World History Timeline: The Historical Periods from 3200 BC to Today
Five thousand years of human history, told period by period, from the first clay tablets at Uruk to the present day and across every inhabited continent. Most entries are spans of time, the life of a kingdom or the length of an age; a few are single days that changed what came after. Dates before about 1000 BC are approximate, as are most ancient population figures and death tolls, and where historians disagree the text says so. Images: Wikimedia Commons.
Writing Begins at Uruk
Somewhere around 3200 BC, in the temple precinct of Uruk on the lower Euphrates, scribes began pressing marks into wet clay with a cut reed. The first tablets are not poetry or law. They are receipts: so many measures of barley, so many sheep, so many rations of beer for workers, entered by temple administrators who could no longer keep the accounts in their heads. Uruk by then held somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 people, more than any place on earth had held before. It took several centuries for the bookkeeping signs to become cuneiform, a script that could set down speech, and about six hundred years passed between the first tablets and the first written story. One of the earliest names on any tablet may belong to an accountant. The signs read Kushim, beside a quantity of barley, and scholars still argue whether Kushim was a man or a job title.
Early Dynastic Egypt: The Two Lands Become One
Around 3100 BC the villages strung along a thousand kilometers of the Nile were brought under a single king. Tradition names him Menes; the evidence points to a ruler called Narmer, whose ceremonial palette, a slab of green siltstone about 64 centimeters high, shows him wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt on one side and the red crown of Lower Egypt on the other. The capital was placed at Memphis, near the point where the valley opens into the Delta. The first two dynasties, lasting some four hundred years, built the machinery the pyramid builders would later use: a royal treasury, an administration that taxed the harvest, and hieroglyphic writing. A fragment of a later king list, the Palermo Stone, records for year after year of these early reigns the height the Nile reached in its flood, because the flood decided the harvest and the harvest decided the tax. The kings were buried at Abydos, with servants laid in rows of graves around them, a practice that ended with the First Dynasty and was never taken up again.
Caral and the Norte Chico: The First Cities of the Americas
On the desert coast of Peru, in four short river valleys north of modern Lima, people began raising platform mounds and sunken plazas around 3000 BC, at roughly the time the Egyptians were unifying the Nile. The largest site, Caral, covers some 60 hectares and has six large pyramid mounds. Its builders made no pottery, left no writing anyone has deciphered, and left almost no sign of warfare. They grew cotton for fishing nets and traded it to the coast for anchovies and sardines, and that exchange of fiber for fish seems to have sustained the whole society. Ruth Shady, the Peruvian archaeologist who began work at Caral in 1994, found 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bone buried in one of its temples. UNESCO declared the site a World Heritage Site in 2009.
The Sumerian City-States
For five and a half centuries southern Mesopotamia was a patchwork of walled cities, Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Umma, Kish and a dozen others, each with its own god, its own temple and its own king, and each ready to fight its neighbors over water. Lagash and Umma quarreled over a strip of irrigated border land for about a hundred and fifty years, and the inscriptions they left are among the first written records of a war. At Ur in the 1920s, Leonard Woolley opened some 1,800 graves, sixteen of them royal. In one, the tomb of a woman named Puabi, he found her attendants laid out in rows with lyres, gold headdresses and cups beside them, and no sign that they had struggled. The excavation ran for twelve seasons, from 1922 to 1934, paid for jointly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Old Kingdom: The Age of the Pyramids
The Old Kingdom is the age of the pyramids, and it began with an architect. Imhotep, chief official to King Djoser, stacked six diminishing platforms of cut limestone at Saqqara around 2650 BC and so built the first monumental stone building in the world. Within a century the step pyramid had become the true pyramid, and the true pyramid had become Giza. The kings were gods on earth, and the state existed to see them safely into the next life. The arrangement held for about five hundred years. In the reign of Pepi II, who is credited with more than sixty years on the throne, the provincial governors grew rich and independent, the Nile floods failed, and when the old king died the central government came apart with him.
The Indus Valley Civilization
At its height, around 2500 BC, the Indus civilization covered more ground than Egypt and Mesopotamia together, over a million square kilometers of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. Its cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro the largest of them, were laid out on grids, built of baked bricks of standard proportions, and drained by covered sewers that ran beneath the streets. Most houses had a bathing platform. Many had a private well. They wrote, on small stone seals carved with bulls, elephants and a one-horned beast, and nobody can read what they wrote. The script has never been deciphered, and no bilingual inscription has been found. After about 1900 BC the cities emptied, slowly, as the monsoon weakened and the rivers shifted their beds, and the people moved east and south into villages.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu Is Finished
The Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu over about twenty years and finished around 2560 BC. It contains some 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, averaging more than two tons each, and stood 146.6 meters high. Its sides are aligned to the four cardinal points with an error of a few minutes of arc. It was built by crews of skilled workmen and seasonal laborers, fed by the state, who lived in a town south of the plateau. In 2013 archaeologists working at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea found the oldest inscribed papyri yet discovered. They are the logbook of an inspector named Merer, recording months of ferrying limestone by boat from the quarries at Tura to Giza. For more than 3,800 years it was the tallest structure made by human hands.
The Akkadian Empire of Sargon
Sargon of Akkad, who by his own account began as cupbearer to the king of Kish, conquered the Sumerian cities one after another and made them a single state, the first that historians agree to call an empire. He ruled, the king lists say, for 56 years, and one of his inscriptions boasts that 5,400 men ate bread daily before him. His city of Akkad has never been found. His daughter Enheduanna, appointed high priestess of the moon god at Ur, wrote hymns that survive in later copies, and she is the first author in history known by name. The empire lasted about a century and a half. A severe drought in the twenty-second century BC, which shows up in lake sediments and ocean cores, coincides with its fall.
The Middle Kingdom of Egypt
Mentuhotep II of Thebes reunited Egypt around 2055 BC after more than a century of division, and the kings who followed him governed more modestly than the pyramid builders. They spent less on tombs and more on irrigation, draining the marshes of the Faiyum to make farmland, and they built a chain of mud-brick forts above the Second Cataract to hold Nubia. It was the classic age of Egyptian writing. Schoolboys were still copying The Story of Sinuhe, about an official who flees into exile and spends his life longing to be buried at home, centuries after it was written. The kingdom ended when people from the Levant, the Hyksos, took control of the Delta and brought with them the horse and the war chariot.
Minoan Crete
Around 2000 BC the people of Crete began building palaces, great rambling complexes of courtyards, storerooms and light wells, at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Zakros. Knossos had some 1,300 rooms. None of the palaces had defensive walls, and the frescoes inside show processions, leaping dolphins, and young men and women vaulting over the backs of charging bulls. The name Minoan is not theirs. Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos from 1900 and spent a fortune of his own rebuilding parts of it in reinforced concrete, borrowed it from Minos, the king of Greek legend who kept the Minotaur in a labyrinth. Their own writing, Linear A, remains unread. After about 1450 BC Mycenaean Greeks were ruling at Knossos and keeping its accounts in an early form of Greek.
Babylon's First Dynasty
Babylon was a minor town on the Euphrates when an Amorite chieftain named Sumu-abum made it his seat around 1894 BC. Under its sixth king, Hammurabi, who reigned from about 1792 to 1750 BC, it swallowed its rivals one by one, Larsa, Eshnunna and Mari among them, until it ruled all of southern Mesopotamia. For the next fifteen hundred years, whoever ruled Mesopotamia wanted to be king in Babylon. Its scribes did their arithmetic in base sixty, which is why the hour still has sixty minutes, and a small clay tablet of the period, now at Yale, gives the square root of two correct to about six decimal places. The dynasty ended suddenly in 1595 BC, when a Hittite army came down from Anatolia, sacked the city, carried off the statue of its god Marduk, and went home.
Hammurabi Sets Up His Laws
Near the end of his reign, about 1754 BC, Hammurabi had 282 laws carved on a basalt stele 2.25 meters tall, with a relief at the top showing him standing before Shamash, the sun god and god of justice. Copies were set up in cities across the kingdom. The prologue says he had been called to make justice visible in the land, so that the strong should not oppress the weak. The penalties depended on who you were. Destroy the eye of a free man and you lost your own; destroy the eye of a commoner and you paid a mina of silver. There were laws on wages, interest, divorce and bad builders: if a house collapsed and killed its owner, the builder was put to death. The stele was carried off as plunder to Susa, in Iran, around 1158 BC, and French archaeologists dug it up there in 1901, broken into three pieces.
