by Morris, Ian;
Tell Brak (Syria), 181, 184
Tell Leilan (Syria), 192, 193, 206
Temps modernes, Les (journal), 106
Temujin, 388
Tenochtitlán, 417, 421, 426, 429, 431–33, 460
Terracotta Army, 282, 285
Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan), 59
Thailand, 120, 127, 534
Thebes (Egypt), 193, 194, 215, 219
Theodora, Empress, 344, 345, 363n
Theodosius, Emperor, 315, 326
Three Dynasties Chronology Project, 201, 214
Thucydides, 268, 296
Tiananmen Square massacre, 549, 586
Tibet, 458
Tierra del Fuego, 139
Tiglath-Pileser III, King, 245–49, 269, 303, 316, 335, 567
Tilley, Christopher, 141
Tinghai (China), 145, 148
Tokyo, 501n, 503, 523, 524
population of, 149, 152, 482n
Tolkien, J.R.R., 53
Tolstoy, Leo, 113, 284
Tomyris, Queen of Massagetae, 278
Tongling (China), 210
Treasure Fleets, 408, 416, 426, 429
Treasury Bonds, U.S., 585
Treatise on Agriculture (Wang Zhen), 379, 420n
Tripitaka (“Three Baskets” of Buddhist canon), 256
Trobriand Islands, 133, 137
Troy, 199, 241
True Levellers, 452
Tunisia, 315, 364
Turkana Boy, 45, 52, 57
Turkey, 81, 97, 197n, 431, 443–46, 452, 453, 459–61, 528, 605n
archaeological sites in, 96, 100, 102–103, 105, 123–25
modernization of, 571
Turkic peoples, 348, 349, 354–56, 358, 361, 364, 366–67, 372, 567; Ottoman, see Ottomans
Turkmenistan, 125, 189
2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 63, 149, 182, 183
Ugarit (Syria), 216, 217, 220, 225
Ukraine, 196, 295, 458
Uluburun (Anatolia), 200
’Umar, 351
Undefeated Sun, 323
United Arab Emirates, 605n
United Monarchy, 234
United Nations, 150, 610
Food and Agriculture Organization, 601
Human Development Index, 145–47, 149–50
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), 599
United States, 31, 35, 158, 488, 531, 601n, 604, 605, 612, 634
carbon emissions of, 18, 538, 609
China and, 518, 546–47, 585–88, 606
diseases in, 603
economy of, 12, 34, 225, 529–31, 535, 540–41, 542, 553, 578, 582, 588, 597, 598, 615
emigration to, 509, 603
impact of climate change in, 600
industrialization in, 510, 521
Japan and, 10, 534
military spending in, 548, 631
neo-evolutionary theory in, 138–39
nuclear weapons and, 605–606, 608, 616
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on, 551
Soviet Union and, 526, 527, 533–35, 540–42, 550, 580, 616
technology in, 542, 594, 597, 615
in Vietnam War, 535
in World War I, 529
in World War II, 52, 532, 533, 579
Universal History (Polybius), 263–64
Ur (Mesopotamia), 193–94
Royal Cemetery of, 188–89
Urartu, 248
Urban II, Pope, 372
Uruk (Mesopotamia), 181–88, 190, 192, 194, 203, 206, 207, 210, 223, 229, 562, 610
Uzbekistan, 59, 366, 606n
Vagnari (Italy), 273
Valencia, 438
Valens, Emperor, 312, 313
Valerian, Emperor, 310, 328
Vandals, 313, 315, 316, 345
Vedas, 137
Venice, 371, 373, 384, 392, 402, 404, 420n, 427, 429, 431–32, 459
Venter, Craig, 595, 596
Verne, Jules, 507, 511
Vespasian, Emperor, 286
Viagra, 594
Victoria, Queen of England, 6, 7, 10–11, 14, 148
Vienna, Congress of, 489
Vietnam, 11, 127, 407, 408, 587
Vietnam War, 106, 140, 141, 502n, 535
Vikings, 363, 364, 371, 421, 427
Vinland, 371
Virgil, 286
Voltaire, 13, 280, 472–74, 481
von Däniken, Erich, 182–83, 186, 189, 194, 215, 253, 399, 410, 614n
Voyage on the Red Sea, The, 273, 275
Wagner, Lindsay, 594
Wales, 472n Wal-Mart, 553
Wang Anshi, 376, 421
Wang Feng, 18
Wang Mang, Emperor, 299
Wang Qirong, 210–11
Wang Yangming, 426, 453, 473n
Wang Zhen, 379–80, 420n
Wanli, Emperor, 442–43
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 113
Wardi, al-, 398
War of the East, 524, 532
Warring States period, 244n, 264
War of the West, 486–89, 524, 526, 532, 534, 550
Waterloo, battle of, 486
Watt, James, 494–97, 500, 502, 504, 567, 568, 573
Wayne, John, 18
