I Owe You (Jubilee)

Lyrics

History does not begin with a sword.It begins with a debt.With a line scratched on a tablet.A promise that cannot be kept.Lagash. Sumeria.Twenty-four hundred years before the Common Era.The tax collector stood at every border.The overseer watched the boats, the cattle, the nets.The cost of a proper burial... seven jars of strong beer, four hundred and twenty loaves of bread.The cost of dying was a lifetime of debt for the living.Until a ruler, Urukagina...He looked upon the fields of the palace, the house of the gods...And saw they had grown fat on interest.He took up a stylus.He took up wet clay.And he wrote the first word for freedom humanity had ever seen.He established it for them.He carved it into the cones that would outlast his city.Ama-gi.Ama-gi.It means... return to mother.Return to the beginning.The boatmen without an overseer.The debt-slave walking home.The first jubilee.The first breath.