The Hittite Empire
From their capital at Hattusa, on a high rocky plateau in central Anatolia, the Hittite kings built a state that by 1350 BC stood level with Egypt. They were early masters of the light war chariot, carrying three men where the Egyptians carried two, and they kept their archives on clay tablets in eight languages. Their own, deciphered by the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný in 1915, turned out to be the oldest written Indo-European language. They had very nearly been forgotten. The Bible mentions Hittites in passing, as one people among many in Canaan, and nobody connected them with an empire until the tablets of Hattusa were dug up from 1906 onward. Around 1180 BC the capital was abandoned and partly burned, and within a generation the empire had ceased to exist.
Mycenaean Greece
The Greeks of the late Bronze Age lived in small kingdoms ruled from fortified palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos and Thebes, behind walls built of blocks so large that later Greeks assumed giants, the Cyclopes, had set them in place. They were warriors and traders, and at Mycenae they buried their kings with gold masks over their faces. Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman who had made a fortune and set out to prove Homer true, dug at Mycenae in 1876 and lifted one of those masks. He is supposed to have wired the King of Greece that he had gazed on the face of Agamemnon; the line is probably a later embellishment, and the mask is some three centuries too early for any Trojan War. When Michael Ventris deciphered their script, Linear B, in 1952, the tablets turned out to be inventories of chariot wheels, sheep, bronze and perfumed oil.
The Shang Dynasty
The Shang kings ruled the middle Yellow River valley from about 1600 BC, and at their last capital, near modern Anyang, they asked their ancestors questions. A diviner carved the question into the shoulder blade of an ox or the undershell of a turtle, applied a heated rod, and read the answer in the cracks. Will it rain? Will the queen's childbirth go well? Should we attack? Afterward the outcome was often carved beside the question. These are the oldest Chinese writing, and the characters are recognizably the ancestors of the ones in use today. Until 1899 nobody knew of them; the bones were being ground up and sold by apothecaries as dragon bones, until a scholar named Wang Yirong noticed writing on pieces bought as medicine. The tomb of Fu Hao, a queen and general, was found intact in 1976 with 468 bronze objects and sixteen people buried with her.
The New Kingdom of Egypt
Ahmose drove the Hyksos out of Egypt around 1550 BC, and the kings who followed him were soldiers who carried Egyptian power farther than ever before, north to the Euphrates and south past the Fourth Cataract into Nubia. The wealth came home to Thebes, where the temple of Amun at Karnak, added to by king after king for some two thousand years, became one of the largest religious buildings ever made. It was the Egypt of Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled as king for some twenty years, and of Ramesses II, who reigned for 66 years and fathered more than a hundred children. The best known of them all was a minor king. Tutankhamun died at about nineteen, and his tomb survived nearly intact because debris from a later tomb had buried its entrance; Howard Carter's workmen found the first step on 4 November 1922.
The Vedic Age in India
The Vedic age takes its name from the Vedas, four collections of hymns and ritual verses in an early form of Sanskrit, the oldest of them, the Rigveda, composed in the Punjab between about 1500 and 1200 BC. For well over a thousand years they were not written down at all. Priestly families memorized them syllable by syllable, with methods of reciting the text forward, in pairs and in interlocking patterns, so that a single slip would be caught. Over these centuries the herding peoples of the northwest moved east into the Ganges plain, cleared it with iron tools, and settled. Society hardened into four ranked orders, the varnas, with priests at the top. By the end of the period the later Vedic texts, the Upanishads, were asking what the self is, and whether it can escape the cycle of rebirth.
The Battle of Kadesh
In the spring of 1274 BC, Ramesses II marched north into Syria with four divisions of chariots and infantry to take the city of Kadesh from the Hittites. Two Bedouin, planted by the Hittite king Muwatalli, told him the enemy was far away. It was not. Hittite chariots fell on the Egyptian column while it was strung out on the march, and Ramesses, by his own account, saved the day almost single-handed. He had the battle carved on temple walls at Abu Simbel, Luxor, Karnak and Abydos as a great victory. The Hittite records suggest a draw, and the Egyptians went home without Kadesh. Fifteen years later the two powers signed the earliest peace treaty whose text survives in the versions of both sides. A copy of the Hittite tablet hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
The Late Bronze Age Collapse
Within about fifty years after 1200 BC, the connected world of the eastern Mediterranean came apart. The Hittite Empire vanished. The Mycenaean palaces burned, and the Greeks forgot how to write for four centuries. Among the last tablets written at Ugarit, a rich port on the Syrian coast, is a letter from its king to the king of Cyprus: enemy ships have come, his cities are burning, and all his troops and ships are away. Egypt survived, barely. Ramesses III fought off a seaborne invasion around 1177 BC and had the attackers carved on the walls of his temple at Medinet Habu. Historians still argue over the cause, and the list of suspects is long: drought, earthquake, revolt, broken trade, and migrants on the move. Iron, which a smith could make from local ore, was cheaper than bronze, which needed tin from far away, and the age of iron came out of the wreckage.
The Olmec
In the hot, swampy lowlands of Mexico's Gulf Coast, the Olmec built the first great ceremonial centers of Mesoamerica, San Lorenzo from about 1200 BC and later La Venta. They carved colossal heads from basalt boulders, seventeen of them found so far, some taller than a man and weighing as much as forty tons, and moved them from quarries in the Tuxtla Mountains, dozens of kilometers away, without wheels or draft animals. Each head is a portrait of a particular man, probably a ruler, wearing a close-fitting helmet. Much of what later Mesoamericans held in common seems to start with them, including the ritual ball game and a reverence for jade. The oldest rubber balls in the world, preserved in the mud of a sacred spring at El Manatí, come from their region.
The Phoenician Trading World
The Phoenicians lived in a string of independent harbor cities on the coast of modern Lebanon, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, and after the collapse of the Bronze Age they had the sea largely to themselves. Their ships went to Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia and Spain, and out past the Strait of Gibraltar to Cádiz, which by tradition they founded around 1100 BC. Carthage, founded from Tyre in about 814 BC, would one day fight Rome for the Mediterranean. They sold timber, glass and a purple dye boiled from sea snails, so costly, at thousands of snails to the gram, that it became the color of kings. Their most lasting export was an alphabet of 22 letters, consonants only, simple enough for a merchant's clerk. The Greeks borrowed it in the eighth century BC and added vowels, and the letters on this screen descend from it.
The Kingdom of Kush
Kush, in what is now northern Sudan, had been Egypt's southern neighbor, rival and colony for centuries before it turned the tables. In the eighth century BC the Kushite king Piye marched north and conquered Egypt, and for nearly a century his dynasty, the 25th, ruled from Napata to the Mediterranean as pharaohs. They restored the old temples and were buried, in the Egyptian fashion, under pyramids. Driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians, the Kushites moved their capital south to Meroë, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, where there was rain-fed farmland and iron ore. They developed a script of their own, Meroitic, which can be sounded out but not yet understood. Sudan today has more pyramids than Egypt, around two hundred of them at Meroë alone.
The Zhou Dynasty
The Zhou overthrew the last Shang king at the battle of Muye in 1046 BC and ruled, at least in name, for nearly eight hundred years, longer than any other Chinese dynasty. To justify having replaced the Shang they put forward an idea that lasted until the last emperor abdicated in 1912: Heaven grants a ruler the right to govern, and withdraws it if he governs badly. Every later dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven, and every rebel claimed it had been lost. After 771 BC, when invaders sacked the western capital and the court fled east to Luoyang, the Zhou kings ruled little but their own domain, and real power passed to the lords of the great fiefs. In those unsettled centuries Confucius was born, in the state of Lu in 551 BC, along with the Daoist and Mohist teachers who argued with his followers. The last Zhou king surrendered to the state of Qin in 256 BC.
The Bantu Expansion
Over some fifteen hundred years, beginning around 1000 BC, farming peoples speaking related languages moved out of the borderlands of what are now Nigeria and Cameroon and spread across most of Africa south of the equator. They carried yams and, later, bananas, along with cattle, pottery and the knowledge of smelting iron, and they reached the coast of what is now South Africa by about AD 300. Nobody wrote it down. The movement has been reconstructed from words: there are now more than five hundred Bantu languages, spoken by some 350 million people, and the family tree of their shared vocabulary, checked against archaeology and DNA, traces the route. It was one of the largest migrations in human history, and it happened a few kilometers a generation at a time.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire
From their homeland on the upper Tigris, the Assyrian kings built the largest empire the world had yet seen, reaching by the seventh century BC from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. They kept a standing army equipped with iron weapons and siege engines, and they broke conquered peoples by deporting them wholesale: by one scholar's estimate, four and a half million people over three centuries. At Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal, who boasted that he could read and write, collected tens of thousands of clay tablets copied from temple archives across Mesopotamia. When the city was sacked by Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC, the library was buried in the ruins. Among the fragments carried to the British Museum was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which a young assistant named George Smith deciphered in 1872; witnesses said he was so excited he began to take off his clothes.
