World History For Dummies

By Peter Haugen

Discover how the modern world came to be with this easy-to-follow and up-to-date history companion

Want to get a taste of the entirety of human history in a single book? With World History For Dummies, you'll get an overview of the history of, well, everything, from the Neanderthal experience to the latest historical developments of the 21st century. Re-live history from your armchair as you ride into battle alongside Roman generals, prepare Egyptian pharaohs for the afterlife, and learn from the great Greek poets and philosophers.

Written in the easy-to-digest style the For Dummies series is famous for, you'll discover:

• How religion, philosophy, and science shaped, and were shaped by, the great figures of history
• The human consequences of warfare, from historical battles to more modern conflicts from the 20th century
• What's influencing events in the 21st century, from climate change to new regimes and economies

World History For Dummies is the perfect gift for the lifelong learner who wants to brush up on their world history knowledge. It's also an indispensable resource for AP World History students looking for a supplemental reference to help them with their studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781119855620

Book preview

Introduction

The complete history of the world boiled down to 400-some pages and crammed between paperback covers? The idea is preposterous. It’s outrageous. I’d be crazy to attempt it. So here goes.

This book doesn’t claim to be complete. It can’t be. Hundreds of other volumes are devoted to a measly decade or two (the World War II era comes to mind). Plumbing thousands of years in one little book would be impossible. Skimming the surface, however, is another matter.

About This Book

Here, you can find enough information that if you hit on an era, a personality, or a civilization you’d like to know more about, you’ll at least know what to look for. There’s no lack of places to find out more. You can turn to many far more complete accounts of the history of specific countries (such as the United States), continents (such as Europe), and events (such as the U.S. Civil War). You can find books about all these topics and more in this excellent For Dummies series. But if you want a simplified overview, consisting of a collection of easy-to-read glimpses of major players and events that have made the world what it is today, I’m your guide, and World History For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is your first-stop reference.

History is like a soap opera that has been running ever since the invention of writing. The show is lurid, full of dirty tricks and murder, romances and sexual deceptions, adventures, and wars and revolutions. (And, yes, treaties and dates.) Or maybe a better analogy is that history is like hundreds of soap operas, with thousands of crossover characters jumping out of one story and into another — too many for even the most devoted fan to keep straight, which is all the more reason for an easy-to-use overview.

The most important thing to remember is that history is fun, or should be. It’s not as though this is life-and-death stuff… . No, wait. It is life-and-death stuff — on a ginormous scale. It’s just that so many of the lives and deaths happened long ago. But that’s good, because I can pry into private affairs without getting sued. History is full of vintage gossip and antique scandal, peppered heavily with high adventure — swords and spears and cannons and stuff. The more you get into it, the better you’ll do when the neighbors drag out the home version of Jeopardy. (Renaissance Italy for $500, please.)

Every field from brain surgery to refuse collection has its conventions, a special vocabulary chief among them. History is no exception, but I tried to steer clear of historians-only words and phrases. When such a word is unavoidable, I explain it in reader-friendly terms. As for other technical terms, I usually follow them with definitions and explanations.

You’ll find a few Latin and other foreign words and phrases sprinkled throughout the book too. I have to include them because I tell you about cultures and countries where English was unknown. Latin terms show up because this book’s subjects include the important, influential Roman Empire, where everybody spoke Latin. I also cover Europe in the Middle Ages, when Latin was the international language. I use other words that may be unfamiliar; those terms are highlighted in italics and defined. Finally, I can’t write about world history without covering the enormous influence of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that for many centuries clung to Latin as its official means of expression. But don’t worry. I promise not to use many such terms, and when I do, I’ll explain what they mean.

Foolish Assumptions

As I wrote this book, I made some assumptions about you. They may be foolish, but here they are:

You’ve studied at least some history in school. You may even know quite a lot about certain historical topics, but you’d like to find out more about how it all fits together.

You’ve seen movies or read novels set in various historical eras, and you suspect that they’d be more enjoyable if you were better informed about the time periods and the historical peoples featured.

At least once in your life, you’ve encountered an obnoxious history know-it-all, one of those people who spews random facts about ancient Rome or the French Revolution. In the event that it happens again, you want the satisfaction of either keeping up with the conversation or contradicting Smartypants and knowing (at least a little bit) about what you’re talking about.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, icons in the margins highlight certain types of valuable information. Here are the icons you’ll encounter and a brief description of each.

