BY MAYA GREEN
Every empire has believed its noon would never see a dusk. From the mud-brick ziggurats of Mesopotamia to the marble forums of Rome, the defining trait of great civilisations is not their power, but their hubris — the quiet, collective delusion that they are the chosen exception to the law of decay.
We look at the ruins of antiquity and see ancient history, forgetting that to the people who walked those streets, their world was just as solid, permanent, and modern as our own. They, too, had complex economies, bureaucratic systems, and cutting-edge technologies that seemed indomitable. Yet, time is an impartial judge.
When a society begins to value expansion over sustainability, wealth over community, and arrogance over humility, it fractures from within long before the outer walls are breached. Today, we sit atop a global civilisation built on glass, silicon, and steel, convinced that our digital interconnectedness makes us invincible. But history is not a straight line of endless progress; it is a cycle.
The ruins beneath our feet are not monuments to failure, but mirrors reflecting our potential future. To ask “Are We Next?” is not an exercise in defeatism, but a vital act of survival — a plea to wake from our collective sleepwalk and remember that the soil makes no distinction between the concrete of today and the dust of Babylon.
Pause For A Poem: Just A Brief Noon
From river silt and sun-baked clay,
Where ancient shadows found the day,
The first tall towers clawed the sky,
With dreams that they would never die.
The kings of Ur and Babylon,
Swore empires lived in endless dawn;
Then marble cracked and banners fell,
And silence was the citadel.
Through Egypt’s sands and Caesar’s might,
Through golden ages turned to night.
The wheel of time ground thrones to dust,
As iron traded peace for rust.
And now we stand in glass and steel,
Believing what we touch is real —
We map the stars, we code the sea,
And blind ourselves with vanity.
The grass will grow where highways bend,
The greatest stories find their end.
The question hangs in quiet air,
While history watches from the stair:
Are we the exception to the rule,
Or just another sleeping fool?
The call to reflection
If the ruins of history teach us anything, it is that collapse is rarely a sudden cataclysm, but a slow, unheeded unravelling. We tend to imagine our end as a dramatic flash of lightning, yet it usually arrives like the steady encroachment of the tide — eroding the foundations while we are looking the other way. The true tragedy of fallen empires is not that they vanished, but that they watched their own decay and chose to call it progress.
Our modern world possesses tools that the emperors of old could scarcely dream of, yet we remain bound to the same fragile human nature that brought them down. Technology cannot engineer a way out of moral or systemic bankruptcy. If we continue to mistake wealth for wisdom and connectivity for community, we simply build a higher tower from which to fall. The question “Are We Next?” is not a prophecy of doom, but an urgent ultimatum delivered by the ghosts of our ancestors.
To break the cycle, we must trade our arrogance for stewardship and our myopia for a longer vision. Survival belongs to the societies that choose humility over hyper-expansion and resilience over convenience.
The dust of Babylon and Rome does not demand our pity; it demands our attention. Whether our descendants inherit our thriving cities or merely excavate our plastic ruins depends entirely on the choices we make before the sun sets on our own brief noon.
Maya Green, aka Dato Mohammad Medan Abdullah, is a freelance essayist, poet, and cultural commentator whose work explores the intersections of history, philosophy, and modern technological society. With a deep fascination for classical antiquity and systemic sustainability, Maya Green’s writing aims to bridge historical patterns with modern ethical dilemmas.
Maya Green’s commentary and creative non-fiction have previously appeared in several regional print publications and digital literary journals. When not writing, he can be found exploring local architectural ruins, volunteering with heritage preservation initiatives, or having a chill out amongst nature and the greenery in his neighbourhood.
