A Little History of the World

Author: E. H. Gombrich

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Their priests made quite sure that no son did anything his father had not done before him. To them, everything old was sacred. (10.70340%)

• Comments: This appears to b a running theme for many ancient societies: that the old is sacred and change is bad.

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Today we know that these are the stars that are close to us, and that they turn with the earth around the sun. They are called planets. But the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians couldn’t know that, and so they thought some strange magic must lie behind it. They gave a name to each wandering star and observed them constantly, convinced that they were powerful beings whose positions influenced the destinies of men, and that by studying them they would be able to predict the future. (12.23240%)

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In those days people thought that the earth was a flat disk, and that the sky was a sort of hollow sphere cupped over the earth, that turned over it once each day. So it must have seemed miraculous to them that, although most of the stars stayed fixed to the heavens, some seemed, as it were, only loosely fastened, and able to move about. (12.23240%)

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BETWEEN EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA THERE IS A LAND OF DEEP VALLEYS and rich pastures. There, for thousands of years, herdsmen tended their flocks. They planted vines and cereals, and in the evenings they sang songs, as country people do. But because it lay between those two countries, first it would be conquered and ruled by the Egyptians, and then the Babylonians would invade, so that the people who lived there were constantly being driven from one place to another. (13.14985%)

• Comments: These are the Jews! Explains why the Jews are always struggling in history.

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These mountain people were the Persians. For hundreds of years they had been dominated, first by the Assyrians, and then by the Babylonians. One day they had had enough. Their ruler was a man of exceptional courage and intelligence called Cyrus, who was no longer prepared to put up with the oppression of his people. (17.12540%)

• Comments: It feels like this period of history (the Bronze Age?) is full of people getting conquered, the conquered becoming tired of beng conquered and then rebelling, and finally deciding to do some conquering of their own, ad nauseum.

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He was furious with the Athenians for meddling in his affairs. With the aim of destroying Athens and conquering Greece, he equipped a large fleet. But his ships were caught in a violent storm, dashed against the cliffs and sunk. (17.43120%)

• Comments: How different might history have been if the Persian king Darius had gotten those ships to Greece? It's interesting how fortune can play a role in the course of humanity.

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the Greeks – and the Athenians in particular – did the opposite. Almost every year they came up with something new. Everything was always changing. The same went for their leaders. Miltiades and Themistocles, the great heroes of the Persian wars, learnt this to their cost: one moment it was high praise, honours and monuments to their achievements, the next it was accusations, slander and exile. This was not the best feature of the Athenians, yet it was part of their nature. Always trying out new ideas, never satisfied, never at rest. Which explains why, during the hundred years that followed the Persian wars, more went on in the minds of the people of the little city of Athens than in a thousand years in all the great empires of the East. (18.65440%)

• Comments: That is a very intriguing interpretation: that the frivolousness of public opinion can be a side effect of a propenity to change and try new things. That gives me a sense of hope about public opinion.

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Had they not lived in fear – fear of their own slaves – the Spartans might never have become so warlike and brave. Athenians had fewer reasons to be afraid and they didn’t live under the same pressures. (19.57190%)

• Comments: This is like a macro example of how human development changes dramatically when a person acts out of fear and pain. Not worrying makes you explorative, while worrying makes you defensive.

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most of the continent was subdued by the descendants of these invaders, who, like the Spartans, maintained a distance between themselves and the peoples they had conquered. Traces of this division persist today in what is known as the ‘caste system’. (21.10090%)

• Comments: The suggestion here is that the caste system is a result of political control. A way to separate the slavers from the enslaved.

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Chinese writing is special. You can read and understand it even if you don’t know a single word of the spoken language. (22.93580%)

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Instead of writing words you write things. If you want to write ‘sun’, you make a picture like this: . Then you can read it in any language: sun in English, soleil in French or jih in Mandarin Chinese. Everyone who knows the sign will know what it means. (22.93580%)

• Comments: This approach to the written word seems to make learning a language more difficult, but it also means that written communication can be more widely disseminated.

