A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  The end of a classical world?

  In the fifteenth century, humanist scholars in the growing cities of northern Italy began to think that they were living in a new era, one in which the literary, philosophical, and artistic glories of ancient Greece and Rome were being reborn. What separated their golden age—later dubbed the Renaissance, French for rebirth—from those of Greece and Rome was a long period of darkness and decline, to which a seventeenth-century professor gave the name “Middle Ages.” In this conceptualization, the history of Europe was divided into three periods, ancient, medieval, and modern, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire seen as a great turning point when the glorious culture of the Romans was replaced by barbarism.

  Historians of other parts of the world have also pointed to the collapse of large-scale empires and classical societies in roughly the same period. The Han dynasty of which Ban Zhao and Ban Gu were so proud ended in 220 CE when the son of a general deposed the reigning emperor, but provincial military leaders refused to recognize his authority and the empire broke into warring factions, while waves of invaders—including the Xiongnu, known in the West as the Huns—swept across the frontiers. Centuries of disunity followed. The Kushan Empire fragmented into two parts in the third century, and outsiders overwhelmed each of these shortly afterward. Those outsiders included the Gupta Empire, which brought large parts of northern India under its control in the fourth century, but then broke apart in the fifth century because of invasions from the north by steppe people known in Western and Indian sources as the Hepthalites or White Huns. In Mesoamerica, decline came somewhat later but was similarly traumatic: invaders burned down the great city of Teotihuacan in 750, and the urban cores of many southern Maya city-states were abandoned between 800 and 900. Thus in many places the urbanized societies examined in this chapter became less urban, hereditary dynasties were overthrown, and violence disrupted village life.

  Map 2.2 The world in about 400 CE

  These collapses are generally described in political and military terms, but they appear to have often had demographic and environmental roots. The Silk Roads across Asia carried Buddhism and trade goods, but they also carried disease pathogens, and what had been separate disease pools were connected, with catastrophic results. Roman soldiers returning from fighting in Mesopotamia in 165 CE brought with them a disease that may have been smallpox or measles, which devastated the city of Rome and then spread to the northern provinces; estimates of deaths in this Antonine Plague over the next decade or so range in the millions, and may have been as much as one-quarter of the Roman Empire. Another pandemic in 250–270 CE, again probably smallpox and named the Cyprian Plague after an early Christian bishop who saw and wrote about it, also killed thousands per day in the city of Rome itself and perhaps hundreds of thousands elsewhere. Both of these epidemics diminished the ranks of the Roman army, created labor shortages in the countryside, and so allowed the migration of Germanic peoples further and further into the empire. A third epidemic in 541–543, called the “Justinian Plague” after the emperor ruling in Constantinople at the time who contracted it but survived, and which was probably bubonic plague, swept across western Asia and the Mediterranean, weakening both the Byzantine Empire and its enemy the Sassanid Empire in Persia. Similar diseases also destabilized the Han Empire, and were everywhere exacerbated by a fluctuation in the climate cycle that brought colder weather and declining agricultural productivity. Climate change also created ecological crises in the Americas; severe El Niños, the periodic warm weather currents in the Pacific, brought both drought and torrential rains to the Peruvian coast in the fifth century, while drought and the resultant crop failures seem to have been factors in the Maya collapse. Demographers suggest that world population may have dropped from about 250 million in 1 CE to 200 million in 500 CE, with the largest decline in Asia and Europe.

  Decreases in population created challenges for ruling hereditary dynasties dependent on the work and taxes of their subjects, and the diseases themselves carried off both rulers and heirs. High rates of death from epidemic disease or from the large-scale violence that accompanied political instability created problems for ordinary families as well. Overcrowded cities became even more deadly, particularly for children, who were already at risk from ordinary infectious diseases. Systems of ownership and inheritance and norms of proper family relationships were confronted by situations that lawmakers and moralists had not envisioned. The in-migration of new peoples brought different ways of organizing society from the family on out, challenging social structures and norms that were understood to be “natural” or rooted in unchangeable divine command.

