We know quite a lot about the past from looking at the things it has left
lying around; and the most detailed knowledge we have of the past comes from
what people of the time wrote down. When they wrote it with intent to give a
future reader a clear account – albeit usually with at least some bias
– of what happened, we call it history; when they wrote it for other
reasons (such as accounts to keep trade honest or to help an owner keep track of
what he owns), one could argue that our interpretation of it is more
archeological than historical, but we usually treat the reading of such records
as history anyway (they are, if nothing else, more apt to be honest). As a
result, the scope of history is limited to the era of written records – to
which this page is devoted. For events prior to the invention of writing, see
my time-line.
I measure time backwards from the present (nominally 2001 –
see below for why) and all of history falls within the range
of times ago that I'd naturally represent in kilo-years, a.k.a. millennia
– writing emerged within the last ten millennia and anything more recent
than a century (tenth of a millennium), while genuinely history, shades into
current affairs and the mythology of present political realities, so I chose to
leave it to others. If you want information on closer time-scales than the last
century, seek elsewhere: and please be sensible enough to bear in mind that any
author, whose writings you can hope to read, is close enough to the
socio-political realities of the events discussed that you should engage your
best talent for skepticism (especially if what they say agrees with
your prejudices) in assessing the veracity of their accounts of the recent
past.
One such elsewhere that may have a sobering impact on readers
is Piero
Scaruffi's list of wars
and casualties, steadilly expanding outwards from the 20th century as he
gathers more information. As Eric Bogle
says at the end
of No
Man's Land
(lyrics –
PDF), even since
the war to end
wars, it has all happened again and again and again and again and
again.
My main aim here is merely to record the time-line of our past, in which the
order of events takes centre stage, even when the events in question are
unrelated – proper histories generally (and properly) tell a cogent story
of related events, ignoring unrelated events elsewhere; but, here, I want to
provide the framework for seeing how those disparate stories' time-lines match
up. As a result, although this page treats the last ten
millennia because what we know of them is predominantly from written
records, I include here the things we know from other sources.
51 yr ago: carbon dating's The Present
In
contrast to my choice of 2001 as the present, there is a well-established
precedent of using 1950 as The Present for purposes of dates before
the present, a.k.a. BP. The reason for this is that this is when humanity's
rash experiments with nuclear weapons so tainted the world with radioactive mess
as to render carbon (and other isotopic decay methods of) dating after that date
unreliable. Stuff deep enough in the ground at that date to not be tainted can
still be dated, as long as it's not been chemically interacting with things
living since then.
570 to 92 yr ago: superstitious law courts
1431, May 30,
Rouen, France: Jean d'Arc burned at the stake
for communing
with spirits; April 1909, the same maid of Orleans was canonised on grounds
of those spirits being deemed angelic.
134 yr ago: Alaska purchase
The USA bought Alaska off the Russian
Tzar in 1867.
224 to 146 yr ago: Karl Friedrich Gauss
A gardener's son, born in
Braunschweig, Germany in 1777 on April 30th, showed such early promise that Duke
Ferdinand of Brunswick had him educated, thereby bestowing a huge blessing on
Science and Mathematics.
249 yr ago
Great Britain (hence also its colonies) waited until
1752 to make the transition to the Gregorian calendar. September 1st was
followed by September 13th. The same year, Great Britain also changed from
March 25th as the start of the year to January 1st (although the tax
year in the
UK starts on
April 1st, which looks suspiciously like a hold-over from this).
294 to 218 yr ago: Leonhard Euler
One of history's most prolific
mathematicians, who introduced the now-conventional symbols to the square root
of −1 and the base of the natural logarithms; he also introduced the f(x)
notation for functions.
320 to 170 yr ago: private fire brigades
After The Great Fire of
London, fire brigades run by insurance companies emerged to help folk protect
against a repeat. Many modern sources (probably including school history
lessons and text books, at least back when I was a child)
perpetuate an urban
myth that the private fire brigades in London would leave a building to burn
if it wasn't insured by the company that employed them.
340 yrs ago; microbiology
emerges
Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek uses combinations of lenses to make microscopes with
×200 magnification. This let him spot human body-cells. Soon after,
Robert Hooke shows the same for biological organisms present in nature, never
before imagined.