Wealth and Poverty of Nations, The (Landes), 17
weapons, 151, 180, 185, 197, 217, 295, 389
in China, 305, 374, 380
nuclear, see nuclear weapons
high-tech, 548, 591–92, 615–16, 618
iron and bronze, 128–29, 181, 191, 200, 208, 233–34, 276
of mass destruction, 605
prehistoric, 57, 80
siege, 277
in World War I, 526; see also guns
Weber, Max, 136–37
Wedgwood, Josiah, 498
Wei (China), 265, 266, 335n
Weiss, Harvey, 192
Wellington, Duke of, 486
Wendi, Emperor, 337, 345, 346, 354
West Germany, 533, 535
Wheeler, Brigadier Mortimer, 274–75
White, Leslie, 148
Whitney, Eli, 496
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 524, 525
Wilkinson, John (“Iron-Mad”), 495
William I (“the Conqueror”), King, 194
William of Orange, 20
Wire, The (television show), 442
Woods, Tiger, 594
Wordsworth, William, 491–92
World Bank, 547, 603
World Health Organization, 603–604
World Trade Organization, 610
World War I, 65, 133, 526–29, 531, 533, 605
World War II, 17, 52, 254, 273–75, 526, 531–34, 565, 578, 579, 608
Wozniak, Steve, 542
Wright brothers, 510
Wu (China), 245, 524
Wu, King, 229–31
Wudi, Emperor (Han dynasty), 285, 294, 457
Wudi, Emperor (Liang dynasty), 329
Wuding, King, 212–15, 220, 221
Wu Zetian, 340–42, 344, 345, 355, 363n
Wuzong, Emperor, 375
Xia dynasty, 205–209, 214, 235, 245
Xian, Marquis, 251
Xianbei, 335–36
Xiandi, Emperor, 302–304
Xianfeng, Emperor, 10
Xiangyang (China), 392
Xiaowen, Emperor, 336, 338, 362
Xiongnu, 293–95, 298, 299, 301, 303–305, 310, 314, 349, 354
Xishan (China), 124
Xishuipo (China), 126
Xuan, King, 242
Xuan, Marquis, 251
Xuanzong, Emperor, 355–57, 359
Xuchang (China), 79
Xu Fu, 421n
Xunzi, 259
Yahgan people, 139
Yale University, 30, 192
Yan (China), 265n
Yang, Prince, 221
Yang Guifei, 355–56, 424
Yangzhou (China), 442
Yanshi (China), 209
Yan Wenming, 120, 121
Yellow Turbans, 302
Yemen, 349
Yesugei, 388
Yih, King, 233
Yom Kippur/Ramadan conflict, 90
Yongle, Emperor, 406, 407, 413, 414, 416, 426, 429
You, King, 242–43, 355
Younger Dryas, 92–94, 96, 100, 114, 119, 122, 175, 577–78
Yu, King, 204–208, 214
Yuan dynasty, 587
Yuan Shikai, 528
Yue (China), 524
Yu Hong, 342
Yukichi, Fukuzawa, 15
Zemeckis, Robert, 572
Zeno, Emperor, 316–17
Zenobia, Queen, 311
Zhang Zhuzheng, 442–43
Zhao, King, 232
Zhao (China), 265, 266, 279
Zhaodun, 252–53
Zheng, King, 266–67
Zheng (China), 244
Zhengde, Emperor, 441
Zheng He, 16, 17, 407, 408, 413, 417, 420n, 426, 429, 433, 589
Zhengtong, Emperor, 413, 416, 417
Zhengzhou (China), 209–10, 212
Zhou, Duke of, 230, 257
Zhou, Madame, 424, 426
Zhou dynasty, 214, 221–22, 229–37, 242–45, 250–51, 253, 257, 278, 285, 355, 359n, 369
Zhoukoudian (China), 51–55, 57, 60, 72, 78, 154, 210n, 211
Zhou Man, 408, 410, 413
Zhuangzi, 257–59
Zhu Xi, 422–24, 426, 453
Zhu Yuanzhang, 404–405
Zoroaster, 254n
Zoroastrianism, 328, 342
Zuozhuan (commentary on historical documents), 252–53
*Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the fifteenth century, but, as I will try to show in Chapter 8, these claims are probably fanciful. The closest thing to evidence for these imaginary voyages is a map of the world exhibited in Beijing and London in 2006, purporting to be a 1763 copy of a Chinese original drawn in 1418. The map is not only wildly different from all genuine fifteenth-century Chinese maps but is also strikingly like eighteenth- century French world maps, down to details like showing California as an island. Most likely an eighteenth-century Chinese cartographer combined fifteenth-century maps with newly available French maps. The mapmaker probably had no intention of deceiving anyone, but twenty-first-century collectors, eager for sensational discoveries, have happily deceived themselves.