Remember Remember icons mark information that’s especially important. But it’s okay if you forget; just go back and look for the icon. I hope that points you to content that’s memorable.

Technicalstuff The Technical Stuff icon in this book marks information that’s interesting but not essential, so if you want, you can skip it. I like these asides, but you don’t have to.

Tip Tip icons are for ideas that you may find helpful, including places to see historical artifacts that can help you feel more in touch with the past. If the artifact is in a museum, you probably won’t get to touch it physically, though.

Intheirwords The In Their Words icon marks a quote that makes a point better than I can, although I hate to admit it.

Warning The Warning icon tells you to watch out! In considering history, it’s especially important not to assume, to keep an open mind, and to set preconceptions aside.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the abundance of information and guidance related to world history that you can find in this book, you can get access to even more help and information at Dummies.com. Check out this book’s online Cheat Sheet. Just go to www.dummies.com and search for World History For Dummies Cheat Sheet.

Where to Go from Here

You can start with Chapter 1 and read to the end, but that’s not required. A great thing about this book is that it’s organized so that you can jump in any place you want. As you page through and browse, note that you can look at the same era from different perspectives. Part 3, for example, tells you how philosophy and religion shaped history; there, you can find out about the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation. But if you’re more interested in the weaponry and strategies of war, jump to Part 4. And if you just want to browse the bios of some historical all-stars, check out Part 5. Not sure what you’re looking for? Part 1 is a good place to get a general feel for history. The table of contents and index, along with the part summaries earlier in this introduction, should get you to the pages you need.

Part 1

Getting into History

IN THIS PART …

Follow the threads of cause and effect that weave through every part of human experience. If you want to know how things got to be the way they are today, look to yesterday.

See how myths and artifacts — such as the ruins of once-great cities and even the preserved remains of our ancestors — provide wonderful clues to the realities of the ancient world and the beginnings of what we call history.

Put history and its personalities into perspective and wrap your head around how long humans have been doing a lot of the same things people do today: buying, selling, cooking, falling in love, traveling, and fighting wars.

Chapter 1

Tracing a Path to the Present

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Pondering how the past shaped the present

check Thinking about humankind’s remarkable journey

check Tracing a tapestry of historical threads

Just two decades into the 21st century, humanity hit a speed bump, in the form of a pandemic. The pandemic was a new viral disease — relatively benign in many patients but deadly in others and wildly unpredictable. Because it was new to our species, nobody had a ready immune response. Highly contagious, it spread rapidly around the world. Immunologists, the scientists who are experts at these things, had to figure out how to fight the disease on the fly.

The World Health Organization called the virus SARS-CoV-2, for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, version 2 (after a predecessor in 2003). It called the sickness COVID-19, for coronavirus disease 2019, the year it was identified.

The nature of the threat and how it should be dealt with sparked worldwide debate. Some governments took quick, decisive action to contain it, while others decided to go more slowly. The latter approach proved to be ineffective as infection rates soared.

Another point of discussion was why the world was caught unprepared. Public health experts have predicted we’d be hit by another pandemic for decades, puffed the pundits. Why didn’t leadership have a plan? asked the journalists. Why the heck didn’t anybody see this coming? queried podcasters. It’s all a hoax! screamed too many conspiracy theorists.

The pandemic changed the world. According to Johns Hopkins University, it killed more than 4 million people worldwide by the middle of 2021, with case rates rising again. It stalled the world economy and influenced the way people did their jobs, as well as where and how they chose to live.

But this book isn’t about a 21st-century pandemic any more than it’s about the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe and Asia in the 14th century. It isn’t about modern epidemiology or economics, either. It’s about two broader questions: How did things get to be like this? and Why is the world as it is?

There have been too many years of human activity on this planet — too many lives lived, too many diseases, technological breakthroughs, migrations, wars, murders, weddings, coronations, revolutions, recessions, natural disasters, and financial meltdowns — to trace humanity’s route simply. Too many historians have interpreted events in too many contradictory ways. But what I hope you find in this book is a general view of how human history has gotten you and the world you live in to current reality. To this. To now.