Archaic Greece
Between about 800 and 480 BC the Greeks rebuilt their world out of the dark centuries that followed the Bronze Age. They learned to write again, with an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians, and someone, a blind poet named Homer if tradition is right, set down the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hundreds of independent city-states, the poleis, grew up around their markets and temples. Short of farmland, they planted colonies around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, at Marseille, Naples, Syracuse and Byzantium, until Greeks lived, as Plato later put it, like frogs around a pond. In Athens in 594 BC the magistrate Solon canceled debts and freed citizens who had been sold into slavery for them. In 508 BC another Athenian, Cleisthenes, gave power to an assembly of all male citizens, and the Athenians called it democracy.
The Axial Age
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers observed in 1949 that between roughly 800 and 200 BC, in civilizations with little or no contact with one another, people began asking the same kind of question. In China there were Confucius and the Daoists; in India, the Buddha and the authors of the Upanishads; in Israel, the prophets; in Greece, Socrates and Plato; and in Iran, perhaps, Zoroaster. Jaspers called it the axial age, because history seemed to turn on it. Their answers differed, but each put conscience and right conduct ahead of sacrifice and ritual. Historians still argue whether the age was real or a pattern found after the fact. The Buddha and Confucius may well have been alive at the same time, and neither ever heard of the other.
The First Olympic Games
By the Greeks' own reckoning, the first Olympic Games were held in 776 BC at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, in the western Peloponnese. There was one event, a footrace of one stade, about 192 meters, and the winner was a cook from the nearby city of Elis named Koroibos. The Greeks came to count their years by Olympiads, and a sacred truce let athletes and spectators travel to the festival in safety every fourth summer. The games went on for more than a thousand years, until the Christian emperor Theodosius suppressed the pagan festivals at the end of the fourth century AD. The first modern Olympics opened in Athens in 1896.
The Kingdom of Rome
The Romans dated their city from 21 April 753 BC, when, they said, Romulus plowed a furrow around the Palatine Hill and killed his twin brother Remus for jumping over it. Archaeology does find huts on the Palatine at about that time: a cluster of villages on hills above a ford of the Tiber, where an old road brought salt inland from the coast. Seven kings ruled, by tradition, the last of them Etruscans, who drained the marshy valley that became the Forum and built the great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which still carries water today. In 509 BC the Romans drove out the last king, Tarquin the Proud, after his son raped a noblewoman named Lucretia. They swore never to have another king, and they kept the oath, at least in name, for the rest of their history.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire
Nabopolassar, a Chaldean general, freed Babylon from the Assyrians in 626 BC and, with the Medes, destroyed Nineveh fourteen years later. His son Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem in 597 BC and again in 587 BC, when he burned the temple and carried much of the population of Judah away to Babylon. Psalm 137 is their lament: by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept. Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt Babylon as the greatest city of its day, with a processional way lined with glazed blue bricks and striding lions, and the Ishtar Gate, which stands today, reconstructed, in a museum in Berlin. Whether the Hanging Gardens ever existed is still argued; no Babylonian text mentions them. In 539 BC Cyrus of Persia took the city, reportedly without a fight, and let the exiled Jews go home.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire
Cyrus the Great, king of the Persians in southwestern Iran, defeated the Medes in 550 BC and went on to take Lydia, Babylon and everything between, building in two decades the largest empire the world had known, from the Aegean to the Indus. Under Darius I it ruled more people than any state before it. The Persians governed through local customs and local languages, collected their taxes in silver, and joined the provinces with the Royal Road, some 2,700 kilometers from Sardis to Susa, along which relays of mounted couriers could carry a message in about a week. Herodotus, who admired them, wrote that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could stop them, and the words are carved over the main post office in New York. Alexander burned the palace at Persepolis in 330 BC.
The Roman Republic
Having expelled their king, the Romans divided his powers between two consuls elected each year and a Senate of former magistrates, and with that awkward arrangement they conquered Italy and then the Mediterranean. The defining contest was with Carthage, three wars between 264 and 146 BC, in the second of which Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army and thirty-seven elephants and destroyed a Roman army at Cannae on a single August day in 216 BC. The conquests made a few families enormously rich and filled Italy with slaves, and the Republic never solved what to do about either. In its last century politics was settled more and more by armies loyal to their generals rather than to the state. On 10 January 49 BC Julius Caesar led a single legion across the Rubicon, a small river at the edge of his province, and said, according to Suetonius, that the die was cast.
The Greco-Persian Wars
When the Greek cities of Ionia rebelled against Persia in 499 BC, Athens sent twenty ships to help them, and Darius did not forget it. In 490 BC his expedition landed at Marathon, about 40 kilometers from Athens, and was beaten by an Athenian army of some 10,000 men. The Athenians counted 192 of their own dead. The Persian dead, by Herodotus's figure, numbered 6,400. Ten years later Darius's son Xerxes came with an army so large that Herodotus said it drank rivers dry. Three hundred Spartans and their allies held the pass of Thermopylae for three days, and that September the Athenian fleet destroyed the Persian navy in the narrow strait of Salamis while Xerxes watched from a throne on the shore. The fighting went on, intermittently, until about 449 BC. Herodotus wrote his history, he said, so that great deeds should not be forgotten.
Classical Greece
In the century and a half after the Persian wars, Athens, a city of perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 adult male citizens, built the Parthenon, finished in 432 BC, and staged the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides in a theater on the slope below it. Socrates spent his life in its streets asking questions, and its courts put him to death in 399 BC. Its democracy was real and narrow: women, slaves and resident foreigners had no vote. Its glory was paid for partly with tribute from its allies, and it led Athens into a 27-year war with Sparta that it lost in 404 BC. Thucydides, who fought in that war and was exiled for failing to save a city, wrote its history not, he said, for the applause of the moment but as a possession for all time. The age ended in 323 BC with the death of Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle.
The Warring States
By the fifth century BC the Zhou king was a figurehead, and seven large states, Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei, fought one another for two and a half centuries. Armies grew from a few thousand nobles in chariots to hundreds of thousands of conscripted peasants with crossbows and iron swords. After the battle of Changping in 260 BC, by the traditional account, Qin put to death some 400,000 surrendered soldiers of Zhao. It was also the most fertile age of Chinese thought, the time of the Hundred Schools. Rulers kept scholars at court the way later princes kept painters, and the state of Qi maintained an academy at the Jixia gate of its capital. The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu, comes from this world, and so do Mencius, Zhuangzi and the Legalists, who held that people are moved only by reward and punishment. Qin took the Legalists' advice, and won.
The Conquests of Alexander
Alexander of Macedon was twenty when he became king and twenty-one when he crossed the Hellespont into Asia in the spring of 334 BC with an army of about 40,000. In eleven years he broke the Persian Empire in three great battles, founded cities named Alexandria from Egypt to Afghanistan, and marched as far as the Beas River in the Punjab, where his exhausted soldiers refused to go any farther. He died in Babylon in June 323 BC, at thirty-two, after a night of drinking and a fever that lasted ten or eleven days. Asked on his deathbed to whom he left his empire, he is supposed to have answered, to the strongest. His generals took him at his word and fought over it for forty years.
The Hellenistic World
Alexander's generals divided his conquests into kingdoms, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Asia the largest of them, and for three centuries Greek was the language of power and learning from Sicily to Afghanistan. Its capital of the mind was Alexandria, where the Ptolemies built the Museum and a library said to have held hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Ships entering the harbor had their books taken and copied; the library kept the originals and gave the owners the copies. In Alexandria Euclid set down the Elements, the geometry taught in schools for two thousand years, and Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth from the angle of the noon sun in two cities, and came remarkably close. In Syracuse, Archimedes calculated pi to within a fraction of a percent. The age ended in 30 BC, when Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies and the first of them to learn Egyptian, died by her own hand after Octavian's victory.
