Post by bluekumul on Jul 23, 2023 16:45:52 GMT
A few years ago I took part in a challenge on a forum, trying to sum up one's historical knowledge as concisely as possibly. Now I've found my write-up and expanded it somehow.
Do you think something important is missing, or that some parts of this summary are pointless trivia?
History of our civilization begun about 100 000 BC, when humans first achieved basic intelligence. Humans originated in Africa, but they gradually spread throughout the planet, absorbing related species such as the Neanderthals. For tens of thousands of years, people lived in bands of 50-150 individuals. Life in this era was mostly about satisfying basic survival needs. Art existed in a rudimentary form, the prevalent form of religion was worship of nature spirits and ancestors. There was a lot of violence, though it was disorganized, without states there was no possibility of orderly warfare. This is the lifestyle the human species is biologically adopted to, there are still people who retained the Paleolithic lifestyle in Africa and South America.
Eventually, about 10 000 BC in the Middle East humans learned to purposefully cultivate certain plants and domesticated animals such as dogs, horses, cows and pigs. Agriculture was born. This guaranteed better supplies of food, although hunger remained a menace for a long time. Still, for the first time a few people could devote most of their time to something else than survival. Division of labour appeared. The result was development of more complex arts, as well as further progress in practical abilities. This development was however very slow. People still lived in small tribal communities, though perhaps they were slightly better organized than during the hunter-gatherer period.
Only about 3000 BC human beings started to create larger and more integrated communities known as states. First states appeared in Egypt and Sumer, then about 2000 BC the same thing happened in China and India. Since that time, political organization started dominating most of Eurasia and northern coasts of Africa, while the rest of the world was stuck on tribal level. This form of organization made life more peaceful, since tribal warfare was no longer possible. The early states had one important drawback: they were ruled ruthlessly by absolute hereditary monarchs and aristocrats. The tyrants and their acolytes guaranteed themselves a relatively high standard of living compared to their subjects. An important practical achievement of the era of early states was metallurgy, at first working on bronze, and later iron. Writing was invented roughly at the same time, but remained known to only to ruling elites.
Early civilizations often had impressive knowledge of medicine, astronomy and architecture. The Pyramids of Egypt have remained the tallest buildings in the world for thousands of years. However, these peoples were easily led astray into superstitions and magical practices.
The monarchs claimed descent from the gods, necessitating a more sophisticated theology, although the basis of religion remained nature worship. Priesthoods appeared, often demanding human sacrifices. There was however some discontent with this kind of religion. About 1600 BC, a man known as Abraham started venerating a single God as the creator of all reality and supreme lawmaker. For a long time his faith remained confined to one small ethnic group, the Jews, who upheld it despite hostility of their neighbours.
From 500 BC civilized humans' relationship with the universe was revolutionized. In Greece, India and China philosophy was invented, more or less at the same time. Its beginnings were naive but eventually it developed into more reasonable systems of thought. Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy in Greece as well as Confucius' one in China were among the most influential schools of thought, and stayed relevant for many centuries. In India Gautama Buddha's doctrine started as a philosophy, but soon developed into a religion, although one based on reaching eternal happiness by means of meditation and ascetic practices rather than worship of spirits or gods.
The Greeks, as well as Romans who imitated their civilization, were the first to conceive a democratic political system, though it did not last very long. Greek medicine, science, mathematics, poetry and sculpture of this era also achieved heights unknown to any earlier human society. Some centuries later the world's most successful states: the Chinese Empire in the Far East and the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean have dominated very large areas and achieved levels of prosperity unknown before.
The beginning of our AD era marks the birth of Jesus Christ, an Israelite revered by His followers as God Incarnate. He taught that the Deity represents not only creative power and justice but also universal love. Jesus soon angered the followers of traditional interpretation of Abraham's religion, known as the Pharisees. They manipulated the Roman authorities to sentence Him to death by crucifixion, but the new faith could not be erased and eventually became the most successful religion in human history. The spiritual revolution was complete when Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 313 AD and declared it state religion, resulting in development of hierarchical Catholic Church.
About the year 400 AD both Roman and Chinese empires faced barbarian invasions. The Romans were defeated completely in 476, while the Chinese responded to the invasions by developing an isolationist attitude. It should however be noted that China continued to progress and remained for many centuries the most cultured nation on the planet.