Firing Up the WABAC Machine

If you care about classic TV cartoons, you’ve heard of the WABAC Machine. Pronounced way back, the machine was a fictional time-traveling device built and operated by a genius dog named Mr. Peabody. In every episode of the 1960s animated series Rocky and His Friends, the professorial pooch and his pet boy, Sherman, transported themselves to a historical setting — say, ancient Rome, revolutionary America, or medieval England — where they interacted with famous people and solved whatever ridiculously absurd dilemma was troubling cartoon Julius Caesar, George Washington, or King Arthur. Thus, Mr. Peabody and Sherman allowed the events we think of as history to take their proper course.

These episodes spoofed a classic science-fiction premise. Storytellers often use time travel as a plot device. American novelist Mark Twain did it in 1889 with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. England’s H.G. Wells followed suit in 1895 with The Time Machine, although he sent his protagonist (identified only as the Time Traveller) into the future. Other examples include British TV’s numerous incarnations of Doctor Who to hundreds of novels, graphic novels, plays, films, and videogames.

Often, these stories involve someone going back in time to change something in the present or to prevent the present from being changed in some fashion that will cause a future catastrophe. One tiny interference in the time continuum, as it’s often called, can lead to a monumentally altered chain of events.

Nobody can do that, of course.

Remember You can, however, understand more about the present if you time travel in your head — that is, think about the ways that yesterday’s events shaped today. You can ponder how what happened a decade ago shapes this year and how a single change somewhere in the past could have made today different. Historians scoff at the what if game, but it’s a tool for getting your head into history.

What if incumbent Donald Trump had won the 2020 U.S. presidential election instead of challenger Joe Biden? Would an angry mob have attacked the U.S. Capitol the following January? How different would American politics have been? How about if voters in the United Kingdom had not chosen, in a 2016 referendum, to withdraw that nation from the European Union? Would that nation’s banks or fishing industry be better off or worse today? What about its people?

For that matter, what if Japan had not attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941? Or what if the terrorists who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, had been stopped before they could board the planes? Think about the lives that would have been saved and the grief that would have been averted. Imagine the years since. What would have been different?

In the case of the World Trade Center, U.S. troops wouldn’t have been sent to Afghanistan, for one thing. That invasion turned into a two-decades-long conflict, the United States’ longest war. And if the Trade Center had not fallen, would there have been that other U.S. war in the Middle East — the one in Iraq? We can’t know for sure, but we know that many lives changed because of that tragic 2001 attack.

Footpath to Expressway: Building on Humble Beginnings

Human beings used to be hunter-gatherers. There may be a slim chance that you’re still living that way, getting all your food from the natural world around you. I doubt it, though. Instead, you’re a student, an office worker, or perhaps a truck driver. Maybe you write code, or you’re an IT specialist. You perform any of thousands of occupations unimagined by early humankind. You use tools like cellphones and GPS navigation — things hardly dreamed of even when I was born in the middle of the 20th century, let alone at the dawn of civilization. Yet here I am, clacking away on a computer keyboard, checking my meager investments online, and listening to my streaming playlist just like a modern human being.

In a way, here too are the people of 30,000 years ago, my ancestors and yours. They may have thought a lot about berries, seeds, insects and grubs, shellfish, and calorie-rich bone marrow from fresh or scavenged kills. But they were endowed with the same basic biological equipment we have today. They were big-brained, tool-using bipeds with opposable thumbs, and after tens of thousands of years living hand to mouth from what they could find or kill, some of them spread across the world.

Either pushed by circumstance (climate change, for example) or inspired by new opportunities, they traveled from the lush forests, savannahs, and seacoasts of Africa to face the harsh challenges of virtually every environment on Earth, including mountains, deserts, frozen steppes, and remote islands. Eventually, they traded in stone spearheads and scrapers for tools and weapons made of copper, then of bronze, and then of iron … and ultimately built things like microcircuits and Mars rovers. Those people traveled and adapted and innovated all the way to today. They are you and me. In a weird way, then is now.

Around 12,000 years ago, not very long after the last Ice Age ended, some people whose technology consisted largely of sticks and rocks settled down. They were discovering that if they put seeds in the ground, plants would come up, and that this process worked best if they stuck around to tend the plants. This realization eventually led to farming.

Scholars point to an area they call the Fertile Crescent (see Figure 1-1), as a hotbed of early farming. Shaped like a mangled croissant, the Fertile Crescent stretched from what is now western Iran and the Persian Gulf through the river valleys of today’s Iraq and into western Turkey. Then it hooked south along the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into northern Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. The crescent is where archaeologists have found some of the oldest cities in the world.