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Confucius said: ‘I believe in Antiquity, and I love it.’ By this he meant that he believed in the sound good sense of all the many-thousand-year-old customs and habits, and he repeatedly urged his fellow countrymen to observe them. He thought that everything in life ran more smoothly if people did. (23.54740%)

• Comments: This looks like the argument that customs are evolutionary pre-selected: they exist and get passed on because they work well, so we ought to respect them.

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Concern for our fellow human beings and sympathy for the misfortunes of others are inborn sentiments. All we need do is to make sure we do not lose them. (23.54740%)

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for Confucius, the family, with its brotherly and sisterly love and respect for parents, was the most important thing of all. He called it ‘the root of humanity’. (23.54740%)

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China is, in fact, the only country in the world to be ruled for hundreds of years, not by the nobility, nor by soldiers, nor even by the priesthood, but by scholars. No matter where you came from, or whether you were rich or poor, as long as you gained high marks in your exams you could become an official. The highest post went to the person with the highest marks. (29.96940%)

• Comments: This is so interesting. So different from how power was acquired in many other lands.

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No longer able to mount their raids on China, Asiatic hordes from the steppes had turned westwards in search of new lands to plunder. This time it was the Huns. (36.39140%)

• Comments: The Great Wall of China worked so well that the tribesmen turned to the West. Crazy!

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This marked the end of the Roman Empire of the West and its Latin culture, together with the long period that goes all the way back to prehistoric times, which we call ‘antiquity’. So the date 476 marks the birth of a new era, the Middle Ages, given its name for no other reason than that it falls between antiquity and modern times. (37.30890%)

• Comments: So Rome is the last society deemed part of "anitiquity". Why?

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But in the West, in Italy, there was a holy man who, like the Buddha, could find no inner calm in the solitary life of a penitent. He was a monk named Benedict, meaning the Blessed One. He was convinced that penitence wasn’t all that Christ wanted. One must not only become good, one must do good. (38.53210%)

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Once consecrated as a monk you didn’t just pray – though of course prayer was taken very seriously and Mass was celebrated several times a day – you were also expected to do good. But for this you needed some skill or knowledge. And this is how the Benedictine monks became the only people at that time to concern themselves with the thought and discoveries of antiquity. (38.53210%)

• Comments: Yet another group that kept alive Greek traditions.

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But it wasn’t only in Italy that there were monasteries like these. Monks wanted to build them in wild and out-of-the-way places where they could (39.14370%)

• Comments: Sounds like missionairies.

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In the Koran it is written: ‘Fight the infidel until all resistance is destroyed.’ And in another passage: ‘Slay the idolatrous wherever you shall find them, capture them, besiege them, seek them out in all places. But if they convert, (40.97860%)

• Comments: This seems to end up being a battle cry or something because Muslim forces start invading acros Asia and Europe and Africa, becoming a political power in their own right.

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Soon the empire was shared out among Charlemagne’s three grandsons in the form of three separate kingdoms: Germany, France and Italy. (43.73089%)

• Comments: It's as if the borders of today get carved out through the decisions of these powerful kings and emperors.

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it. The land the king had bestowed on him, known as his fief, was his land, and would be inherited by his son, as long as he did nothing to offend the king. In return for his fief all a prince had to do was to take his lords of the manor and his peasants with him into battle to fight for the king, if there was a war. And of course, there often was. (44.64832%)

• Comments: This is an interesting way of maintaining power over your lords: maintain ownership of their properties.

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knights. Only peasants and poor servants, farm-lads and labourers who went to war on foot weren’t knights. (46.17740%)

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But when exactly was the Age of Chivalry, and what was it really like? The word chivalry comes from the French word chevalier meaning horseman, and it was with horsemen that chivalry began. Anyone who could afford a good charger on which to ride into battle was a knight. (46.17740%)

• Comments: So title is directly tied to ability to afford certain resources.