391 yrs ago
Galileo Galilei (having heard of Lippershey's) makes
a telescope (with a ×30ish magnification) and points it at the night sky.
He observes Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus and details of the Moon's
surface and how the changing angle of sunlight on it show that it has surface
features of its own. The world moves – and turns as it goes.
392 yrs ago;
spyglass
Hans
Lippershey invents a telescope. He files a patent in 1608 CE, well-aware of
its potential application to war.
400ish years ago
Invention of microscopes and telescopes by
suitable combinations of lenses. There is some controversy over who did what
first, but it didn't take long for both ideas to spread fast throughout Europe's
(microscopic minority of) scientists.
401 yr
ago
Giordano
Bruno is burned at the stake for his heresies. There is some debate as to
whether his heterodox views on cosmology – identifying stars as suns, with
planets of their own, in an infinite universe – contributed to The
Inquisition's deciaion.
419 yr ago
Introduction of the Gregorian calendar (named after
pope Gregory XIII), on October 15th 1582. In Roman Catholic countries, October
4th was followed by October 15th. Denmark, The Netherlands and protestant
Germany made the switch in the 1600s.
475 yr
ago
Thomas
Digges publishes a re-telling of Copernicus without the outer celestial
sphere, thus introducing the idea of an infinite universe. (In this,
he may
have been
echoing Nocholas of
Kues, who espoused similar ideas 540 or more years ago.)
In 1507 a Scottish
alchemist, John Damian, lept off the ramparts of Stirling castle, intent on
flying to France. It's not clear how far he got, but modern researchers suspect
he actually did fly a short way (before infamously breaking his leg on landing
in a midden).
550ish years ago
Transparent glass. On Venice's island dedicated
to glass-workers (so that they wouldn't burn down the rest of the
city), Angelo
Barovier mixed seaweed (rich in Potassium Oxide and Manganese) into his
glass (which duly burned it to ash). The resulting glass proved to be fully
transparent. This was a necessary prerequisite of glasses (not just the ones
folk drink out of but also the ones that help people see better) and lenses
(hence both telescopes and microscopes, each of which proved important). So
that's a pretty big deal (see the next160 years).
700 to 800 years ago
Some time in the CE's 1200s, Amazonia
suffered its
worst drought in 5k years.
At least 830 years
ago
Irish
distillation of aqua vitae in abbeys, recorded in
1170 on Henry II's invasion. English taxes were being levied on the alembics
used for this as early as 1276 CE.
A millennium ago
Abulcais (Cordoba, 936–1031
CE) perfected the
alembic, hence distillation of ethanol.
1130 years ago
Al Kindi (Baghdad, died 873 CE) improved
distilling techniques to obtain rose essence.
at least 1265 years ago
The Reverend Bede (who died in 735 AD, in
Jarrow, Northumberland) wrote a history of England. How much of it is mythology
and how much real remains open to debate.
at least 1.5 k yr ago
The Amazon
basin teems
with thousands of low-density garden cities. They manage fisheries and have
tamed sections of jungle as orchards, including domesticated cultivars of fruit
trees, and each has thousands of residents. By composting their waste the
residents enriched the (naturally nutrient-poor) native soil to support more
intensive agriculture. By tending their environment the residents enriched the
local eco-systems. The cities had monumental civic structures, geometric road
patterns and defensive centres. They show clear signs of civic planning and
include fire-breaks to protect against forest fires. Some date back at least 2k
yr ago. All in stark contrast to our modern cities. All were later wiped out
by pandemics of diseases that arrived with Europeans who were immune to
them.
1.591 k yr ago
Sack of Rome.
1.689 k yr ago: conversion of Constantine
The official date, 312
AD, at which the Roman Empire switched from oppressing christianity to promoting
it. The oppression had actually been limited: there was official persecution in
249 AD under Decius and 303–304 AD under Diocletian, probably with other
outbursts of varying officialness, but generally the Roman Empire protected all
religious minorities from the general population's antipathy. The general
population resented the christians because they didn't honour the gods,
so all the bad things that happened were clearly their fault, the gods'
punishment on the general population for tolerating the atheists in their
midst (much as some who now call themselves christians now blame bad
things on certain of their fellow citizens).
1.734 k yr ago
Athens sacked by Goths.