The chain reaction that starts civilizations goes something like this: Agriculture leads people to stay put in exchange for more food, and ample food enables population growth. When a group’s population reaches a certain size, there’s little chance of going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because there wouldn’t be enough food for so many people. Ample food also gives the growing population commodities to trade. Trade leads to more trade, which leads to more goods and wealth. Not everybody works in the fields. Some folks can specialize in hauling goods; others can construct buildings or perhaps concentrate on making weapons, used either to protect their own wealth or to take wealth away from others. Artisans create jewelry and turn mundane objects (arrowheads, pots, baskets) into aesthetic statements. Society gets multilayered. Buildings rise. Villages become towns. Cities rise. Trade necessitates keeping track of quantities and values, which necessitates a way to record information. Number systems get invented. Writing follows. Prehistory becomes history.

Map depicts the Fertile Crescent extended from the Persian Gulf through Iraq and into Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into the Nile Valley of Egypt.

Nafsadh / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0

FIGURE 1-1: The Fertile Crescent extended from the Persian Gulf through Iraq and into Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into the Nile Valley of Egypt.

Next thing you know, an English-speaking woman in Florida, whose various ancestors spoke Spanish, Irish Celtic, and Japanese, is sitting in her South Korean car, stuck in traffic on the expressway, a style of limited-access road invented in Germany. She’s sipping a cup of coffee harvested in El Salvador, brewed in the Italian style in a machine manufactured in China to Swiss specifications. On her car’s satellite radio, a voice beamed from London is introducing news stories about outbreaks of disease, raging wildfires, floods, and a new tropical storm. The reports come from Greece, Canada, China, and Haiti. She reaches over and switches to a station that features a style of music invented in Jamaica by English-speaking people of African descent.

War! What Is It Good For? Material for History Books, That’s What

A view of history that sees only progress — this advance leads to that terrific advance, which leads to another incredible breakthrough, and so on — doesn’t account for the fact that people can be awful. Some are ruthless, some are destructive, some are stupid, and many are hateful. More often, people are simply thoughtless and careless. Not you, of course. You’re full of compassion and understanding, and capable of doing great things. And we all know or at least know about somebody whose ability to make this world better is off the charts. But the human race also produces bad characters and bad results.

Much of this book deals with war. I wish that weren’t so, but for reasons that anthropologists, psychologists, historians, politicians, economists, and many more have never been able to untangle, there’s always been somebody who’s eager to bash, skewer, shoot, blast, or vaporize somebody else. History is too often an account of how one group of people, under the banner of Persia, Genghis Khan, William of Normandy, imperial Japan, or whatever decided to overrun another group. Many such efforts succeeded, if success can be defined as killing other people and stealing their land, resources, wealth, wives, children, and so on.

Intheirwords One of my favorite quotations about war comes from the historian Barbara Tuchman: War is the unfolding of miscalculations. It underscores two facts: Many decisions made in war turn out to be wrong, and many successful wartime strategies have turned out to be the result of dumb luck.

Historians cite the 20th century as being perhaps the worst ever in terms of war and its toll — not because people were more warlike, but because the weapons had grown so much deadlier and transportation so much faster. During World War I (1914–18) and even more during World War II (1939–45), the machines of destruction reached farther and did more damage than ever before.

Wars since WWII have been somewhat contained to a region or fought with an understanding that neither side would escalate the weaponry too far. During the Vietnam War, a 1960s-’70s conflict between communist North Vietnam and the nationalist government of South Vietnam, each side had allies with deep pockets and nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union and China provided supplies and arms to the North Vietnamese, while the United States sent military advisers and then, starting in 1965, active troops to fight for South Vietnam. The military conflict spread to Cambodia and Thailand, but not around the world. The Americans, though deeply suspicious of and armed against both the Chinese and the Soviets, avoided all-out war with either.

Remember In the 21st century, humankind has far more than enough destructive power to kill everybody on the planet. Keep in mind that there are two kinds of progress: constructive (as in trade, peaceful innovation, medicine, cultural exchange, and the like) and destructive (as in thermonuclear weapons).