  The social structures and cultural traditions created in the ancient world turned out to be far more resilient than commentators at the time predicted, however. (Dire warnings about the disastrous effects of social change and new practices are one of the traditions that has had a long life.) The Western Roman Empire was never reconstructed, but Greek philosophy and Roman laws, including those concerning slavery and the family, were preserved in the Eastern Roman Empire, eventually reintroduced in western Europe, and from there taken around the world. Sometimes this transmission happened directly when Greek scholars came west, and sometimes it happened indirectly through the work of Muslim and Jewish scholars. Muslim scholars also passed on Greek ideas to the Islamic world, which, as we will see in the next chapter, came to stretch over much of Afroeurasia and to view written texts with particular esteem. Confucianism has survived every political change in China, minor or major, and was exported to Vietnam, Japan, and Korea, where it became a powerful cultural force. Buddhism similarly spread to Korea and Japan, where it developed into new forms that introduced elements from indigenous religious traditions, and was then carried further. Christianity actually benefited from the end of the Western Roman Empire, with its officials assuming a wider range of roles and powers. By 1000 CE, the Christian Church was the wealthiest and most powerful institution in Europe, and “Christian” was people’s primary identity beyond their family and village. Hereditary monarchies remained the standard political structure for states until the eighteenth century, and continue to be so in modified form for a significant number of countries today. Slavery and the caste system have officially ended everywhere, but the United Nations estimates that 30 million people are in forced labor situations, often as the result of human trafficking, and that caste discrimination affects more than 200 million people worldwide.

  In fact, one might even say that the social forms and cultural traditions created in the urbanized agricultural states of the ancient world and discussed in this chapter are far more powerful today than they were in ancient times. In 500 CE, although the majority of people lived in states, most land was outside of them, and was inhabited by bands of foragers, villagers led by kin leaders, family groups of pastoralists, crop-raisers ruled by chiefs, confederations of clans, or other forms of social organization that later scholars would term “stateless societies.” Wherever they lived, the vast majority of people learned the traditions of their culture and their place in the social hierarchy orally. Today, not only do more than half of the world’s people live in cities—a milestone reached only in 2008—but every one of them lives in a state, or, as we now term them, a nation. After a brief period dubbed the “new orality,” when radio, television, telephones, and other oral and visual media appeared as if they would end the dominance of writing, alphabets have returned in triumph. And like Sumerian scribes, many of us produce our alphabets and symbols on small objects we hold in our hands; among these objects are tablets, on which we sometimes write with a stylus.

  Further reading

  The best place to find the newest research on cities is Norman Yoffee, ed., Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE, Volume 3 of the Cambridge World History (2015); similarly, on the development of states, see Volume 4 of the Cambridge World History, Craig Benjamin, ed., A World with States, Empires and Networks, 1200 BCE–900 CE. Mic
hael Adas, ed., Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), Bruce D. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Shelley Hales and Tamar Hodos, eds., Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) are cross-cultural examinations of recurring social, economic, and cultural patterns. For more on cities, see Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff, eds., The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Ancient Urbanism (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2008), Monica Smith, ed., The Social Construction of Ancient Cities (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010), and Charles Gates, Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2011). For Jenne-jeno, see Roderick J. McIntosh, Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). On states, see Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Richard E. Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States (New York: Springer, 2008). Susan E. Alcock, ed., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) is a collection of essays about premodern empires throughout the world, and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) is a broad analysis that begins with Han China and extends into the twentieth century.

  On the development of writing, see Stephen Houston, ed., The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the implications of writing, see Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967), and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012) extends this analysis to contemporary media.

  On the family, see the enormous edited collection, André Burguière et al., A History of the Family, Volume I: Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996) and the much more compact Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner, The Family: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) is a classic work with much information on the ancient period. On slavery, see Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986) presents a good introduction to the idea of the Axial Age, and Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Anchor, 2007) uses this idea to analyze and compare religious and philosophical traditions in four regions of the world. Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Roads: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, 2nd edn. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) examines the transmission of religious culture along the Silk Roads through Central Asia.