1.7 k yr ago
An edict of
Diocletian records (in the attempt to fix) the prices of diverse goods; from
Roman tax records, we also know the incomes of folk in various social
classes. This video
explores what that implies for the standard of living of three sample
households.
1.9ish k yr ago
Somewhat transparent glass. Prior to this, the best
glass folk had was opaque; but Alexandrian glass-makers added Manganese dioxide
(MnO2) to their silicate. The resulting glass still
scattered some of the light passing through it, but quite a lot made it
through in a straight line.
See this Veritassium video
on the subject for further details.
2 ky ago: start of the common era
This is the
nominal date of Christ's birth: but it's fairly clear that – even for
those who accept the historical reality of the man in question – the late
Roman and dark age tracking of dates, combined with poor back-tracking through
the centuries in which years were referred to relative to the reigns of assorted
rulers, introduced something like four years of inaccuracy. (For example, the
biblical account of a bright star moving about the sky can fairly sanely be
matched to Chinese records of a comet if we accept a four year discrepancy,
while the claim that he was born in Herod's reign implies he was born in 4BCE or
earlier.) The Christian system of year numbering refers to years since this
nominal start-point as anno domini or AD; somehow, the world
has been persuaded to use the same numbering but described as CE (for Common
Era) instead of AD, despite religious and calendrical differences. The year
before 1 CE (a.k.a. 1 AD or 754 AUC) is thus the first year
before the common era, 1 BCE (a.k.a. 1 BC, the first year before Christ; I've
heard that, technically, that's supposed to be before his circumcision, on the
8th day of his life, putting his birth on December 25th 1 BC – although
I've also heard that, before his official birthday was set thus, the early
church didn't care much about when he was born but placed it in spring); earlier
years are correspondingly numbered backwards, so the n-th year BCE is (in the
numbering I'm using here) 2000+n years ago – I chose 2001 CE as my nominal
reference date to make that arithmetic easy ! Note that there is no year
zero in the CE/BCE or AD/BC system.
2.045 k yr ago (45 BC, 709 AUC)
Introduction of the Julian
calendar. The Romans had previously used a luni-solar calendar in which the
insertion of leap months was determined by elected priests; consequently, the
decisions had been more political than scientific, leaving the calendar 80 days
behind the Sun in 46 BC. Caesar hired an Egyptian astronomer, Sosigenes, to
sort out a better calendar, based on the Egyptian solar calendar. 46 BC was
extended to get back in sync with The Sun – it was later known as The
Year of Confusion – and the start of the year was shifted from March
15th (the Ides of March) to January 1st. (Thus 80 days were inserted but 74 of
those days were counted as falling in the following year.) The conspirators who
murdered him on the Ides of March the next year, 44 BC, thus did so on the
former New Year's Day; I cannot help but suspect that contained some
symbolism.
49 BCE, January 10th, Julius Caesar paused on the banks of
the Rubicon, a river formally marking the border between Italy and Gaul, the
province to which he'd been sent with his army. Roman law forbade him to bring
his army out of his province: he had to return to Rome and present himself to
the senate's judgement of how he'd fared in his campaign; but he knew political
machinations were afoot by his enemies. If he took his army with him, he broke
the law; if he didn't, he was defenceless against ruthless opponents. While he
mulled this dilemma (according to his later account), some of his soldiers
crossed the river to enjoy music being played by a shepherd on the other side;
Caesar took this as his cue to take his army to Rome, thereby starting a civil
war pivotal to the Roman republic's later tranformation into an empire.
2.264 to 2.146 k yr ago
The Punic
wars; Rome and Carthage fought for dominance of the Mediterranean.
2.287 to 2.212 k yr ago: Archimedes
The nearest the Romans got to
making a
decisive contribution to mathematics was killing Archimedes on the beach at
Syracuse in 212 BCE. Archimedes, aside from his prolific contributions to
mathematics and physics, invented several machines of war which helped Syracuse
keep the Romans at bay for some years. He was born around 287 BCE and narrowed
the value of a famous constant to 223/71 < π < 22/7.