Human advances have also been influenced by disasters such as volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, and disease. The bubonic plague of the 14th century, known as the Black Death, changed history in part because it so drastically reduced the populations of Europe and Asia. So many fewer people meant that their labor was worth more, so there was more wealth. More wealth meant more demand for goods, which in Europe spurred a search for better trade routes, which led Westerners to places such as India, China, and the Americas. The results were good for Europeans but disastrous for the Indians, Chinese, and Native Americans.

Also in the 21st century, the world faces new challenges that may be more immediately dangerous than stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The changing climate — hotter summers, melting glaciers, worse and more-frequent storms, and rising sea levels — will in the not-too-distant future, challenge us all.

Appreciating History’s Tapestry

A standard analogy is that human events over the centuries are a rich tapestry. But many readers and students aren’t all that familiar with tapestries, which are decorative fabrics usually hung on a wall to show off their craftsmanship. Made from weaving threads together in such a way that the colors of the thread form recognizable shapes and scenes, tapestries may be called rich because people have to be rich to own them. Classic tapestry is hand-woven, taking a lot of time and skill to produce, which makes it expensive. Also, the process is complex. Each thread contributes a tiny percentage of the finished image.

History is like that, even if the threads interweave somewhat randomly and the picture is often hard to figure out. Yet with history, you can follow a thread and see where it crisscrosses and crosscrisses (if you will) other threads to see how the picture formed into what you recognize as the historical present.

Threading backward

History often gets told in chronological order, which makes sense. Much of the content of this book is presented in chronological order, but not all of it. I thought it would be a good idea to break out some of the big influences on how people behave — things like philosophy and religion, styles of warfare, and even individual personalities. Giving these developments their own parts of the book (3, 4, and 5) allows you to come at the same events and eras from different perspectives.

Even when I tell you things in the order in which they happened, though, I sometimes refer to latter-day developments that resulted from long-ago events, or I use modern examples of how things today can work pretty much as they did then (whenever then was).

When studying history, it helps to start by thinking about where humanity is now and work backward, asking the questions that the journalists, pundits, and podcasters did when talking about the COVID-19 pandemic: How did we get here? Why are we here now, and not later or before? You don’t have to start with now, though. You can work backward from an interesting event that began in, for example, 2003.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned such an event, the war in Iraq. It started when U.S. planes bombed a bunker where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was thought to be meeting with top staff. (The raids didn’t get him then but were followed up with an invasion that led to his eventual capture and execution.) To trace every thread of that war through time would be too ambitious, but you can follow a few threads. Warm up the WABAC Machine, Sherman.

Among the reasons that U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisers cited for invading Iraq was the need to remove a brutal dictator. Saddam came to power in 1979, when his cousin and predecessor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, stepped down, or (as many people believe) was forced out of office. Al-Bakr’s career included ousting two previous military dictators and helping with the overthrow of Iraq’s monarchy in 1958.

The monarchy dated to the 1920s, when the United Kingdom (Britain), which ruled Iraq as a colony, installed Faisal I as king. A descendant of the family of the Prophet Mohammed, Faisal was not from Iraq, but from Saudi Arabia, and the British expected him to answer to London. Yet he helped secure Iraq’s independence before he died.

The League of Nations, a short-lived predecessor to the United Nations, had cobbled Iraq together after WWI. The body put Britain in charge of Baghdad and Basra, two adjacent parts of the old Ottoman Empire (which fell apart in WWI), and a few years later threw in Mosul to the north.

The Ottomans first conquered that territory in 1535. Baghdad (later Iraq’s capital) had been a center of the Islamic world since Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century; before that, it was a province of the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the region in the fourth century BC. (The designation BC can be confusing. It means before the time of Jesus — in this case, 400 years before. I explain BC, along with AD, BCE and CE, in more detail in Chapter 3.)

In fact, when Alexander died in 323 BC, he was just south of the city of Baghdad, in Babylon, one of the most famous places in the ancient world and one of those early cities that arose in the Fertile Crescent after agriculture took hold. Babylon had been the capital of a kingdom established by a people called the Amorites in the 19th century BC. Archaeologists think it was a much older town that grew to city size by 2400 BC, more than 4,400 years ago.

Crossing threads

Okay, the preceding section has a highly superficial tracing of a thread I’ll call What was Iraq before, and who ruled it? This discussion is so superficial that I skipped parts in which different conquerors fought over the territory and rule shifted back and forth. The famous Turkish-Mongol conqueror Timur, for example, took over for a while in the 14th century. His thread would take you back to his ancestor Genghis Khan, a great Mongol warrior and ruler. And his thread could take you forward (it works both ways) to Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, a 13th-century emperor of China.

