A Short History of the World (2 page)

We do not currently know if the causes for human migrations were competition for resources, climate change, or simply the desire to explore. Regardless of the reasons, the general view is that Australia was reached approximately 50,000 years ago and that, by circa 15,000 BC, Homo Sapiens crossed into present-day Alaska via what is now the Bering Strait, when it was either dry land or frozen.
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Then, within a few thousand years, they reached the southernmost tip of South America and, with the exception of a few islands in the Pacific, most of the world was colonised by humans by this time. From then on, life in the Americas would develop in complete isolation from the rest of the world until European colonisation began in 1492, notwithstanding a brief visit by the Vikings around AD 1,000.
 

From Hunter-gathering to Farming

Humans initially led a nomadic ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence, moving from area to area, hunting animals and eating any digestible foods they could find, such as plants, nuts, berries and fruit. Eventually, people began returning every year to the same and the most fertile places. About 10,000 years ago, it seems humans worked out how to sow crops, a discovery that allowed them to move from hunting and gathering to farming and which had such a significant effect on the subsequent development of mankind that it has been named the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.
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Once people began living near each other, increased communications led to greater cooperation and to the exchange of knowledge. Yet it was the availability of more food that was fundamental to how mankind developed: more food led to more people and more people led to more settlements. The ability to produce and store food also meant that societies were eventually able to support non-food producing specialists such as artisans, holy men, bureaucrats and soldiers as well as political leaders.

 
While crops were helpful in yielding yarn for clothing, other clothes were provided by the hides of animals such as sheep, goats, cows and pigs, all of which mankind gradually domesticated. These animals also helped in other ways; their manure helped increase crop yields, as did the animals themselves by pulling ploughs, which in turn made more land suitable for farming.
 

A productive virtuous circle was established, but living together in permanent dwellings came with a downside: it meant that humans were now living near their own refuse and excrement. This was not conducive to hygiene at a time when humans neither understood the benefits of cleanliness nor knew about the existence of germs. Living in closer quarters with livestock also meant that diseases, which had developed in animals and to which humans had no immunity, were now able to jump across to humans and infect them. The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals and then transferred over to humans via fleas or other carriers.
 

Jumping forward for a moment, the Black Death in the 14th century, the destruction of the native American populations at the time of Columbus, and the influenza of 1918 that reportedly killed some 20 million people – along with other plagues throughout the centuries – may all have originated in this way. The 21st century is no exception, with Swine Flu and Bird Flu acting as nasty reminders that rearing animals in close quarters – and inhumanely – might still come back to bite us (no pun intended).

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The Ancient World

3500 BC - AD 500

The First Civilisations

The earliest evidence that has been found of complex societies comes from Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq and Syria – in around 3500 BC. The mild wet winters and long, dry, hot summers characteristic of the area were ideal for growing crops, and it is here that plants were first domesticated. Importantly, the land was also located between two major rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – which provided ready access to water and thus to irrigation.
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When viewed on a map, the area itself is crescent-shaped and for this reason, along with that of the fertility of its land, it has been named the ‘Fertile Crescent’.
 

 
Mesopotamia was positioned at the crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia – a convenient location for people to meet to trade goods and share ideas. The area also had few natural boundaries and was therefore difficult to defend. As a result, its history between 3500 and 400 BC is that of the rise and fall of kingdoms and continuous wars over territory. Due to the numerous shifts in power over time, and a general lack of information from the period, this history is not always easy to follow.

One of the earliest civilisations in the world – that of Sumer – dominated southern Mesopotamia from approximately 3300 to 2000 BC. It is generally believed that the Sumerians were the first people to establish true cities of up to 50,000 inhabitants. Sumer’s main city of Uruk may well have been the largest city in the world at one time and some temples from this age still stand in Iraq today. It is also from Sumer that we have the earliest example of one of the most important developments for humankind: writing in the form of pictograms used by temple officials to record basic information about crops and taxes. Apart from what we have surmised about world history through archaeology and geology, we know very little of what actually happened until the appearance of writing, which acts as the dividing line between pre-history and history.

Ancient Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs (3100 BC)

Around the same time another civilisation sprang up in Egypt around the banks of the river Nile – a river whose annual floods provided the much-needed water for irrigating crops. The fertility of the soil around the Nile contributed significantly to the growth of Egyptian power as it allowed the Egyptians to become rich from supplying food to other parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The desert acted as a defensive barrier and the lack of invaders ensured political stability in the land.

In circa 3100 BC, this patchwork of different kingdoms was united under a powerful king, or pharaoh, called Nemes, who built the capital, Memphis, from which Egyptian dynasties ruled for the next thousand years. Egypt became the largest kingdom in the world, with up to a million subjects ruled by approximately 30 different dynasties over the following 2,500 years. The pharaohs were recognised as gods by the population.