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Sons of serfs became serfs and the sons of knights, knights. It wasn’t so very different from ancient India and its castes. (46.78900%)

• Comments: Power divides

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the age of seven a knight’s son was sent away to another castle, to learn about life. He was called a page, and had to serve the ladies – carry their trains and perhaps read to them aloud – for women were rarely taught to read or write whereas pages usually were. On reaching the age of fourteen, a page became a squire. He didn’t have to stay in the castle and sit beside the fire any more. Instead, he was allowed to accompany his knight when he went hunting, or to war. A squire had to carry his knight’s shield and spear and hand him his second lance on the battlefield when the first one shattered. He had to obey his master in all things and be true to him. If he proved a brave and loyal squire, he in his turn would be dubbed a knight at the age of twenty-one. (46.78900%)

• Comments: So squires and pages were relatively well off too! I thought they were like interns.

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As you know, a knight’s first duty was to fight for God and for Christendom. And it wasn’t long before they found a wonderful opportunity to do so. Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem was, as was the whole of Palestine, in the hands of Arab unbelievers. So when reminded of their duty to help liberate the tomb by a great preacher in France, and by the pope – whose victory over the German kings had made him the mightiest ruler of Christendom – Christian knights in their tens of thousands cried out enthusiastically: ‘It is God’s will! It is God’s will!’ (47.70640%)

• Comments: Whoa. So the Crusades was an attempt to take control of Jerusalem from Muslims!

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In the distant Orient the Christians discovered Arab culture – their buildings, their sense of beauty and their learning. And within a hundred years of the First Crusade, the writings of Alexander the Great’s teacher, the books of Aristotle, were translated from Arabic into Latin and eagerly read and studied in Italy, France, Germany and England. (48.01220%)

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Once inside Jerusalem, however, they behaved neither like knights nor like Christians. They massacred all the Muslims and committed hideous atrocities. (48.01220%)

• Comments: Always nasty behaviour in the name of what is "right".

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All that the Arabs had learnt and experienced in the course of their conquests around the world was now brought back to Europe by the crusaders. (48.01220%)

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People who lived in towns grew richer and richer, and no one could give them orders because they weren’t peasants and didn’t belong to anyone’s fief. On the other hand, since no one had granted them land, they weren’t lords either. They governed themselves, much as people did in antiquity. They had their own courts of law and were as free and independent in their cities as the monks and the knights. Such citizens (called burghers in Germany or the bourgeoisie in France) were known as the Third Estate. (48.92970%)

• Comments: These people had power by way of economic wealth.

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And suddenly, in about 1420, the Florentines noticed that they were no longer the people they had been in the Middle Ages. They had different concerns. They found different things beautiful. To them the old cathedrals and paintings seemed gloomy and rigid, the old traditions irksome. And, in their search for something more to their liking, something free, independent and unconstrained, they discovered antiquity. And I mean literally discovered. It mattered little to them that the people of those times had been heathens. What astonished them was what those people could do. How they had freely and openly debated and discussed, with arguments and counter-arguments, everything in nature and the world. How everything interested them. These people were to serve as their models. (53.82260%)

• Comments: So Florence is yet another place where independent thinking started thriving again!

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He was left-handed and wrote in minuscule mirror-writing, a reversed script, which is far from easy to read. This was probably intentional, for in those days it was not always safe to hold independent opinions. Among his notes we find the sentence: ‘The sun does not move.’ No more than that. But enough to tell us that Leonardo knew that the earth goes round the sun, and that the sun does not circle the earth (54.74010%)

• Comments: Wow, poor Leonardo Da Vinci. Having new thoughts was very dangerous back then.

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Where this money came from mattered less to the popes of the day than getting hold of it and completing their wonderful church. And in their desire to please the pope, priests and monks collected money in a way which did not conform with the teachings of the Church. They made the faithful pay for the forgiveness of their sins, and called it ‘selling indulgences’. (58.40980%)

• Comments: Wow, capitalizing on the desire to sin yet not experience guilt. This feels low.