But in tracing that one thread back from 21st-century Iraq, I crossed other threads. At one intersection was WWI, which was triggered by a Serbian nationalist rebellion against Austrian rule of Bosnia. That war redrew the map of Europe and brought down not just the Ottoman Empire, but also the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

The overthrow of the Russian Empire led to the establishment of the Soviet Union — a military superpower and archrival to the United States through much of the 20th century. Then there’s the fact that WWI ended with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms imposed upon Germany have been blamed in part for the rise of Adolf Hitler and WWII. The war also led to the establishment of the League of Nations, which lumped together the group of territories we know as Iraq.

Weaving home

The German Empire was a successor to the Holy Roman Empire. Not to be confused with the earlier Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was a union of Central European territories dating back to Otto the Great in 962 AD. It was considered to be a continuation of the Frankish Empire, established in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West — essentially naming him the successor to the Roman emperors going back to Augustus, whose rule began in 27 BC.

Follow Leo’s popish thread, and you’ll get to Pope Urban II, who in 1095 called upon Europe’s Christians to make war against the Turks, especially the Seljuk Dynasty, who controlled the city of Jerusalem and the land surrounding it, considered to be the Christian Holy Land.

Urban’s war became the First Crusade, followed by at least nine more crusades over several centuries in which Christians from Europe traveled east to conquer territory in western Asia. Not surprisingly, these incursions contributed to enduring hard feelings on the part of many Muslims toward Christians and the West.

You may trace a thread between the Crusades and latter-day anti-U.S. sentiments, such as those held by the notorious terrorist organization called ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (Confusingly, it’s also called IS, ISIL [for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], and Daesh.) That thread also crosses the one in which the United Nations partitioned what had been British Palestine (another post-WWI territory) into Arab and Jewish areas to make way for the modern nation of Israel.

Before the rise of ISIS, another terrorist group, al-Qaeda, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. The American response was a War on Terror(ism) that included the invasion of Afghanistan, where the leaders of al-Qaeda were supposedly hiding, and then the invasion of Iraq, whose leader was thought to be hiding banned weapons and aiding terrorist groups. That second invasion and war destabilized Iraq for many years, giving ISIS a place to form and grow. And I’m back where I started.

Making the Connections

If you’re not thrilled with the tapestry analogy, how about the notion of six degrees of separation, also known as six degrees of Kevin Bacon when applied to entertainment figures. The idea is that anybody on Earth can be linked to anybody else in six or fewer interactions. Depending on which interpretation of this idea you like, the interaction could be as simple as a shared acquaintance or a handshake. Some people call it an urban legend, but a few researchers have tried to test the notion, with mixed results.

The game calls for making the connection in six steps or less. Let’s see whether I can do that with Alexander the Great, who died in ancient Babylon, and the Iraq War that started in 2003.

Alexander’s conquests spread Greek influence around the Mediterranean Sea.

Romans embraced aspects of Greek religion and philosophy.

The Roman Empire eventually adopted Christianity.

The Roman Catholic Church preserved ancient writings containing classical (Greek and Roman) ideas through the Middle Ages.

Christian scholars rediscovered Greek philosophy, sparking the Renaissance.

Oops. Darn. I’m not there yet.

So historical connections aren’t as easy to make as movie-actor connections, but I was on my way. See, the Renaissance led to the Enlightenment, when ideas such as government by consent of the governed took hold. That period led to the American Revolution and modern democracies — the style of government that George W. Bush said he would establish in the Middle East after getting rid of Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq, which helped make room in Iraq and Syria for the rise of ISIS. That’s more than six steps, but not bad.

Remember If you fill in enough steps and make enough connections, you’ll begin to see the interconnectedness of virtually everything people do on Earth. Maybe once upon a time, a band of hunter-gatherers in what would later be Yemen or Thailand could live for 1,000 years in ignorance of the rest of the world, and no other band of hunter-gatherers anywhere would have known that those prehistoric Yemeni or Thai people existed. But that moment is long gone. Delve into any bit of humankind’s story now, and you’re on a path that reaches far beyond whatever city or village you started in. Each path branches into countless others that together reach around the world and stretch through time to what came before. Everything that ever happened, somebody once said, is still happening. History is now.