The Mauryan Empire
Chandragupta Maurya seized the throne of Magadha around 322 BC, drove out the garrisons Alexander had left in the Punjab, and built the first empire to cover most of the Indian subcontinent. He governed from Pataliputra on the Ganges, a city that Megasthenes, ambassador from the Seleucid court, reckoned at nearly fifteen kilometers long, enclosed by a timber palisade with 570 towers. His grandson Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on the east coast, around 261 BC, and was so shaken by the killing, a hundred thousand dead by his own count, that he turned to Buddhism and spent the rest of his reign preaching restraint. He had his edicts carved on rocks and on polished stone pillars across the empire. The lion capital from one of those pillars, at Sarnath, is the national emblem of India.
The Parthian Empire
The Parthians were horsemen from the steppe east of the Caspian who took Iran from the Seleucid Greeks and held it for nearly five centuries, from about 247 BC to AD 224. Their capital at Ctesiphon, on the Tigris, sat astride the middle stretch of the Silk Road, and they grew rich on its tolls. They were the one power Rome could never conquer. In 53 BC Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, invaded with seven legions and was destroyed at Carrhae by mounted archers who could turn in the saddle and shoot backward at full gallop, which gave English the phrase a Parthian shot. Crassus's head was sent to the Parthian king, who, Plutarch says, was watching a performance of Euripides when it arrived.
The Qin Dynasty Unifies China
In 221 BC the king of Qin, Ying Zheng, finished conquering the last of the warring states and took a new title, Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. He abolished the old fiefs and ruled through appointed officials; he standardized weights, measures, coins, the width of cart axles and the written script; and he joined the northern walls into the first Great Wall. Scholars who criticized him were silenced, and books that were not practical were burned. He was buried near Xi'an with an army of some 8,000 life-size terracotta soldiers, each face different, which lay unknown until farmers digging a well struck fragments in March 1974. The burial mound itself has never been opened. His dynasty, which he expected to last ten thousand generations, collapsed four years after his death.
The Han Dynasty
Liu Bang, a peasant who had been a minor police official under the Qin, came out of the civil war as the first Han emperor, and the dynasty he founded lasted, with one interruption, for four hundred years. It kept the Qin's centralized state and softened it with Confucian learning, and in 124 BC it founded an imperial academy to train officials in the classics. Most Chinese still call themselves the Han people. Han China and Rome were the two great powers of their age, each with something like sixty million people, and each knew of the other only by rumor. A court official named Cai Lun presented paper to the emperor in AD 105, though fragments show it was in use well before then. The Han also produced China's first great historian, Sima Qian, who accepted castration rather than death after defending a disgraced general, so that he could finish his history.
The Silk Road
In 138 BC the Han emperor Wu sent an officer named Zhang Qian west to find allies against the nomads. He was captured, held for ten years, escaped, and came home after thirteen years with reports of kingdoms no Chinese had heard of and horses that sweated blood. Within a few decades caravans were moving regularly along the routes he had opened, around the Taklamakan and over the Pamirs into Central Asia. Silk went west, and Roman moralists complained that the transparent silks worn by Roman women were draining the treasury; glass, silver and horses went east. Few merchants traveled the whole way. Goods passed from hand to hand through oasis towns like Samarkand and Kashgar, and with them went Buddhism, Islam, paper and, in the 1340s, the plague. The name itself is modern: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined it in 1877.
Teotihuacan
Forty kilometers northeast of modern Mexico City, a city grew up in the first century BC that by AD 450 held perhaps 100,000 people, which would have made it one of the largest cities on earth. It was laid out on a grid along a broad avenue more than two kilometers long, with the Pyramid of the Sun, 65 meters high, on one side, and its people lived in some 2,000 walled apartment compounds. We do not know what its people called it, or themselves, or what language they spoke. Teotihuacan, the place where the gods were made, is the name the Aztecs gave the ruins centuries later, when they found them already abandoned. Around AD 550 the center of the city was burned, apparently by its own people, and the city slowly emptied.
The Assassination of Julius Caesar
On the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC, Julius Caesar went to a meeting of the Senate in the hall attached to Pompey's theater, a month after being named dictator for life. More than sixty senators were in the plot, led by Brutus and Cassius, men he had pardoned after the civil war. They surrounded him and stabbed him twenty-three times, and he fell at the foot of a statue of Pompey, his old rival. The conspirators believed they were restoring the Republic. Instead they set off thirteen more years of civil war, at the end of which Caesar's adopted great-nephew, Octavian, held power alone. The place where Caesar died lies in the Largo di Torre Argentina in central Rome, a sunken square of ruins now best known for the colony of stray cats that lives there.
The Roman Empire and the Pax Romana
In January 27 BC the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus, and he let it be understood that he had restored the Republic while he kept the army, the treasury and the important provinces in his own hands. He was careful never to call himself king. The two centuries that followed, until the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180, are called the Pax Romana, and while the frontiers were seldom quiet, the interior of the empire, some fifty to sixty million people from northern Britain to the Euphrates, lived in a peace it would not know again for a very long time. The Romans laid some 80,000 kilometers of paved road and built aqueducts that brought Rome close to a million cubic meters of water a day. Edward Gibbon, writing in the 1770s, said that anyone asked to name the period in which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous would choose the one from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.
The Kingdom of Aksum
From its highland capital in northern Ethiopia, Aksum controlled the trade between the Roman Mediterranean and India through its Red Sea port of Adulis, exporting ivory, gold and incense. It struck its own coins in gold, silver and bronze, the first state in Africa south of Egypt to do so, and the Persian prophet Mani, in the third century, counted it among the four great kingdoms of the world, with Rome, Persia and China. Around AD 330 its king Ezana became a Christian, and the crescent and disc on his coins gave way to the cross, which makes Ethiopia one of the oldest Christian states in the world. The Aksumites raised granite stelae carved to look like towers of many stories. One of them, taken to Rome by Mussolini's army in 1937, was returned in 2005 and raised again in Aksum in 2008.
China Divided: From the Three Kingdoms to the Sui
When the Han dynasty fell in 220, China broke into three warring kingdoms, Wei, Shu and Wu, and it was not reunited for good for more than three and a half centuries. The registered population fell from over fifty million to around sixteen million within a few decades, partly from war and famine and partly because there was no longer anyone to do the counting. In those centuries of division nomad dynasties ruled the north and Chinese courts the south, and Buddhism, which had come in from India along the Silk Road, took hold in both. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a novel written more than a thousand years later, made the period's generals and strategists the best-known characters in Chinese literature. In 589 the Sui dynasty took the southern capital at Jiankang, modern Nanjing, and put the country back together.
The Sasanian Empire
In AD 224 Ardashir, a Persian from the old Achaemenid heartland, overthrew the last Parthian king and founded a dynasty that ruled Iran for more than four hundred years and fought Rome, and then Byzantium, almost without pause. In 260 the shah Shapur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian in battle, the only Roman emperor ever taken alive by a foreign enemy, and had the scene carved in a cliff at Naqsh-e Rustam. The Sasanians made Zoroastrianism a state church and built at Ctesiphon a palace whose brick vault, the Taq Kasra, is the largest single span of unreinforced brick ever raised; it still stands, though cracked. A last great war with Byzantium, from 602 to 628, left both empires exhausted just before the Arab armies came out of the desert. The last shah, Yazdegerd III, was murdered by a miller near Merv in 651.
The Classic Maya
In the rain forests of the Yucatán and Guatemala, the Maya built dozens of rival city-states, Tikal, Calakmul, Copán and Palenque among the greatest, each ruled by a holy lord who presided over plazas, temple pyramids and ball courts. They had the most fully developed writing system of the ancient Americas, recorded dates to the day across thousands of years, and used a sign for zero. Most of their script has been read only in the last fifty years, after a Soviet linguist, Yuri Knorozov, showed in 1952 that it was partly phonetic, and the inscriptions turned out to be dynastic history: births, accessions, wars and captures. In the ninth century the southern cities stopped putting up monuments one by one. The last date carved in the Long Count corresponds to AD 909. When the Spaniards arrived, millions of Maya still lived in the region; it was the great cities that had been given up.
The Gupta Empire
The Gupta kings, ruling from the Ganges valley from about AD 320, presided over what Indians long regarded as their classical age. Kalidasa wrote his plays and poems at their court, the great Sanskrit works of medicine and astronomy took their final form, and the cave temples at Ajanta were painted under a neighboring dynasty to the south. The mathematician Aryabhata, writing in AD 499 at the age of twenty-three, proposed that the earth turns on its axis and explained eclipses by shadows rather than by demons. Indian mathematicians of the period wrote numbers with nine digits and place value, and before long with a zero as well. Those numerals traveled west through Baghdad, and Europeans, who learned them from the Arabs, called them Arabic.
