Somebody on Quora asked how brief I can make the history of the world.
I interpreted "world" for this purpose not as going back to the Big Bang back as starting when civilization does. And I foreshortened that too, a little, though not much.
How brief can I be in recounting the history of the last 4000 years?
Well: I can leave you forty still shots from an infinitely complicated motion picture.
1. By 2025, the Assyrian Empire had been founded in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, our story begins with a quick rise-and-fall arc for Assyria, because ...
2. 1990 BCE, approx., wthe reign of the great Sargon I in this empire. He is the charming fellow portrayed above. But all institutions are mortal, so …
3. 1730 BCE Assyria fragments, as someone described in the surviving records as a “son of a nobody” seizes the throne.
4. 1680 BCE, Hammurabi founds an empire to the south of Assyria, which becomes known as Babylonia
5. 1353 BCE The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton creates history’s first known monotheistic religion
6. 1320 BCE, the reaction against the now-deceased Akhenaton brings Egypt back to its old gods, the new bosses seek to bury even the memory of his reforms. The historical analog to the Biblical exodus may have been the departure of those who were faithful to Akhenaton’s views, as they had become very unpopular with the new ruler.
7. 1200 BCE, By this time the Shang armies in China were using horse drawn chariots: the greatest military tech innovation ever!
8. 950 BCE, The Kingdom of Israel is at its height around this date, ruled by David and then his son Solomon, and their people began to think and write about their own history
9. 900 BCE, south of the Himalayas, scholars are working on the books that came to be known as the VEDAS, (Wisdom books) the foundation of Hinduism.
10. 776 BC, the Greeks are coming along, and the various cities start sending their best athletes to compete in games, Olympiads, at this time.
11. 500 BCE, The Chinese invent cast iron.
12. 470 BCE, Scholar in Elea (part of the Greek world, though geographically in Italy) develop the theory that the whole world is One, and is static — Being cannot allow for change or difference, all of which must be illusion. What is new isn’t this view, but the rationalistic style in which it is defended.
13. 462 BCE, Pericles rises to power in Athens, a now great city at the heart of the Greek world.
14. 399 BCE, the death of Socrates, a philosopher executed by order of an Athenian jury.
15. 336 BCE, Alexander, a pupil of another great Athenian philosopher, is crowned King of Macedonia.
16. 214 BCE, the creation of a great canal connecting the Pearl and Yangtze Rivers in China, the Xianggui Canal — the first example in history of an artificial connection between two natural waterways.
17. 146 BCE, after a long struggle, the rising power in the west of the Meditterranean, Rome, defeats and destroys the city of Carthage on the northern coast of Africa.
18. 73 BCE, after a brief but intense struggle Rome puts down a slave rebellion led by the mysterious “Spartacus.”
19. 44 BCE, Conspirators kill Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic is doomed — though its memory will long have defenders, the growing empire of Rome will be the realm of a monarchy for centuries to come.
20. First century CE — something happens in Palestine, centered around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth and talk of miraculous resurrection and ascension into heaven — that sets off a new religion, growing out of but in time distinct from the Judaism of David and Solomon.
21. 106 - 117. Roman Empire reaches its largest-ever width with the conquests of Romania, Iraq, and Arminia.
22. 476, the fall of Rome, and its western realm, to barbarian nations which gradually settle down into the nation-states of western Europe. For a long time yet, though, some Roman institutions will be kept above in the east, in a remnant empire centered in Constantinople.
23. 570, the birth of Muhammed.
24. 726, the Iconoclast movement begins in the east of Christendom. This will be a big source of tension between Constantinople and Rome.
25. 1066 — William the Bastard invades England, wins it, and changes his name to William the Conqueror — finds that he likes the sound of that one much better.
26. 1158, creation of the Hanseatic League, a free trade compact in north central Europe.
27. 1187. Saladin recaptures Jerusalem from the Latin world’s Crusaders.
28. June 1215. England’s King John is forced to accept limits on his power, the Great Charter.
29. 1347 — the Black Plague arrives in Europe.
30. October 1415 — Henry V defeats the French army at Agincourt.
31. May 1453 — the fall of Constantinople, the “second Rome,” to the (Islamist) Ottoman Empire.
32. 1498 — Florence condemns and executes the passionate heretical friar Giralamo Savanorola
33. 1513 — Niccolo Machiavelli puts out THE PRINCE, a study of the (unscrupulous) means that one must use to control a city-state.
34. 1637 — Rene Descartes creates modern philosophy with his DISCOURSE ON METHOD.
35. 1720 — one of history’s great speculative fevers, the South Sea bubble, is blown and popped.
36. 1787 — The Constitution of the United States is framed, with a resonate preamble identifying “We the People” as the ones doing the framing for their own sovereignty
37. 1871 — Rome becomes the capital of a new Kingdom of Ital after a long struggle to unite the warring city states of the peninsula.
38. 1878 — Philosopher Charles Peirce coins that “pragmatic maxim” and gets the philosophy known ever since as pragmatism into gear.
39. October 1945 — Creation of the United Nations. The word has been shocked into an unprecedented degree of international organization by the unprecedentedly massive slaughter of the preceding years.
40. January 1, 1983 — ARPANET adopts TCP/IP. In effect, this is the start of the internet.
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