2.332 k yr ago: Alexandria
Alexander the Great established
Alexandria as his capital for Egypt, in 332 BCE as part of his campaign of
conquests. There may well have
been an earlier settlment dating back to as much as 3 k yr ago. His general
Ptolemy subsequently converted Alexandria into a centre of intellectual
excellence. Euclid (born c. 325 BCE) was one of the first luminaries to
flourish there.
2.336 to 2.323 k yr ago
The reign of Alexander III (The Great) of
Macedonia; preceded by his father, Philip II, from 2.359 to 2.336 k yr
ago.
The Pythagorean school of thought, in the 500s
BCE, considered the world a sphere (and believed it to orbit the Sun); Aristotle
(384–322 BCE) threw in some supporting evidence; Eratosthenes
(276ish–196ish BCE) measured its curvature fairly accurately.
2.312 k yr ago: the Seleucid Era
Seleucus won a battle at Gaza
that established his rule over a large part of Asia. This was the 1st year of
the 117th Olympiad.
2.6 k yr ago
Foundation of Marseilles, by Greeks from the West of
Asia Minor (now Turkey).
Meanwhile, in Hallstatt,
salt-miners were washing down blue cheese with beer.
800 to 200 BCE, a period of major developments in
philosophical/religious thinking across several civilisations stretching (at
least) from Greece to China.
Cannabis has
been used for its mind-altering effects.
2.775 or 2.753 k yr
ago:
Rome
founded: April 21, 753 BCE according to tradition; archeological evidence
suggests c. 775 BCE. Rome was ruled by kings until 507 BCE. Some Roman
historical records used the AUC dating system – Anno Urbis
Conditae – which counts years from the founding, but not until long
enough after the event that their traditional reckoning (as now extrapolated
back from comparing with other sources using other dating systems) was out of
sync with what archeology now claims.
2.776 k yr ago
The (first year of the) first Olympiad; these went
in a four year cycle, so the second Olympiad stated in 772 BCE.
2.814 k yr ago
Carthage founded
by Phoenician settlers fleeing from the political turmoil in the city of Tyre.
(814 or 813 BCE, according to a not necessarily reliable source; confirmed
apparently independently by another, which supplies the Phoenician
name Qart-Hadasht as originally meaning New City.)
2.9 to 2.7 k yr ago
Villanovan or early Iron Age period in
central Italy, followed by an Etruscan period from 2.7 to 2.48 k yr ago.
2.8 to 3 k yr ago
A bronze age
settlement, near
Must Farm by Whittlesey today, was hastily evacuated by its inhabitants to
escape a fire. Its structures (including homes on stilts and boats) fell into
the fen and were preserved by the oxygen-starved environment of the mud:
everything was too waterlogged to rot. Its
excavation since
1999 has revealed what has come to be known as Britain's Pompeii.
The BBC video includes
an interlude (21 minutes in) about a site in Italy's Po valley that's clearly a
hub of global commerce. The fact that the inhabitants lived on
the highway (that is, the water) suggests (to me) the possibility that
they were the merchant part of a local population. The trove includes
fine woven textiles (as many as 13 threads in 5 mm). The site was enclosed,
which supports the possibility that it was a merchant enclave, or in some other
sense susceptible to attacks (as are suggested by weapons on the site with nicks
in their blades); an enclave of relative wealth would be correlated with
relative sophistication in armaments. That the site was not resettled might not
(as the BBC interviewees seem to think) mean the fire was an attack on its
inhabitants &ndeash; it may simply have been an accident that pushed a
precarious community over an edge. They may have been an immigrant community,
that prospered thanks to their trade connections, while trading with locals
doing standard farming, but foundered once their homes burned with all their
material posessions.
3.5 to 2.3 k yr ago
The Phoenecian
civilisation in the Mediteranean coastline (c.1500 BCE to c.300 BCE). The
originally Phoenecian city of Marseilles still thrives to this day.
3 k yr ago
Early proto-Canaanite (precursor of Hebrew, Greek and
Latin alphabets) writing, on
a shard
of pottery, might be the oldest known text in the Hebrew language.
3.2 to 3.17 k yr ago
The late bronze age collapse. Several
civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean collapse dramatically in the space of
a few decades; only Egypt survives, severely diminished as a dark age
begins.
3.3 to 2.7 k yr ago
The urnfield period of the late bronze
age in western Europe.