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The most ferocious wars were fought in France, where Protestants were known as Huguenots. In 1572 the French queen invited all the Huguenot nobility to a wedding at court, and on the eve of St Bartholomew, she had them assassinated. That’s what wars were like in those days. (61.16210%)

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alike, thousands and thousands of people were burned. The few Jesuit (63.60860%)

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They pointed to a passage in the Old Testament in which Joshua, the great warrior, asks God not to let dusk fall until his enemy is destroyed. In answer to his prayer, we read: ‘The sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies.’ If the Bible says the sun stood still, people argued, then the sun must normally be in motion. And to suggest that the sun did not move was therefore heretical, and contradicted what was written in the Bible. (63.91440%)

• Comments: Biblical claim supporting geocentrism. Wow!

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in 1643, King Louis XIV ascended the throne. He was then four years old and still holds the world record for the length of his reign. He ruled until 1715: that is, for seventy-two years. And what’s more, he really did rule. Not, of course, when he was a child, but as soon as his guardian, Cardinal Mazarin, had died (Mazarin had been Cardinal Richelieu’s successor), he was determined to rule himself. He gave orders that no passport was to be issued to any Frenchman unless he himself had granted it. The court was highly amused, imagining his interest to be no more than a young king’s whim. He would soon tire of ruling. But he didn’t. For to Louis, kingship was no mere accident of birth. It was as if he had been given the leading role in a play which he would have to perform for the rest of his life. No one before or since has ever learnt that role so well, or played it with such dignity and ceremony to the end. (64.83180%)

• Comments: I want to learn more about King Louis XIV.

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Louis XV and Louis XVI, the Sun King’s successors, were incompetent, and content merely to imitate their great predecessor’s outward show of power. The pomp and magnificence remained. Vast sums were spent on entertainments and operatic productions, on a succession of new chateaux and great parks with clipped hedges, on swarms of servants and court officials dressed in lace and silk. Where the money came from didn’t concern them. Finance ministers soon became expert swindlers, cheating and extorting on a grand scale. The peasants worked till they dropped, and citizens were forced to pay huge taxes. (70.64220%)

• Comments: These are the conditions that ignited the French Revolution.

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. In 1789, King Louis XVI finally decided to summon a meeting of the three estates – the nobility, the clergy and the bourgeoisie – to advise him on how to restore the country’s finances. (70.94800%)

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However, their proposals and requests did not please the king, and he told his master of ceremonies to give the order for the representatives of the estates to leave the chamber. But when he attempted to do so, the impassioned voice of a very clever man named Mirabeau was heard to call out: ‘Go and tell his majesty that we are here through the will of the people, and will not leave except at the point of a bayonet!’ (71.25380%)

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King Louis XVI was brought before the People’s Tribunal and condemned to death because he had appealed to foreigners for help against his own people. Soon afterwards Marie Antoinette was beheaded. (72.17130%)

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Whenever a major event happens anywhere in the world we read about it in the newspapers the next day, we hear about it on the radio and see it on the television news. The inhabitants of ancient Mexico knew nothing about the destruction of Jerusalem, and it is unlikely that anyone in China ever heard of the effects of the Thirty Years War. But by the First World War things had changed. The very fact that it was known as a ‘World War’ was because so many nations had been drawn into the fighting. (86.23850%)

• Comments: This makes an interesting suggestion. Could a world war be possible without globalization? I think not.

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I know a wise old Buddhist monk who, in a speech to his fellow countrymen, once said he’d love to know why someone who boasts that he is the cleverest, the strongest, the bravest or the most gifted man on earth is thought ridiculous and embarrassing, whereas if, instead of ‘I’, he says, ‘we are the most intelligent, the strongest, the bravest and the most gifted people on earth’, his fellow countrymen applaud enthusiastically and call him a patriot. (87.15600%)