The Byzantine Empire
Constantine dedicated his new capital on the Bosporus on 11 May 330, on the site of the old Greek town of Byzantium, and the eastern half of the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, outlived the western half by nearly a thousand years. Its people called themselves Romans to the end. The name Byzantine was put on them by a German scholar in the sixteenth century. In 537 the emperor Justinian dedicated Hagia Sophia, whose dome, some 31 meters across, seemed to the historian Procopius to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Behind the city's triple land walls the empire held off Persians, Avars, Arabs, Bulgars and Rus for centuries, kept Greek learning alive, and converted the Slavs, whose Cyrillic alphabet is named for one of the two Byzantine missionaries sent to them, Saint Cyril. The walls were finally breached in 1453.
The Migration Period
Around 375 the Huns, horsemen from the Eurasian steppe, crossed the Volga and broke the Gothic kingdoms north of the Black Sea, and the Goths asked to be let into the Roman Empire. They were let in, cheated and starved, and in 378 they destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople and killed the emperor Valens. For the next two centuries Goths, Vandals, Franks, Angles, Saxons and Lombards moved into the western provinces, sometimes as invaders and more often as hired soldiers and settlers. In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome, the first time in eight hundred years that an enemy had taken the city, and in North Africa Saint Augustine began writing The City of God to explain how such a thing could happen to a Christian empire. The Vandals crossed from Spain to Africa in 429 with perhaps 80,000 people, and in 455 they sacked Rome as well, thoroughly enough that their name became a word.
The Early Middle Ages in Europe
In the five centuries after Rome fell in the West, Europe's towns shrank, its roads went unrepaired and its long-distance trade dwindled. Rome itself, a city of perhaps a million under Augustus, held a few tens of thousands by the sixth century. Most people lived on the land, in villages, under a local lord who could protect them, and most never went far from the place where they were born. Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, was the first to call these the dark ages, and the label has been argued over ever since. Learning survived in monasteries, where monks copied the Latin classics by hand, and around 800 monks on the island of Iona made the Book of Kells, whose pages carry ornament so fine that parts of it are best seen under a magnifying glass. When Viking raids made Iona unsafe, the book was carried to Kells, in Ireland.
The Last Emperor of the West Is Deposed
On 4 September 476 Odoacer, a German officer commanding the barbarian troops in Italy, deposed the last Western Roman emperor, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus, at Ravenna. He did not bother to name a successor. He sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople with word that the West no longer needed an emperor of its own, and he pensioned the boy off to a villa near Naples. Few people at the time thought it worth recording as the end of anything. Roman law, Roman towns and the Roman church went on in Italy much as before, and the empire continued in the East for another thousand years. It was historians, centuries afterward, who settled on 476 as the year the ancient world ended.
The Tang Dynasty
The Tang, who took over from the short-lived Sui in 618, ruled what was probably the richest and most cosmopolitan state on earth. Their capital, Chang'an, was laid out on a grid nearly ten kilometers across and held around a million people, with quarters for Persian, Sogdian, Arab and Japanese merchants, and temples for Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Nestorian Christians. More and more officials were chosen by written examination in the classics, a system that would last until 1905. Li Bai and Du Fu wrote the poems Chinese schoolchildren still learn by heart, and in 868 a man named Wang Jie paid for the printing of a copy of the Diamond Sutra, the oldest dated printed book that survives. The An Lushan rebellion of 755 to 763 crippled the dynasty, and it never fully recovered.
The Hijra: Muhammad Leaves Mecca for Medina
In September 622, warned of a plot against his life, the Prophet Muhammad left Mecca with his companion Abu Bakr and traveled more than 300 kilometers north to the oasis town of Yathrib, where he had been invited to settle the feuds between its clans. The town became known as Medina, the city of the Prophet, and the community he built there was at once a faith and a state. Some seventeen years later the caliph Umar made the year of the Hijra the first year of the Islamic calendar, which is why that calendar begins not with Muhammad's birth or his first revelation but with this journey. By the time he died in 632, most of Arabia had accepted Islam.
The Arab Conquests and the Umayyad Caliphate
Within a century of the Prophet's death in 632, Arab armies had conquered Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, North Africa and Spain, and stood on the borders of India and China. Byzantium lost its richest provinces, and the Sasanian Persian empire ceased to exist. In 711 a force of perhaps 7,000 men crossed from Morocco into Spain under a commander named Tariq, who left his name on the rock where they landed, Jabal Tariq, Gibraltar. From 661 the Umayyad caliphs governed from Damascus, where they replaced the city's great church with a mosque, and in Jerusalem they built the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691, the oldest Islamic monument still standing in something like its original form. In 732 a Frankish army under Charles Martel turned back an Arab raid near Tours. In 750 a revolution in the east overthrew the Umayyads, and one surviving prince escaped to Spain to found a new dynasty at Córdoba.
The Abbasid Caliphate and the Islamic Golden Age
The Abbasids built a new round city on the Tigris in 762 and named it Madinat al-Salam, the city of peace, though everyone called it Baghdad, and within a few decades it was probably the largest city in the world. Paper, made cheap by mills learned from the Chinese, put books within reach of ordinary scholars, and the caliphs paid translators to bring Greek, Persian and Indian works of philosophy, medicine and mathematics into Arabic. In Baghdad around 820 the mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on calculation whose title gave us the word algebra, while his own name gave us algorithm. The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina was still being taught in European universities in the seventeenth century. The caliphs' real power faded long before the end, and in February 1258 a Mongol army under Hulagu sacked Baghdad and killed the last caliph; the chroniclers say the Tigris ran black with the ink of the books thrown into it.
The Viking Age
On 8 June 793 raiders from Scandinavia landed on Lindisfarne, a monastery island off the coast of Northumbria, killed monks and carried off the church's treasures. The scholar Alcuin, writing from Charlemagne's court, said nothing like it had ever been seen in Britain. For the next two and a half centuries Norse ships, shallow enough to row up rivers and sturdy enough to cross oceans, reached Paris, Seville, Constantinople and the Caspian. They were traders and settlers as well as raiders. They founded Dublin, ruled half of England, gave their name to Normandy and served as the bodyguard of the Byzantine emperors; they settled Iceland and Greenland, and around the year 1000 Leif Erikson reached North America, where the remains of a Norse camp were found at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960. The age is usually closed in 1066, when the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada died invading England at Stamford Bridge, and a descendant of Vikings, William of Normandy, took the country at Hastings three weeks later.
Heian Japan
In 794 the Japanese court moved to a new capital laid out on the Chinese model and named Heian-kyo, the capital of peace and tranquility, modern Kyoto. For nearly four centuries a small aristocracy there, a few thousand people, cultivated a life of poetry, calligraphy, incense competitions and exquisite manners, while the business of governing passed to the Fujiwara family, who married their daughters to the emperors. Women at court wrote in the new kana script while men still wrote in Chinese, and so it was women who produced the period's great prose. Around 1008 Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting, was writing The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel. Outside the capital the provincial warriors grew stronger, and in 1185 the Minamoto clan destroyed the rival Taira at the sea battle of Dan-no-ura, and Japan passed under the rule of the samurai.
Charlemagne Is Crowned Emperor
On Christmas Day 800, as Charles, king of the Franks, rose from prayer in St Peter's in Rome, Pope Leo III set a crown on his head and the congregation acclaimed him emperor of the Romans. It was the first time in more than three hundred years that the West had an emperor. His biographer Einhard claimed Charles had not known it was coming and would not have entered the church that day if he had. Charles ruled most of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy, and at Aachen he gathered scholars who reformed the copying of books. Their clear new handwriting, the Carolingian minuscule, is the ancestor of our lowercase letters. Charlemagne himself kept writing tablets under his pillow to practice his letters at night, but, Einhard admits, he began too late in life and made little progress.
The Khmer Empire of Angkor
In 802 a Khmer prince, Jayavarman II, proclaimed himself universal monarch on a sacred mountain north of Cambodia's great lake, and for six centuries his successors ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia from Angkor. They tamed the monsoon with an immense system of reservoirs and canals; the largest reservoir, the West Baray, is eight kilometers long and still holds water. Angkor Wat, built in the first half of the twelfth century by Suryavarman II as a temple to Vishnu, is the largest religious monument in the world, and it appears on the Cambodian flag. Laser surveys flown over the forest since 2012 have shown that greater Angkor was a sprawling, low-density city of perhaps three-quarters of a million people. The Thais sacked it in 1431, and the court moved south toward Phnom Penh.