The time pharaohs spent preparing for death partially explains the dedication with which they built the great pyramids – in effect giant tombstones – between 2700 and 2200 BC. Incredibly, even today, nobody really knows how they were built. What we do know is that they were extremely tall structures for their time and beyond; the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, built over 4,500 years ago, was the tallest building on Earth until Lincoln Cathedral was completed in England in AD 1311 (if you include its wooden spire that is). That’s over 3,000 years later.
 

Civilisations in the East

Beyond Egypt and Mesopotamia, two other major independent civilisations arose along other waterways – one in north-west India along the Indus River, crossing into present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the other along the Yellow River in China.
 

Founded around the turn of the third millennium, the Indus Valley Civilisation – often referred to at its peak as the Harappan Civilisation after its major city of Harappa – covered a huge area of land almost the size of western Europe. Although a number of unanswered questions still remain about this society, partly due to the fact that its writing has still not been deciphered, we do know that Harappa and its sister city, Mohenjo-Daro, were major conurbations, supporting populations of over 30,000 people and trading with each other as well as with Mesopotamia. Their people were clearly advanced as they lived in brick and stone houses, cultivated wheat and barley, and irrigated fields. Moreover, both cities were laid out in grids and similarly constructed, thus suggesting a unified government.
 

While this civilisation flourished between 2600 and 2000 BC, its major cities were suddenly abandoned between 1700–1600 BC, with the entire civilisation ceasing to exist by around 1300 BC. Although nobody is sure what the exact causes for this were, suggestions range from climate change, erosion of the soil that pushed its people further east, and invasion by Indo-Europeans
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from the north-west.

Further east, the earliest dynasty for which we have written evidence is the Bronze Age Shang Dynasty, which established a kingdom along the banks of the Yellow River around 1700 BC. The Shang Dynasty covered an area of approximately one-tenth of modern-day China and lasted for roughly 700 years until it was overthrown by the Chou (or Zhou) Dynasty, which saw China move into the Iron Age.
 

Notwithstanding a few barbarian interruptions, the Chous retained power for a similar length of time. Yet for most of this time, the area consisted of over a hundred quasi-independent principalities, of which the Chous were only the most powerful. However, unlike the Harappan Civilisation in India that suddenly disappeared, the beliefs and rule of the early Chinese dynasties formed the foundations on which successive dynasties would rule the region until well into the 20th century.
 

The Stone, Bronze & Iron Ages

Before 5000 BC, tools and weapons were predominantly made from stone, wood and bone, hence the term ‘the Stone Age’. When humans discovered that metals could be extracted from ore by using high temperatures, copper began to be used for tools, albeit to a limited degree.
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However, sometime around 3300 BC, it was discovered that heating a mixture of copper and tin ore at the ratio 9:1 could produce an even more durable material – bronze. This began what we now refer to as the ‘Bronze Age’.
 

The different ages did not emerge or end everywhere simultaneously; the British Isles, for example, only entered the Bronze Age in around 800 BC, and even into the 20th century several Stone Age civilisations were still being discovered.

Iron began to be used in significant quantities in the Middle East and south-east Europe around the 13th century BC, shortly after people discovered how to produce the necessary heat to smelt the iron ore from the rock. Much stronger and more ubiquitous than copper and tin, iron gradually overtook bronze as the most sought after metal. As with the Bronze Age, the Iron Age began at different times across the world, only reaching northern Europe around 600 BC.
 

The Hittites: Early Ironmongers (1400–1200 BC)

Iron played a large part in the emergence of another major empire that surfaced in the second millennium BC – that of the Hittites. By the mid-14th century BC they had carved out an empire comprising present-day Turkey and parts of present-day Lebanon and Iraq. It was the Hittites who discovered how to smelt iron ore to make iron; this was recognised as an extremely important development as armies possessing more resilient iron weapons could vanquish those poorly armed with bronze. Although the Hittites sold iron tools to other countries, they opted not to share knowledge of how to make them, and it was this that made them the chief power in western Asia from roughly 1400 to 1200 BC.
 

The Olmecs of Central America (1400–400 BC)

Over on the other side of the world, a civilisation of its own developed in Central America: that of the Olmecs. We know less about the Olmecs than we know about the major civilisations that developed in Asia as they left very few written records before all traces ceased in circa 400 BC for reasons unknown (although very possibly due to environmental change). We know that they had a calendar, carved gigantic stone heads, built large pyramid-like structures and that they traded extensively. Bloodletting and human sacrifice were a part of their religious life and the rituals and beliefs of the Olmecs formed the basis of the rituals and beliefs of the civilisations that would inhabit the area after them, including those of the Mayans and the Aztecs.