Tracking the Centuries

Before 12,000 BC: The Pleistocene Epoch, known today as the last major Ice Age, ends after ice sheets recede northward.

Perhaps 10,000 BC: Agricultural societies develop in an area called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East.

About 2400 BC: The town of Babylon, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, has grown into a city.

About 323 BC: Alexander the Great dies of a fever in the ancient city of Babylon.

27 BC: Augustus becomes the first Roman emperor.

962 AD: Otto the Great is crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany.

1535: Ottoman Turks conquer Baghdad.

1919: The Treaty of Versailles sets out terms of peace to officially end WWI.

1932: The Kingdom of Iraq wins its independence from British rule.

1947: The United Nations partitions what had been British Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas.

1965: The United States escalates its involvement in the Vietnam War by sending troops to fight on the side of the South Vietnamese government.

2001: Nineteen suicide terrorists hijack four commercial airlines and succeed in crashing two of them into New York City’s World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashes in Pennsylvania.

2003: The United States and the United Kingdom, along with small contingents of troops from other allied countries, invade Iraq.

2016: The United Kingdom votes in a referendum to separate from the European Union, a move known as Brexit.

2019: A previously unknown viral illness called COVID-19, arises in China, on its way to becoming the fastest-spreading pandemic the world has yet seen.

2021: President Joe Biden withdraws American troops from Afghanistan.

Chapter 2

Digging Up Reality

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Unearthing long-lost legendary cities

check Spawning myth or reality: Plato’s Atlantis

check Connecting with the past in the form of preserved bodies

If you think of history as lists of facts, dates, battles, and key civilizations, you may memorize a lot, but you’ll never experience the thrill of the past. If, on the other hand, you’re able to make the leap to identify with people who are long dead and to imagine what their lives must have been like, you may be among those for whom the past becomes a passion — and perhaps even an addiction.

Maybe you read history, and your imagination brings the stories to life. Or maybe you need help. Hard evidence, the kind you can examine at historic sites or in museums, often works. Seeing what the people of the past left behind — what they made and built, and even their preserved bodies — can bridge the gap between then and now. These things are reminders that real people walked the Earth long ago, carrying within them dreams and fears not so unlike yours.

In this chapter, I look at two lost cities and discuss evidence for their actual existence. I also look at mummies and discuss the ways they can bring history alive.

Homing In on Homer

The Iliad and The Odyssey, ancient epic poems, tell fantastic stories about a long war between Greeks and Trojans and the journey home from that war. They’re so fantastic — full of vengeful gods and supernatural peril — that it’s hard for modern people to credit any part of them as true.

Yet a kind of history is in these poems. This history became more tantalizing in the late 19th century, when an eccentric German businessman dug up the city of Troy, revealing that it had been a real place, one of many ancient Troys built in just the place the poems describe. Each city rose and fell, and another rose on top of it while the old one was forgotten.

The Troy story

Greeks attacked Troy more than 3,200 years ago, in the 13th century BC. (In the next chapter, I explain BC, AD, CE, and BCE.) The stories about that decade-long war were already ancient by the time of the philosopher Aristotle and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposedly the work of a blind singer–poet called Homer, but nobody knows for sure who he was, when he lived (maybe the ninth century BC), or even whether he lived. One widely respected theory is that, long before anybody wrote these stories down, storytellers and singers performed them, often set to music, over and over, each generation teaching the tales to the next.

As centuries and millennia went by, the real Trojan War faded so far into the past that these stories were all that was left — that is, until Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German enthusiast, decided to find Troy. With little to go on except his faith in Homer, he dug up not just one but a stack of nine Troys built one on top of another. Then he went to Greece and discovered the mighty civilization of Mycenae, which also figures in Homer’s saga.

Sure that The Iliad’s account of the Trojan War was true, Schliemann fixed on an ancient mound at a place called Hissarlik, on the southwest coast of modern Turkey.

Starting in 1870, Schliemann’s workers dug into a promising mound of dirt and rubble. What they couldn’t budge, they blasted with explosives. If you’ve seen documentaries about modern archaeologists painstakingly picking through an archaeological site with dental picks and soft brushes, put that image out of your head. These guys approached excavation with all the delicacy of a dog in a flower bed.