Cultural achievements of Greece and Rome and especially Aristotle's philosophy were preserved by the Catholic Church, which has by the time of the invasions assimilated them into its theological system. Despite this fact, Europe suffered a period of cultural regression, the Dark Ages, which lasted for several centuries.
During the era of eclipse, Mohammed introduced a militaristic theologically simplified form of monotheism, known as Islam, inspiring a nomadic nation known as the Arabs to invade large parts of northern Africa and southwestern Asia. Within Islam, Arab culture was considered the only one approved by Allah (God). For a long time, Islamic empires remained a threat to more developed peoples, although they sometimes adopted a more civilized way of life, disregarding some of their prophet's teachings. Around 1100 AD Christian kingdoms of Europe launched several military expeditions to reconquer their lost lands and especially the holy city of Jerusalem. They didn't succeed and only managed to reinvigorate Islamic fanaticism.
In 1220-1240 another nomadic people, the Mongols, briefly seized large parts of Eurasia and exterminated large part of local population, but were soon banished or assimilated by conquered nations. A notable exception was Russia, which remained under Mongol rule for 200 years.
About 1350 a particularly virulent bacterium caused a pandemic called Black Death, which killed probably one third of human population, resulting in marked fascination with death prevailing in the culture of this period.
After 1400 AD, an intellectual revolution happened. European scholars rediscovered ancient Greek science and art, leaving to an intellectual movement known as Renaissance. Painting became more realistic than ever before. The ideal of personality was now not a warrior, but an educated man. Scientists of the Renaissance defined basic laws of physical reality and humans' place in the Cosmos. Nicolas Copernicus discovered that Earth revolves around the Sun. Isaac Newton described fundamental principles of mechanics.
In 1492 an adventurer called Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean and discovered America, which resulted in a wave of colonization. Within a few centuries European states governed almost the whole globe. Spain colonized South America, England took North America, India, Australia and parts of Africa, France colonized other parts of Africa while Russia expanded into northern Eurasia. The Europeans spread their cultural and technological achievements, as well as the teachings of Jesus, but they also committed many acts of violence and injustice. The Spaniards caused a large percentage of the native population of America to die by introducing new diseases to the continent. In Africa, the British started kidnapping the natives and forcing them to work as slaves on new plantations in America. Prejudices against black descendants of these slaves remain a serious problem even today.
During the early colonial period the Catholic Church in northwestern Europe faced a movement known as Reformation or Protestantism led by Martin Luther, who promoted more personal relationship with God and individual interpretation of the sacred texts. The dispute led to brutal wars between Catholic and Protestant countries.
After 1700, a more radical intellectual movement appeared, called the Enlightenment. It called for rational thinking and questioned the authority of monarchy and the Church. These authorities were to be replaced by democratically elected leaders. This movement originated in Britain, which had a strong tradition of personal freedom, and as a result the country was the first to set up a parliament. In America, British settlers rebelled against the rule of Britain and in 1776 they set up a new nation known as the United States of America, whose constitution was based on Enlightenment principles. It attracted settlers from the whole world.
In 1789 a group of Enlightenment radicals, the Jacobins, managed to overthrow the King of France and install a democratic government using the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity". They didn't achieve political stability and power soon fell into the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, a charismatic dictator who wanted to spread the social ideals of this revolution over Europe. He was defeated and the monarchy was restored for a few decades. In other European countries, the process of democratization was longer but more peaceful, so only after a few generations monarchs were either removed completely or became figureheads.
During the next century, science continued to unravel the mysteries of the Cosmos. Charles Darwin explained the development of life including the origin of humans. Albert Einstein described the relative nature of space and time. Progress of astronomy enabled human civilization to realize the immense size of the observable universe. In terms of practical knowledge, the revolution in science allowed humans to travel and communicate much faster than they ever did, giving rise to a global economy. Education also became more widespread, for the first time common people learned to read and write. More and more people came to big cities to study or to work in industrial centres, making kinship relations less important than ever before. Visionary intellectuals started thinking in terms of global community, but most people remained devoted to national identity. At the same time advances such as anaesthetics and antibiotics enabled physicians to treat many diseases much more successfully. For the first time most people in developed countries could expect to live to 70 or 80 years. Human population increased dramatically, bringing about extinction of many plant and animal species. During the same era, Feminist movement, one of the offshots of the Enlightenment, started demanding that women should have equal rights as men. Women's position in society indeed improved, though the process was quite slow.