3.39 to 3.37 k yr ago
Early North European
beer. The Egtved girl
was buried with, among other things, a bucket of beer. See below for evidence
of even earlier beer.
3.55 to 3.07 k yr ago:
Egypt's new kingdom brought
stability to an area spanning 1.2 Mm, from Nubia (now Ethiopia) in the South to
Palestine in the North. Rough contemporaries include a Kassite state (3.53 to
3.16 k yr ago) in Lower Mesopotamia, an Assyrrian state (3.4 to 3.05 k yr ago)
in Upper Mesopotamia, a Hittite new kingdom (3.4 to 3.2 k yr ago) in Asia
Minor (now Turkey) and Cretan palatial civilisations (see the Aegean Bronze age,
below). Biblical chronologies put Israel's conquest of Canaan at around 3.2 k
yr ago, half way through this period.
3.628 k yr ago
The explosion of Thera, north of Crete, had a
fairly drastic impact on eastern mediterranean cultures, but they
recovered.
Early extraction of iron from ores (as distinct from
working naturally-occuring meteoric iron) may go back as far as 3.8 k yr in
India; certainly by 3.2 k yr ago it was being practiced in southern India and
(by hittites) in The Middle East.
3.8 k yr ago
Caananite script developed. Within about a century,
3.7 k yr ago, folk were writing sentences in it on household objects, such
as an
ivory comb. The first albphabet, this writing system was developed by folk
who knew the Egyptian system. Mesopotamia and Egypt have had writing systems
since 5.2 k yr ago, according to that article.
Around the same time, you've got Mesopotamian justice systems that depend
on
geometers to
settle land disputes; and the student mathematicians are getting set
artificial questions that depend on knowing Pythagoras's theorem and being able
to solve simultaneous equations.
4 k yr ago: Banking
The Akkadian karrum
(literally quay but meaning market and the traders associated
therewith; the goods travelled by river, so arrived at the quay) of Ashur
(later: Assyria) controlled trade, levying taxes, keeping its own warehouses and
offering warehouse space to merchants; but also holding goods and money on
behalf of private merchants and, thus, functioning as
a bank of deposit.
4ish k yr ago: Pythagorean triples
Long before Pythagoras, a
Babylonian wrote pythagorean triples on a
clay tablet.
4.1 to 3.8 k yr ago: Egypt's middle kingdom
had a secure
border with Nubia (Ethiopia) to the South.
4.55 k yr ago: the Great Pyramid
Built for the pharoah Cheops,
a.k.a. Khufu, and still not fully explored – but Dr. Zahi
Hawass is
working on it.
The civilisations in and around Mesopotamia (from Egypt to the Indus) evolved
writing – a prerequisite of history and a major boon to research, hence
technology, of all kinds – out of their assorted systems of
markings.
6.714 k yr ago
Start-point of the Julian day numbering system;
its day 0 is 4714 BC, Nov 24 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar (see 419 yr
ago); or 4713 BC Jan 1 in the proleptic Julian calendar (see 2047 yr ago).
7.3 k yr
ago
Proto-writing
in south-eastern Europe. Diverse cultures throughout the Eurasian-African
super-continent have developed systems of marks (for example, on pottery –
which, by now, has spread all over) for various purposes.
8.6 k yr ago
Ancient chinese
proto-writing. There's some debate about what it was, what it was used for
or exactly how long ago it happened, but they definitely made
some interesting
markings on tortoise shells.
10ish k yr ago
Mesopotamians begin
using clay tokens to represent (at least) agricultural goods; in time, they
take to enclosing sets of such tablets in sealed clay containers, then to
marking such containers with symbols indicating what tokens are within; these
markings ultimately develop into writing.
Sources
As in my pages on the scale of things, I
link to relevant sources where practical: but books aren't amenable to HREFs and
I may yet find some sites so worthy of plunder as to justify mentioning the site
URL here as well as the URLs of particular quotes above.
Philip
D. Curtin, Cross-cultural trade in world history; notably p. 68
(banks in Ashur).
The birth of classical Europe – A history from
Troy to Augustine, Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, Penguin. Includes a date chart between bibliography and index.
See also
A video showing
Europe and the Mediterranean, from 400 BCE to the present, with assorted borders
and populations within those borders, as they've varied over time.
Written by Eddy.