Kyivan Rus
From the late ninth century a dynasty of Scandinavian origin, the Rurikids, ruled a loose federation of East Slavic principalities from Kyiv, on the Dnipro, astride the trade route from the Baltic to Constantinople. In 988 Prince Volodymyr was baptized and made Byzantine Christianity the faith of his lands; he chose it, the chronicle says, after his envoys reported that in Hagia Sophia they had not known whether they were in heaven or on earth. Under his son Yaroslav the Wise, Kyiv was one of the largest cities in Europe, with a cathedral of St Sophia whose eleventh-century mosaics survive, and a written law code, the Ruska Pravda. Yaroslav married his daughters to the kings of France, Norway and Hungary. Divided among quarreling princes, Kyiv was sacked by the Mongols on 6 December 1240.
The Song Dynasty
The Song, who reunited most of China in 960, were weaker in war than the Tang and far stronger in commerce. Their capital at Kaifeng was a city of perhaps a million people where markets stayed open through the night, and the government, short of copper for coins, issued the world's first state paper money in the 1020s. Song craftsmen printed books with movable type, the invention of a commoner named Bi Sheng in the 1040s, and Song armies fought with gunpowder in fire lances and bombs. The scroll called Along the River During the Qingming Festival shows Kaifeng's bridges, inns, camels and boatmen in more than 800 figures. In 1127 northern invaders took the city, and the court fled south to Hangzhou, where it held out until the Mongols came.
The Polynesian Settlement of the Pacific
Between about AD 1000 and 1300, Polynesian voyagers sailing double-hulled canoes out of the islands around Tahiti found and settled nearly every habitable island in a triangle of ocean bounded by Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand, an area of more than 20 million square kilometers. New Zealand, reached around 1280, was the last large habitable land on earth to be settled by people. They had no compass and no charts. They steered by the rising and setting points of stars, by the run of the swells, by the flight of birds at dusk, and by the clouds that pile up over land beyond the horizon. Western scholars long doubted such voyages could have been made on purpose. In 1976 the Hokule'a, a replica canoe, sailed some 4,000 kilometers from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments, navigated by Mau Piailug of Micronesia.
The High Middle Ages in Europe
Around the year 1000 Europe began to grow, and it went on growing for three hundred years. The climate warmed, the heavy plow opened the clay soils of the north, the population roughly doubled, and forests were cleared for new villages. Towns revived, and their merchants and craftsmen formed guilds and won charters of self-government. The first universities appeared, at Bologna around 1088 and at Paris and Oxford not long after. It was the age of the cathedrals. Chartres, rebuilt after a fire in 1194, went up in about thirty years, and most of its original stained glass, some 2,600 square meters of it, survives. The masons who built such churches had no engineering mathematics to speak of; they worked by geometry, rule of thumb and experience, and when a vault was too ambitious it came down. At Beauvais, the tallest Gothic choir ever built, 48 meters to the vault, partly collapsed in 1284.
The Crusades
In November 1095 at Clermont, Pope Urban II called on the knights of Western Europe to go east and free Jerusalem, promising forgiveness of sins to those who went. The crowd is said to have answered, God wills it. Tens of thousands went, and in July 1099, after three years of marching, hunger and battle, the survivors stormed Jerusalem and killed much of its Muslim and Jewish population. The crusader states lasted, precariously, for less than two hundred years. Saladin took Jerusalem back in 1187, and the Fourth Crusade, steered by its Venetian creditors, sacked Christian Constantinople in 1204 instead of reaching the Holy Land. The last crusader stronghold on the mainland, Acre, fell in 1291. What the crusaders brought home, besides relics, was a taste for spices and sugar and a trade that the Italian cities would grow rich on.
Great Zimbabwe
On a granite plateau in southern Africa, the ancestors of the Shona built, between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, a city of stone enclosures that at its height may have housed 10,000 to 18,000 people. Its Great Enclosure has walls up to eleven meters high and some 250 meters around, made of dressed granite blocks fitted without mortar. Its wealth came from cattle and from gold, traded down to the Swahili ports on the Indian Ocean; Chinese porcelain and Persian glass have turned up in the ruins. European settlers refused to believe that Africans had built it, credited the Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba, and in the 1970s the white government of Rhodesia pressed archaeologists to say so. When the country won its independence in 1980, it took its name from the ruins.
The Delhi Sultanate
In 1206 Qutb ud-Din Aibak, a Turkic general who had begun life as a slave, made himself sultan at Delhi, and for three hundred years five successive dynasties of Muslim rulers governed northern India from there. The tower he began beside his mosque, the Qutb Minar, was finished by his successors and stands 73 meters high. The sultanate turned back repeated Mongol invasions, which spared India the destruction that fell on Persia and Baghdad. Muhammad bin Tughluq, one of its cleverest and least successful rulers, ordered much of the population of Delhi to move some 1,100 kilometers south to a new capital in 1327, then changed his mind. Timur sacked Delhi in 1398, and in April 1526 the last sultan was killed at Panipat by Babur, who had brought field guns.
The Mongol Empire
In 1206 an assembly of the steppe tribes proclaimed Temüjin their universal ruler, Genghis Khan, and within sixty years his armies and those of his sons and grandsons had built the largest contiguous land empire in history, from Korea to Hungary. They took Beijing in 1215, destroyed the Khwarazmian empire of Central Asia, and sacked Kyiv in 1240 and Baghdad in 1258. Some of the cities they destroyed never recovered. Yet the same empire kept the roads across Asia safe for merchants and envoys, and made possible the journeys of Marco Polo, who spent seventeen years in the service of Genghis's grandson Kublai Khan. Kublai ruled China as the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty, which held it until 1368. The Mongols ran their dominions with metal passes that worked as passports and a relay of post stations that let a rider cover hundreds of kilometers in a day.
Magna Carta Is Sealed at Runnymede
On 15 June 1215, in a meadow called Runnymede beside the Thames, King John of England set his seal to a charter drawn up by barons in rebellion against him. Most of its 63 clauses deal with feudal grievances: the rights of widows, the fish weirs on the Thames, the removal of foreign knights. The pope annulled it ten weeks later at John's request, and the country went to war. But it was reissued after John died, and one clause survived every revision: no free man shall be imprisoned or dispossessed except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The idea that the king himself was under the law crossed the Atlantic with English settlers, and those words found their way, by long descent, into the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Four original copies of the 1215 charter survive, two of them in the British Library.
The Mali Empire
Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso king around 1235 and founded an empire on the upper Niger that grew to reach from the Atlantic coast to the great bend of the river at Timbuktu and Gao. Mali controlled the goldfields of West Africa at a time when they supplied much of the gold used in the Mediterranean world, and its rulers were Muslims who made Timbuktu a city of scholars and manuscripts. In 1324 its king, Mansa Musa, passed through Cairo on pilgrimage to Mecca with thousands of followers and so much gold that, according to the Syrian historian al-Umari, its value in Cairo had still not recovered twelve years later. A Catalan map of 1375 shows him seated on a throne in the middle of the Sahara, holding up a golden nugget. The empire declined after 1450 and broke apart in the early seventeenth century.
The Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans began around 1299 as one of many small Turkish principalities on the Byzantine frontier in northwestern Anatolia, named for their founder, Osman, and within two centuries they were the strongest state in the Mediterranean. They took Constantinople in 1453, Egypt and the holy cities of Arabia in 1517, and under Suleiman the Magnificent they laid siege to Vienna in 1529. The empire recruited many of its soldiers and administrators by levying Christian boys from the Balkans, converting them and training them for the Janissary corps or the palace service, so that some of the most powerful men in the state had been born in peasant villages. It lasted more than six hundred years. The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, and the last sultan left Istanbul aboard a British warship.
The Hundred Years' War
From 1337 to 1453 the kings of England fought the kings of France for the French throne, which Edward III claimed through his mother. It was a war of long truces and short, brutal campaigns, and of English victories won by longbowmen, at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, against French knights who would not believe that commoners on foot could beat them. In 1429, with the English besieging Orléans, a peasant girl of seventeen named Joan persuaded the uncrowned French king that she had been sent by God, and led a relief force that broke the siege in nine days. She was captured the next year, sold to the English, and burned as a heretic at Rouen in 1431, at about nineteen. Twenty-two years later the English held nothing in France but Calais.