There was also a dark side to the modernization process. New philosophies rejected Jesus' ethos of universal love and put in its place the idea of rational but innately selfish individual. This resulted in growth of economic competition between wealthy men, which made technological progress speed up, but left the working masses in miserable conditions. Democratic states tried to mitigate the effects by introducing systems of state charity, but many workers thought they were doing too little.
New political movements started to appear, promising the workers a more equal distribution of material goods by means of total government control of all economic activity. These movements succeeded in two countries: in Russia the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin took power by coup in 1917. The new regime, using the official name "Soviet Union" tried to undermine the power of market-oriented governments and businessmen by inciting workers of the world to violent uprisings. In Germany the Nazis with their infamous leader Adolf Hitler won an election in 1933. Their ideology was more militaristic and tribalistic. Hitler attempted a worldwide military expansion, causing the greatest war in the planet's history (1939-1945). He also ordered murder of millions of Jews, accusing them of being the worst exploiters of the German working class. Japan, who allied with Nazi Germany to attack America, had the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima hit with an atomic bomb in retaliation. The Nazis were eventually defeated by combined effort of Bolshevik Russia and democratic states led by America. These two became now the world's greatest powers. After a few years a conflict called the Cold War broke between the two, threatening the world with nuclear war, which fortunately never happened. Meanwhile in the Far East, in 1949 China became a totalitarian state based on the Bolshevik model while Japan was rebuilt as a democracy under American control. Both nations became later economic powerhouses.
In expression of revulsion against the violence of the recent period, an ideology known as the Counterculture arose among the generation born after the war, preaching a peculiar combination of naive mysticism, return to nature, hedonistic attitude to sex, unlimited self-expression and sentimental empathy. The original ideology died out soon, but it made big impact on mainstream society. Despite dramatic social changes science continued to develop, the two greatest achievements of the post-war period were a manned expedition to the Moon (1969) and invention of personal computer (1977), which revolutionized both communication and entertainment. Development of effective contraceptions helped with the cause of gender equality as well as with sexual liberation promoted by the Counterculture. In the same period European powers abandoned their colonies in Africa and the Middle East, creating a power vacuum soon filled by tyrannies inspired by either Bolshevism or political Islam. Some of these states supported terrorist attacks against America and its European allies. In 1990 Bolshevik Russia collapsed under the weight of its own economic incompetence, many of its former satellite states in central Europe joined the democratic alliance. America became the dominant political power in the world, although its position is now contested by China, expected to overtake American economy in 2035.
Eventually, about 10 000 BC in the Middle East humans learned to purposefully cultivate certain plants and domesticated animals such as dogs, horses, cows and pigs. Agriculture was born. This guaranteed better supplies of food, although hunger remained a menace for a long time. Still, for the first time a few people could devote most of their time to something else than survival. Division of labour appeared. The result was development of more complex arts, as well as further progress in practical abilities. This development was however very slow. People still lived in small tribal communities, though perhaps they were slightly better organized than during the hunter-gatherer period.
Only about 3000 BC human beings started to create larger and more integrated communities known as states. First states appeared in Egypt and Sumer, then about 2000 BC the same thing happened in China and India. Since that time, political organization started dominating most of Eurasia and northern coasts of Africa, while the rest of the world was stuck on tribal level. This form of organization made life more peaceful, since tribal warfare was no longer possible. The early states had one important drawback: they were ruled ruthlessly by absolute hereditary monarchs and aristocrats. The tyrants and their acolytes guaranteed themselves a relatively high standard of living compared to their subjects. An important practical achievement of the era of early states was metallurgy, at first working on bronze, and later iron. Writing was invented roughly at the same time, but remained known to only to ruling elites.
Early civilizations often had impressive knowledge of medicine, astronomy and architecture. The Pyramids of Egypt have remained the tallest buildings in the world for thousands of years. However, these peoples were easily led astray into superstitions and magical practices.
The monarchs claimed descent from the gods, necessitating a more sophisticated theology, although the basis of religion remained nature worship. Priesthoods appeared, often demanding human sacrifices. There was however some discontent with this kind of religion. About 1600 BC, a man known as Abraham started venerating a single God as the creator of all reality and supreme lawmaker. For a long time his faith remained confined to one small ethnic group, the Jews, who upheld it despite hostility of their neighbours.