*Wong left Irvine in 2005, but moved only forty miles, to the University of California’s Los Angeles campus; and Wang had a co-author, James Lee, but he, too, teaches just forty miles from Irvine, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
*Academic biology is a vast field; I draw on its ecological/evolutionary end rather than its molecular/cellular end.
*I use “sociology” as a shorthand term for the social sciences more generally, and draw primarily on those branches that generalize about how all societies work rather than those that focus on differences. This definition cuts across traditional academic distinctions among sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, and puts great emphasis on areas where biology and the social sciences meet, especially demography and psychology.
*Geography, like biology and sociology, is a huge and loosely defined field (so loosely defined, in fact, that since the 1940s many universities have decided that it is not an academic discipline at all and have closed their geography departments). I draw more on human/economic geography than on physical geography.
*What, since the nineteenth century, people have rather confusingly called the “Middle East.”
*Mesopotamia is the ancient Greek name (literally meaning “between the rivers”) for Iraq. By convention, historians and archaeologists use Mesopotamia for the period before the Arab invasion of 637 CE and Iraq after that date.
*I borrow this term from the economist Alexander Gerschrenkon (although he used it slightly differently).
*I present more technical accounts in the appendix to this book and on my website, www.ianmorris.org.
*The word “ape-man,” with its Tarzan-and-Jane connotations, was much favored in schoolbooks when I was young. Nowadays paleoanthropologists tend to think it condescending, but it seems to me to capture nicely the ambiguities of these prehuman hominins, and is certainly less of a mouthful.
*In practice they probably jumped a few miles at a time to find good new foraging spots, then stayed put for several years.
*Although we now normally transliterate the name of the Chinese capital as Beijing, by convention paleoanthropologists still speak of Peking Man.
*That said, Heidelberg Man did live in Africa as well as Europe. Some paleoanthropologists envisage a European origin followed by a spread back into Africa, but others assume that Heidelberg Man, like Homo habilis and Homo ergaster, evolved in Africa in response to local climate changes, then spread north. Bones rather like Heidelberg Man’s have also been found in China, but that evidence is more disputed.
*And, of course, an unknown number of hominin species like the Flores hobbits that died out without leaving modern descendants. Another new species was identified in the mountains of central Asia in 2010, and was predictably labeled “the yeti.”
*One Harvard anthropologist greeted the publication of the Neanderthal genome by suggesting that a mere $32 million investment would allow us to genetically modify modern human DNA and insert it into a chimpanzee cell to yield a genuine Neanderthal baby. The necessary technology is not—yet—available, but even when it is, we might hesitate to apply it; as my Stanford colleague Richard Klein, one of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists, asked a journalist: “Are you going to put [the Neanderthals] in Harvard or in a zoo?”
*Some isolated groups, like the Flores “hobbits,” possibly survived until recently. When Portuguese sailors reached Flores in the sixteenth century they claimed to have seen tiny, hairy cave dwellers who could barely talk. More than a hundred years have now passed since a sighting has been claimed, but it is said that similar little people still exist on Java. One of their hairs was recently produced, but on testing, its DNA turned out to be fully human. Some anthropologists believe that we will eventually encounter these last relics of premodern humanity in the shrinking Javanese forests. I have to admit I am skeptical.
†Homo sapiens who stayed in Africa, however, did not interbreed with Neanderthals, and modern Africans have no Neanderthal DNA. The implications of this have yet to be explored.
*Mao Zedong coined this phrase in 1957 to describe his radical experiment in industrialization and collectivization in China. It was one of the worst disasters in world history, and by the time Mao called it off in 1962 maybe 30 million people had starved (I return to it in Chapter 10). This makes “Great Leap Forward” rather an odd term to describe the emergence of fully modern humans, but it has caught on.
*Some Chinese archaeologists think modern humans evolved independently in China. I discuss this idea below.
*If it sounds odd that African Adam lived a hundred thousand years after African Eve, that is because the names do not mean anything. These were not the first Homo sapiens man and woman; they are just the most recent ancestors to whom everyone alive today can trace genes. On average, men have just as many offspring as women (obviously, since we all have one father and one mother), but the number of children per man varies more around that average than does the number of children per woman, since some men father dozens of babies. The relatively large pool of men with no children means that men’s genetic lines die out more easily than women’s, and the surviving male lines therefore converge on a more recent ancestor than the female ones.