The Black Death
The plague came out of Central Asia along the trade routes and reached the Black Sea port of Caffa in 1346. In October 1347 Genoese galleys brought it to Messina in Sicily, and within four years it had crossed all of Europe and reached the Middle East and North Africa. Somewhere between a third and a half of Europe's people died, perhaps 25 to 50 million, and the population took some two centuries to recover its numbers. Boccaccio, who lived through it in Florence, wrote that the dead were buried in trenches, stowed tier upon tier like cargo in a ship. In Siena a chronicler named Agnolo di Tura wrote that he had buried his five children with his own hands. With so few people left to work the land, wages rose and serfdom in the West began to give way, and in many towns the survivors turned on the Jews, who were accused of poisoning the wells.
The Ming Dynasty
Zhu Yuanzhang, a former Buddhist monk and beggar orphaned by famine, drove the Mongols out of China in 1368 and founded the Ming, the bright dynasty. His son, the Yongle emperor, moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City, some 980 buildings inside a moat and wall, with a workforce said to have numbered a million, between 1406 and 1420. The Ming rebuilt the Great Wall in brick and stone, and most of the wall that visitors walk on today is theirs. Ming porcelain, blue on white, became so prized in Europe that the word china came to mean the porcelain itself. The dynasty fell in 1644 when rebels took Beijing; the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a tree on Coal Hill, behind the palace, and the Manchus came through the wall to take the throne.
Joseon Korea
The Joseon dynasty, founded in 1392 by the general Yi Seong-gye, ruled Korea for more than five hundred years, one of the longest-lived royal houses in history, governing through a Confucian bureaucracy chosen by examination from its capital at Hanyang, modern Seoul. Its fourth king, Sejong, had scholars devise an alphabet for Korean because, he wrote in 1446, the common people had many things they wished to say but could not set them down in Chinese characters. Its designers claimed that a wise man could learn it before the morning was over and a fool within ten days. In 1592 the admiral Yi Sun-sin used armored turtle ships to break a Japanese invasion fleet.
The Renaissance
It began in Italy, in city-states grown rich on banking and the cloth trade, and above all in Florence, a city of perhaps 50,000 people that in the fifteenth century produced Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its scholars hunted through monastery libraries for lost Latin texts and learned Greek from Byzantine refugees, believing that by recovering the ancients they could make their own age great. Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral, built from 1420 to 1436 without the timber centering everyone assumed it would need, is still the largest brick dome in the world. Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling standing on a scaffold with his head bent back, from 1508 to 1512, and wrote a comic sonnet about the goiter it gave him. The Medici and the popes paid for most of it.
The Treasure Voyages of Zheng He
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent seven great fleets into the Indian Ocean under the admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan. The first, by the official account, carried some 27,800 men in more than 300 ships, the largest of them treasure ships whose true size is still disputed. They called at Java, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz, and reached the coast of East Africa at Malindi and Mogadishu. They came home with tribute and curiosities, among them a giraffe presented to the emperor in 1414 as a qilin, a beast that appears only in the reign of a sage ruler. Then the court, worried about the cost and the northern frontier, stopped the voyages, and later officials are said to have destroyed the records. Sixty-five years after Zheng He's last voyage, Vasco da Gama reached India round Africa with four ships.
The Age of Discovery
Portugal, a kingdom of about a million people on the edge of Europe, began sending ships down the coast of Africa in the 1420s under the patronage of Prince Henry, later called the Navigator, who never sailed on any of them. The caravels went a little farther each year. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in May 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, in India, having spent some three months out of sight of land on one stretch of the voyage. Spain followed Columbus west, and in September 1522 the eighteen survivors of Magellan's expedition, out of about 270 who had set out three years before, came home on a single ship, the Victoria, the first to sail round the world. Magellan was not among them; he had been killed in the Philippines. By the end of the century European ships were trading in Japan and Mexico, and the oceans of the world had become, for the first time, a single connected system.
The Aztec Empire
The Mexica, latecomers to the Valley of Mexico, founded their city of Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco around 1325, and in 1428 joined two neighboring cities in a Triple Alliance that conquered much of central Mexico. Tenochtitlan grew to perhaps 200,000 people, joined to the shore by causeways, supplied by an aqueduct and ringed by floating gardens. The conquered paid tribute in maize, cotton cloth, cacao, feathers and captives for sacrifice. When Hernán Cortés and his men first saw the city in November 1519, one of them, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, wrote that some of the soldiers asked whether what they saw was a dream. Cortés had about five hundred Spaniards, but he also had tens of thousands of native allies who hated the Mexica, and the help of smallpox, which killed the emperor Cuitláhuac in 1520. Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521, after a siege of nearly three months.
The Inca Empire
In 1438 Pachacuti, a prince of the small kingdom of Cusco, beat off an invading army and set out to conquer the Andes. In less than a century the Inca built the largest empire in the Americas, Tawantinsuyu, the four parts together, running 4,000 kilometers from Ecuador to central Chile and ruling perhaps ten to twelve million people. They held it together with some 40,000 kilometers of road, rope suspension bridges, storehouses of food and relays of runners. They had no writing as Europeans understood it, but they kept records on khipus, cords of knotted string that recorded numbers and perhaps more. Machu Picchu, built as a royal estate for Pachacuti, was never found by the Spanish. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro, with 168 men, seized the emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca, took a room full of gold as ransom, and executed him anyway the following July.
The Fall of Constantinople
On 29 May 1453, after a siege of fifty-three days, the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II broke through the land walls of Constantinople. Mehmed was twenty-one. He had brought cannon larger than any seen before, one of them cast by a Hungarian engineer named Orban that threw stone balls of some 270 kilograms, and he had about seventy ships dragged overland on greased logs into the Golden Horn to get around the chain across its mouth. The last emperor, Constantine XI, was last seen fighting at the walls; his body was never identified with certainty. Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia that afternoon and ordered it made a mosque. Counting from Augustus, the Roman Empire had lasted almost fifteen hundred years. Greek scholars who escaped carried manuscripts west to Italy, where there were buyers waiting for them.
Gutenberg Prints the Bible at Mainz
Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith of Mainz, spent the better part of twenty years and most of his partners' money working out how to print. The answer was a system: letters cast in a metal alloy from a hand mold so that each was identical to the next, an oil-based ink that would cling to metal, and a press adapted from the ones used for grapes. His Bible, about 180 copies, was finished by 1455. Gutenberg made almost nothing from it. His backer, Johann Fust, sued him that November for repayment of the loans and took over the workshop. But printing spread so fast that by 1500 presses in more than 250 European towns had turned out somewhere between eight and twenty million books. Forty-nine copies of his Bible survive, some of them incomplete.
Columbus Reaches the Americas
At about two o'clock in the morning of 12 October 1492, a lookout on the Pinta saw a white cliff in the moonlight and shouted land. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor in the service of Spain, had left the Canaries thirty-six days before with three ships and about ninety men, convinced the world was smaller than it is and that Japan lay some 4,500 kilometers to the west. The crown had promised a pension to the first man to sight land. Columbus claimed it himself, saying he had seen a light the night before. He landed that morning on an island in the Bahamas that its Taino people called Guanahani and he named San Salvador, and he died in 1506 still insisting he had reached Asia. What followed was the Columbian Exchange: maize, potatoes and tomatoes went east, horses, wheat and sugar went west, and with the Europeans came smallpox and measles, which within a century had killed most of the native population of the Americas.
Safavid Persia
In 1501 Ismail, the fourteen-year-old head of a Sufi order whose followers wore red-tipped caps, captured Tabriz and proclaimed himself shah. He made Shia Islam the religion of Iran, by force where necessary, and the country has remained Shia ever since, which set it apart from its Sunni neighbors, the Ottomans to the west and the Mughals to the east. The greatest of the Safavids, Shah Abbas I, moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and built around a vast public square, the Naqsh-e Jahan, two mosques, a palace and a covered bazaar. Persians said Isfahan was half the world. The dynasty never recovered after Afghan invaders besieged the city in 1722 and starved it into surrender.