From 500 BC civilized humans' relationship with the universe was revolutionized. In Greece, India and China philosophy was invented, more or less at the same time. Its beginnings were naive but eventually it developed into more reasonable systems of thought. Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy in Greece as well as Confucius' one in China were among the most influential schools of thought, and stayed relevant for many centuries. In India Gautama Buddha's doctrine started as a philosophy, but soon developed into a religion, although one based on reaching eternal happiness by means of meditation and ascetic practices rather than worship of spirits or gods.
The Greeks, as well as Romans who imitated their civilization, were the first to conceive a democratic political system, though it did not last very long. Greek medicine, science, mathematics, poetry and sculpture of this era also achieved heights unknown to any earlier human society. Some centuries later the world's most successful states: the Chinese Empire in the Far East and the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean have dominated very large areas and achieved levels of prosperity unknown before.
The beginning of our AD era marks the birth of Jesus Christ, an Israelite revered by His followers as God Incarnate. He taught that the Deity represents not only creative power and justice but also universal love. Jesus soon angered the followers of traditional interpretation of Abraham's religion, known as the Pharisees. They manipulated the Roman authorities to sentence Him to death by crucifixion, but the new faith could not be erased and eventually became the most successful religion in human history. The spiritual revolution was complete when Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 313 AD and declared it state religion, resulting in development of hierarchical Catholic Church.
About the year 400 AD both Roman and Chinese empires faced barbarian invasions. The Romans were defeated completely in 476, while the Chinese responded to the invasions by developing an isolationist attitude. It should however be noted that China continued to progress and remained for many centuries the most cultured nation on the planet.
Cultural achievements of Greece and Rome and especially Aristotle's philosophy were preserved by the Catholic Church, which has by the time of the invasions assimilated them into its theological system. Despite this fact, Europe suffered a period of cultural regression, the Dark Ages, which lasted for several centuries.
During the era of eclipse, Mohammed introduced a militaristic theologically simplified form of monotheism, known as Islam, inspiring a nomadic nation known as the Arabs to invade large parts of northern Africa and southwestern Asia. Within Islam, Arab culture was considered the only one approved by Allah (God). For a long time, Islamic empires remained a threat to more developed peoples, although they sometimes adopted a more civilized way of life, disregarding some of their prophet's teachings. Around 1100 AD Christian kingdoms of Europe launched several military expeditions to reconquer their lost lands and especially the holy city of Jerusalem. They didn't succeed and only managed to reinvigorate Islamic fanaticism.
In 1220-1240 another nomadic people, the Mongols, briefly seized large parts of Eurasia and exterminated large part of local population, but were soon banished or assimilated by conquered nations. A notable exception was Russia, which remained under Mongol rule for 200 years.
About 1350 a particularly virulent bacterium caused a pandemic called Black Death, which killed probably one third of human population, resulting in marked fascination with death prevailing in the culture of this period.
After 1400 AD, an intellectual revolution happened. European scholars rediscovered ancient Greek science and art, leaving to an intellectual movement known as Renaissance. Painting became more realistic than ever before. The ideal of personality was now not a warrior, but an educated man. Scientists of the Renaissance defined basic laws of physical reality and humans' place in the Cosmos. Nicolas Copernicus discovered that Earth revolves around the Sun. Isaac Newton described fundamental principles of mechanics.
In 1492 an adventurer called Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean and discovered America, which resulted in a wave of colonization. Within a few centuries European states governed almost the whole globe. Spain colonized South America, England took North America, India, Australia and parts of Africa, France colonized other parts of Africa while Russia expanded into northern Eurasia. The Europeans spread their cultural and technological achievements, as well as the teachings of Jesus, but they also committed many acts of violence and injustice. The Spaniards caused a large percentage of the native population of America to die by introducing new diseases to the continent. In Africa, the British started kidnapping the natives and forcing them to work as slaves on new plantations in America. Prejudices against black descendants of these slaves remain a serious problem even today.
During the early colonial period the Catholic Church in northwestern Europe faced a movement known as Reformation or Protestantism led by Martin Luther, who promoted more personal relationship with God and individual interpretation of the sacred texts. The dispute led to brutal wars between Catholic and Protestant countries.
