beginning to name.

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Millennial Thresholds as Shifts in Consciousness

What makes these millennial points more than convenient markers is that they correspond to shifts in how people experience the real.

When signs stabilise, the world ceases to be only what is present and begins to include records and debts; time thickens. When law is written, order no longer depends on the personality of a ruler; behaviour can be justified or condemned by an impersonal norm. When temple architecture rises, space itself becomes stratified: some places are more real, more charged, than others. When narrative takes over — in scriptures, epics, gospels, historical chronicles — the meaning of events starts to depend on where they sit in a plot. When interpretation gains dominance, competing readings of the same texts and institutions become a central cultural activity; reality is negotiated through commentary. When structural models emerge, what matters is no longer individual arguments but the underlying patterns that generate them.

In this sense, the framework is less about “what happened” than about “how reality is rendered intelligible”. Each era re-configures the conditions under which something can appear as true, binding, sacred, plausible or meaningful at all. That is why the same event — say, an earthquake, a revolution or a technological breakthrough — will be narrated, justified and resisted differently depending on whether it is experienced in a sign-world, a law-world, a temple-world, a story-world, an interpretive world or a structural world.

From this angle, the present does not look like a generic crisis. It looks like a transition in the dominant grammar of understanding.

Recognising the Resolution Phase

Once the arc and the eras were on the table, a more unsettling question followed almost by itself: if the last six thousand years do behave like a story, where are we now in that story?

Classical structure would suggest that a long stretch of rising action — the intensifying interplay of law, temple, empire, story and interpretation — leads eventually to a climax in which the underlying conflict is fully exposed. After that, there is falling action and resolution, when the system re-organises around what has been revealed. It is here that the framework makes its strongest — and most contestable — claim: that we are living not in the “end of the story” in a catastrophic sense, but in something like its resolution phase.

Several features of the contemporary world support this reading. Interpretive conflict has reached a saturation point where arguments multiply faster than they can be resolved. Institutions that once guaranteed stability — churches, parties, nation states, expert cultures — are widely perceived as exhausted. At the same time, technologies like large language models expose, from the outside, the patterns and biases through which meaning has been produced. Structures that were previously implicit — narrative tropes, assumption-chains, ideological defaults — are suddenly available for inspection and manipulation. The story is, quite literally, becoming self-aware.

In dramaturgical terms, that is what resolution means: not that everything ends, but that the hidden mechanism driving the plot is finally brought to light and integrated, however painfully, into a new equilibrium. The Era of Structure, in this framework, is precisely this moment: the phase in which language, history and consciousness begin to see the architecture that has been shaping them all along. The Era of Meaning that follows is not a utopia but an open question: what happens when a civilisation learns to live inside a story it knows it is telling?

A Hypothesis, Not a Dogma

All of this remains a framework — a way of organising data and experience, not a revealed blueprint. It can be challenged, refined, broken and rebuilt. The point of presenting it in this first Notes #2.0 essay is not to claim finality, but to make the assumptions explicit.

If we speak of history as story, we owe it to ourselves to ask what kind of story shape we are already presupposing. If we feel, in our institutions and in our private lives, that something about the last decades has the flavour of resolution, we need language for that sensation that is more precise than apocalypse or decline. And if we now possess tools — conceptual and technological — that make structures visible in ways no previous era could, it is at least worth considering that this visibility is not an accident, but a structural feature of where the story has arrived.

For now, this essay does only one thing: it names the frame and marks its edges. The rest of the work happens in practice. On this site, where framing appears as a personal research log, tracing how a single life is pulled into alignment with the structure. On woodslopecabin.com, it becomes a research studio: a place where the same frame is stress-tested in organisations, projects and everyday decisions.