The crew hardly slowed down as they passed through what later archaeologists identified as the probable Troy of the Trojan War (about 1250 BC), only three levels down. Schliemann’s workers burrowed to an earlier layer of the ancient city, one from before 2000 BC — maybe 700 years earlier than the Troy in Homer’s stories. In 1874, Schliemann found gold artifacts that he erroneously thought had belonged to Priam, the Trojan king in The Iliad.

Not satisfied with his Trojan findings, Schliemann went back to Greece to look for the palace of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in The Iliad. There, he not only made more finds (in the form of ancient tombs), but again came up with treasure, including a golden burial mask that he declared to be the Mask of Agamemnon. Later archaeologists dated it to about 1600 BC, too early for Agamemnon, and some modern archaeologists even think it’s a fake that Shliemann placed in the tomb so that he could discover it.

Inspiring archaeological finds

Schliemann’s enthusiastic work may not have been fraudulent, but it was clumsy and ill-informed. Yet he stumbled upon discoveries of real value, things found by archaeologists such as Arthur Evans (1851–1941), an Englishman who uncovered the remains of the great Minoan civilization. (The Minoans were a powerful people who thrived on Crete and other Aegean islands between 3000 and 1450 BC.) Such finds reminded both scientists and historians that ancient stories — even fantastical ones —can contain important clues to the foundations of history.

Raising Atlantis

Do Schliemann’s discoveries tell us every lost civilization was for real? No. I don’t think it means scientists or explorers will someday find the sunken nation of Atlantis. Oops. I shouldn’t have mentioned Atlantis. There isn’t room in this book to delve into even a small fraction of the theories and fantasies about where and what was Atlantis — if anything like it ever existed.

The story describes a land of peace and plenty, destroyed in an overnight cataclysm. It traces back to the writings of Greek philosopher Plato (about 428–347 BC), who used Atlantis to make a point about social order and good government. But Plato’s descriptions leave room for interpretation, and people have interpreted wildly for thousands of years.

Plato described Atlantis as in the Atlantic Ocean, just past Gibraltar on your way out of the Mediterranean Sea, but geology seems to dictate that it couldn’t have been there. Dueling historians, archaeologists, mystics, and self-appointed prophets have argued vociferously over an alternate site, putting the lost continent everywhere from Britain to Bermuda to Bolivia, from Colorado to the China Sea. One theory claims it was on another planet. Sci-fi movies, comics, and graphic novels depict Atlantis thriving in a giant plexiglass bubble on the ocean floor. Virtually every theory has to make allowances for Plato, who got the story of Atlantis indirectly from the Athenian statesman Solon, who supposedly got it from scholar–priests during a visit to Egypt in about 590 BC. Because Plato wrote his version almost two centuries later, in about 360 BC, details surely changed along the way.

Remember One of the least outrageous theories is that the story of Atlantis is based on the volcanic disaster that destroyed Santorini, an island in the Mediterranean. Archaeologists and geologists have studied the way the Santorini cataclysm caused a monstrous tsunami, followed by sky-darkening ashfall.

Santorini (also known as Thera) lies about 45 miles north of the Greek island of Crete, which was the center of the Minoan culture. Minoan ruins are plentiful on what’s left of Santorini, but they’re only a small remnant of what was on the island until about 1600 BC, when the 5,000-foot volcano in its middle exploded and collapsed into the sea. Ever since, the island has been a crescent surrounding a volcanic-crater lagoon. The volcanic eruptions continued for 30 years, building up to a devastating climax: an enormous tidal wave that knocked down buildings on islands throughout the region.

The tsunami decimated the population, and the subsequent rain of volcanic ash probably finished off the Minoan civilization. Nobody knows for sure whether the sinking of Santorini had anything to do with launching a lasting legend of a capsized civilization, but news of such a catastrophic event surely spread around the Mediterranean and in time could have become legend.

Reading the Body Language of the Dead

Some people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago left more than just their images in sculpture and paintings on stone. Preserved bodies are in-the-flesh evidence of long-ago reality. The mere fact that a human body from thousands of years past is still more or less intact and recognizably like this year’s model can help open your mind to the connection between then and now. Something about a mummy helps your imagination bridge all the generations since that puckered flesh was taut, upright, and dancing.

In history books that cover big expanses of time, you have to adjust your perspective so that a century becomes a relatively small unit of history. In this book, you can breeze through a thousand years here and a thousand years