After 1700, a more radical intellectual movement appeared, called the Enlightenment. It called for rational thinking and questioned the authority of monarchy and the Church. These authorities were to be replaced by democratically elected leaders. This movement originated in Britain, which had a strong tradition of personal freedom, and as a result the country was the first to set up a parliament. In America, British settlers rebelled against the rule of Britain and in 1776 they set up a new nation known as the United States of America, whose constitution was based on Enlightenment principles. It attracted settlers from the whole world.
In 1789 a group of Enlightenment radicals, the Jacobins, managed to overthrow the King of France and install a democratic government using the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity". They didn't achieve political stability and power soon fell into the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, a charismatic dictator who wanted to spread the social ideals of this revolution over Europe. He was defeated and the monarchy was restored for a few decades. In other European countries, the process of democratization was longer but more peaceful, so only after a few generations monarchs were either removed completely or became figureheads.
During the next century, science continued to unravel the mysteries of the Cosmos. Charles Darwin explained the development of life including the origin of humans. Albert Einstein described the relative nature of space and time. Progress of astronomy enabled human civilization to realize the immense size of the observable universe. In terms of practical knowledge, the revolution in science allowed humans to travel and communicate much faster than they ever did, giving rise to a global economy. Education also became more widespread, for the first time common people learned to read and write. More and more people came to big cities to study or to work in industrial centres, making kinship relations less important than ever before. Visionary intellectuals started thinking in terms of global community, but most people remained devoted to national identity. At the same time advances such as anaesthetics and antibiotics enabled physicians to treat many diseases much more successfully. For the first time most people in developed countries could expect to live to 70 or 80 years. Human population increased dramatically, bringing about extinction of many plant and animal species. During the same era, Feminist movement, one of the offshots of the Enlightenment, started demanding that women should have equal rights as men. Women's position in society indeed improved, though the process was quite slow.
There was also a dark side to the modernization process. New philosophies rejected Jesus' ethos of universal love and put in its place the idea of rational but innately selfish individual. This resulted in growth of economic competition between wealthy men, which made technological progress speed up, but left the working masses in miserable conditions. Democratic states tried to mitigate the effects by introducing systems of state charity, but many workers thought they were doing too little.
New political movements started to appear, promising the workers a more equal distribution of material goods by means of total government control of all economic activity. These movements succeeded in two countries: in Russia the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin took power by coup in 1917. The new regime, using the official name "Soviet Union" tried to undermine the power of market-oriented governments and businessmen by inciting workers of the world to violent uprisings. In Germany the Nazis with their infamous leader Adolf Hitler won an election in 1933. Their ideology was more militaristic and tribalistic. Hitler attempted a worldwide military expansion, causing the greatest war in the planet's history (1939-1945). He also ordered murder of millions of Jews, accusing them of being the worst exploiters of the German working class. Japan, who allied with Nazi Germany to attack America, had the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima hit with an atomic bomb in retaliation. The Nazis were eventually defeated by combined effort of Bolshevik Russia and democratic states led by America. These two became now the world's greatest powers. After a few years a conflict called the Cold War broke between the two, threatening the world with nuclear war, which fortunately never happened. Meanwhile in the Far East, in 1949 China became a totalitarian state based on the Bolshevik model while Japan was rebuilt as a democracy under American control. Both nations became later economic powerhouses.
In expression of revulsion against the violence of the recent period, an ideology known as the Counterculture arose among the generation born after the war, preaching a peculiar combination of naive mysticism, return to nature, hedonistic attitude to sex, unlimited self-expression and sentimental empathy. The original ideology died out soon, but it made big impact on mainstream society. Despite dramatic social changes science continued to develop, the two greatest achievements of the post-war period were a manned expedition to the Moon (1969) and invention of personal computer (1977), which revolutionized both communication and entertainment. Development of effective contraceptions helped with the cause of gender equality as well as with sexual liberation promoted by the Counterculture. In the same period European powers abandoned their colonies in Africa and the Middle East, creating a power vacuum soon filled by tyrannies inspired by either Bolshevism or political Islam. Some of these states supported terrorist attacks against America and its European allies. In 1990 Bolshevik Russia collapsed under the weight of its own economic incompetence, many of its former satellite states in central Europe joined the democratic alliance. America became the dominant political power in the world, although its position is now contested by China, expected to overtake American economy in 2035.