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Between the early sixteenth century and 1867, European and American ships carried some 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. About 10.7 million survived the crossing. Most were taken to work on sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean; fewer than 400,000 were landed in what became the United States. The crossing from the West African coast, the Middle Passage, took one to three months. The Brookes of Liverpool, which after 1788 was licensed to carry 454 people, had carried as many as 609 on an earlier voyage. A diagram of the Brookes printed by abolitionists in 1788, showing human beings packed into its hold, did as much as any speech to turn British opinion. Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833. Brazil, the last country in the Americas to end slavery, did so in 1888.
The Reformation
On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther, a professor of theology at the small university of Wittenberg, sent the archbishop of Mainz ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, and, by tradition, nailed a copy to the door of the castle church. The printing press did the rest. Within two months the theses were known across Germany, and within a decade Luther was the most published author in Europe. Called before the emperor at Worms in 1521, he refused to recant. Within a generation Western Christianity had split for good, with Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Anabaptists on one side and, on the other, a Catholic Church reforming itself at the Council of Trent. Europe then fought more than a century of wars over the division, which ended only with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
The Mughal Empire
Babur, a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, won northern India at Panipat in 1526, and his grandson Akbar built on that victory an empire that ruled most of the subcontinent and between 100 and 150 million people, more than lived in all of Europe. Akbar, who never learned to read, kept a library of 24,000 manuscripts and held debates at his court among Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Jesuits. His grandson Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal at Agra as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 giving birth to their fourteenth child; some 20,000 workers labored on it for about twenty years. By one modern estimate, in 1700 the Mughal lands produced about a quarter of the world's goods. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, an old man who wrote poetry, was exiled by the British to Rangoon after the rising of 1857.
The Scientific Revolution
In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the cathedral at Frombork in Poland, published his argument that the earth goes round the sun; he is said to have been handed the first printed copy on the day he died. A hundred and forty-four years later Isaac Newton, in his Principia, showed that one law of gravity governs a falling apple and the orbit of the moon. Between those two books, Europeans changed the way they decided what was true. Galileo turned a telescope on the sky in 1609 and 1610 and saw the moons of Jupiter and the mountains of the moon, and in 1633 the Inquisition made him kneel and abjure his belief that the earth moves; he spent the rest of his life under house arrest near Florence. William Harvey showed that the blood circulates. The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, took as its motto Nullius in verba: take nobody's word for it.
The Dutch Golden Age
The Dutch Republic, seven small provinces that had rebelled against Spain, became in the seventeenth century the richest country in Europe for its size. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, was the first company to sell shares to the public, and those shares changed hands on an exchange in Amsterdam. Dutch ships carried a large share of Europe's seaborne trade, from Baltic grain to Indonesian nutmeg. Prosperity paid for paintings, millions of them, and ordinary households hung them on their walls. Rembrandt finished the Night Watch in 1642, and in Delft Johannes Vermeer painted perhaps forty-five pictures in his whole life, of which some thirty-five survive. In 1672, the year of disaster, France and England attacked the Republic together, and that is where the golden age is reckoned to end.
Edo Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate
After the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu became master of Japan, and in 1603 he took the title of shogun. His family governed from Edo, now Tokyo, for more than two and a half centuries without a major war. The great lords were required to spend every other year in Edo, which kept them under watch and drained their treasuries, and by 1720 Edo had grown to around a million people. From the 1630s the shoguns closed the country. Christianity was banned, Japanese were forbidden to go abroad on pain of death, and the only Europeans allowed to trade were the Dutch, confined to a small artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. Inside the closed country a merchant culture flourished, with kabuki theater and woodblock prints like Hokusai's Great Wave. In July 1853 four American warships under Commodore Perry anchored in Edo Bay, and the long isolation was over.
The Thirty Years' War
It began on 23 May 1618, when Protestant noblemen in Prague threw two Catholic imperial governors and their secretary out of a high window of the castle. All three survived, landing, Catholics said, by the intervention of angels, or, Protestants said, in a dung heap. The war that followed drew in the Habsburgs, Sweden, Denmark, France and Spain, and it was fought mostly on German soil by armies that lived off the land. In some regions of Germany a third or more of the people died, from fighting, famine and plague. Magdeburg, sacked in 1631, fell from some 25,000 inhabitants to about 450. The treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648 laid down a principle that has organized Europe ever since: each state is sovereign within its own borders, and others have no right to interfere in its religion.
The Qing Dynasty
The Manchus, a people from beyond the Great Wall, took Beijing in 1644 and ruled China as the Qing dynasty until 1912. Under the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, who between them reigned for 121 years, they doubled the empire's territory to take in Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Taiwan, and the population grew from about 150 million to more than 300 million. In 1793 a British embassy under Lord Macartney arrived with telescopes, clocks and a planetarium, hoping to open trade. Qianlong sent back a letter saying that China possessed all things and had no use for his country's manufactures. Within fifty years British gunboats were settling the matter. The last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in February 1912 at the age of six, and ended his life working as a gardener in the People's Republic.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was less a movement than an argument, carried on across Europe and the American colonies by letter, pamphlet and conversation, over whether reason and evidence, rather than tradition and revelation, should govern human affairs. Its voices included John Locke, who held that government rests on the consent of the governed, Voltaire, who fought the Church all his life, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite into a thunderstorm. Its monument is the Encyclopédie, edited in Paris by Denis Diderot, who gave a quarter of a century to its seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates while the authorities banned it twice. In 1784 Immanuel Kant, asked what enlightenment was, answered with a Latin motto: sapere aude, dare to know. The revolutions in America and France tried to build its ideas into governments.
The Industrial Revolution
In the second half of the eighteenth century, in the English Midlands and the north, a few hundred inventors and manufacturers began making things with machines, driven first by water and then by coal. Richard Arkwright's water-powered cotton mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, opened in 1771, ran day and night in two twelve-hour shifts, and James Watt's improved steam engine, patented in 1769, freed factories from the riverbank. Manchester, a market town of some 25,000 people in the 1770s, held more than 300,000 by 1850, many of them living in cellars, and children of seven and eight worked in its mills and in the mines nearby. But for the first time in history the output of an economy grew faster than its population, year after year, and kept on growing. Every country that has grown rich since has done it by some version of what happened in Britain then.
The American Revolution
The quarrel began over taxes, with the Stamp Act of 1765, and in ten years it became a war. At Lexington and Concord in April 1775 Massachusetts militiamen fired on British regulars, and that summer the Continental Congress gave command of a new army to George Washington, a Virginia planter of forty-three who had never commanded anything larger than a regiment. For most of its eight years the war went badly. In the last days of 1776, with his army reduced to a few thousand men whose enlistments ran out on New Year's Day, Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware on Christmas night and took the Hessian garrison at Trenton. With a French fleet and a French army beside them, the Americans trapped the British at Yorktown in October 1781, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized the independence of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence
On 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress, meeting in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, voted for independence, and two days later, on 4 July, it approved the text of a declaration explaining why. The draft was the work of Thomas Jefferson, thirty-three years old, who wrote it in rented rooms at Seventh and Market Streets in about seventeen days. Congress cut roughly a quarter of it. John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that the second of July would be celebrated by future generations with parades, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other; he had the day wrong and the rest right. Its second sentence, holding it self-evident that all men are created equal, was written by a man who held well over a hundred people in slavery, and it has been quoted against slavery and tyranny ever since.
The French Revolution
France in 1789 was bankrupt, largely from paying for the American war, and Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years to raise money. Within weeks the deputies of the commons had declared themselves a National Assembly, and on 14 July a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress that turned out to hold seven prisoners. In August the Assembly abolished feudal privileges and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The revolution abolished the monarchy in 1792 and beheaded the king in January 1793. In the Terror that followed, some 17,000 people were officially executed, many by the guillotine, a device adopted because it was thought humane. Wordsworth, who had been in France in its first years, wrote that bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. In November 1799 a general of thirty, Napoleon Bonaparte, took power in a coup.
The Haitian Revolution
Saint-Domingue, the French half of Hispaniola, produced on the eve of the revolution something like 40 percent of the sugar and more than half the coffee consumed in Europe, worked by roughly half a million enslaved Africans, who outnumbered the whites more than ten to one. In August 1791 they rose on the northern plain and burned the plantations, and in a war that lasted twelve years they defeated in turn the planters, a British invasion, and a French army sent by Napoleon to restore slavery. Its greatest leader, Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved coachman, was lured into captivity and died in a cold cell in the Jura mountains in April 1803. On 1 January 1804 his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared Haiti independent, the first nation founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. In 1825 France forced Haiti to pay an indemnity to the former slaveholders, and with the loans it took to pay it, the debt was not cleared until 1947.