  3

  Expanding networks of interaction, 500 CE–1500 CE

  Scholars and poets in the cities of Renaissance Italy viewed ancient Greece and Rome as the height of civilization, a golden age they sought to emulate and revive after a long period of darkness. Scholars and poets in other cities who lived during that period of darkness had a different opinion of their own era, however. One of these was Rashid al-Din (c. 1247–1318), a highly learned vizier at the court of the rulers of the Ilkhanate, one of the four divisions of the vast Mongol Empire that had been established by Chinggis Khan (1167–1227). From a family of imperial officials, and a convert from Judaism to Islam, Rashid al-Din was trained as a physician, but was commissioned by two Ilkhan rulers to write a history of “all the people of the world” that would make plain the importance of the Mongols. Such a history was possible, the Ilkhan ruler Öljaitü commented, because “all corners of the earth are under our control and that of Chinggis Khan's illustrious family, and philosophers, astronomers, scholars, and historians of all religions and nations … are gathered in droves at our glorious court, each and every one of them possesses copies of the histories, stories, and beliefs of their own people.” Rashid al-Din relied on those written histories, which included western European and Indian Buddhist chronicles, Hebrew Scripture and other Jewish texts, Persian epics, and Chinese treatises, as well as the oral testimony of merchants and emissaries from many places living in the Ilkhanate capital of Tabriz, to produce an enormous hemispheric history, the Compendium of Chronicles (Jami’ al-tawarikh), which he finished around 1310. Lavishly illustrated copies were made in both Arabic and Persian in a university complex in the city, destined for other cities in the Ilkhanate. In Rashid al-Din's opinion and those of the rulers he worked for, the golden age was not in the past, but now, when the Mongol states encouraged the movement of people and goods and the exchange of ideas across Eurasia. The Ilkhan rulers themselves were active in this exchange, sending emissaries and letters to the pope and the kings of France and England in the hopes of arranging a military alliance against the Turkish Mamluk rulers of Jerusalem and the territory around it. This alliance never happened, but products regarded as Mongol—or “Tatar” as they were often termed—came to be wildly popular among fashionable Europeans, including foods, music, patterned textiles, figured rugs, and children's names.

  Like Rashid al-Din, contemporary world historians increasingly view the era in which he lived as a time when various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and technologically integrated. The Mongol Empire and other steppe nomads were instrumental in these connections, and so was a new religion, Islam, as well as the older portable religions of Buddhism and Christianity. Trade networks expanded and matured, linking growing cities and glittering courts, which relied for their wealth on the spread and intensification of agriculture, as more and more of the world's land was used for crops. Networks of exchange were larger and denser in the eastern hemisphere than in the western, but products, ideas, and technologies traveled in the Americas as well. Rashid al-Din and his Ilkhan patrons had no knowledge of the other hemisphere, of course—if the Mongols had, they probably would have tried to conquer it. But the knowledge that many people had of places far away grew significantly in this era, and the stories told about distant lands and cities by merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, and returning prisoner of war, enhanced by myths and legends, made them even more desirable as destinations. This chapter examines the ways that, through conquest, trade, migration, conversion, and pilgrimage, networks of interaction expanded and became denser, as people traveled and settled in ever more places.

  The development of Islam

  Islam, a new religion founded by the religious reformer and visionary Muhammad (c. 570–632), created one of the largest and most important of these networks, joining Buddhism and Christianity as a successful portable religion. Carried by its followers over vast distances, Islam blended with local traditions in ways that made it broadly appealing to many ethnic and social groups. Rashid al-Din was a convert to Islam, and so was his patron the Ilkhanate ruler Öljaitü, whose father was a Buddhist and whose mother was a Christian. With their conversions Rashid al-Din and Öljaitü adopted a faith that by the early fourteenth century had spread throughout many of the lands covered in the Compendium.

  Accounts of the life and teachings of Muhammad first circulated orally and were then written down by his followers, just as were those of the Buddha and Jesus. They relate that the Prophet Muhammad was born in Arabia, where the basic social unit was the patrilineal tribe, became a merchant in the caravan trade, and married a wealthy widow, Khadija. He was a pious man and prayed regularly, and when he was about fo
rty he began to experience religious visions instructing him to preach, which continued for the rest of his life. Muhammad described his revelations in a stylized and often rhyming prose as his Qur'an, or “recitation.” His followers memorized his words and some wrote them down, most likely on the wide variety of materials used for writing in Arabia at the time, including clay tablets, animal bones, parchment, and palm fronds. Shortly after the Prophet's death, memorized and written materials were collected and organized into chapters, called suras, and in 651 Muhammad's political successor arranged to have an official standard version prepared. Copies of that written text were carried wherever Islam expanded, and it serves as the basis for the present form of the Qur'an. Muslims regard the Qur'an as the direct words of God to his Prophet Muhammad and revere it for its prophetic message, divine guidance, and inimitable literary quality. At the same time, other sayings and accounts of Muhammad, which gave advice on matters that went beyond the Qur'an, were collected into books termed hadith. Together the Qur'an and the hadith informed Muhammad's followers about the Sunna (“clear and well-trodden path”) he had followed, which provided a normative example of how they were to live.