In the chapters on China I have used the Pinyin system of transliteration as opposed to Wade-Giles, except for certain words where the Wade-Giles format is well known even to non-specialists (Pinyin dispenses with all apostrophes and hyphens in Chinese words). In transcribing other scripts (for example, Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit) I have omitted virtually all diacritical marks, on the grounds that most readers will not know how, for example, å or ẹ modifies the sound. Marks are included only where essential – for example, to distinguish the Russian prehistoric site of Mal’ta from the Mediterranean island of Malta. For the most part I have referred to the books of the Hebrew Bible as scriptures. Occasionally, for the sake of variety, I have used Old Testament.
My greatest debt, as always, is to Kathrine.
A Chronology of Ideas
Some dates, especially the early ones, are approximate
60,000–40,000 years ago: ‘Creative explosion’: cave art and carvings in abundance
14,000–6,000 years ago: domestication of plants and animals
11,000 BC: first use of clay
5500 BC: first writing, in India
after 2900 BC: Gilgamesh – first imaginative epic
2100 BC: first legal code
2000 BC: invention of the wheel
before 1200 BC: first alphabet
640 BC: invention of money
600 BC: first evidence for written Latin
585 BC: Thales of Miletus predicts solar eclipse: for Aristotle this was the moment when science and philosophy began
538 BC: Buddha begins his travels
507 BC: democracy introduced in Athens by Cleisthenes
after 336 BC: Aristotle classifies the world
mid-third century BC: Aristarchus proposes that the earth goes around the sun
second century BC: paper in use in China
160 BC: concepts of Resurrection and the Messiah gain wide currency in Israel
120 BC: the term ‘Judaism’ first used in Second Book of Maccabees
First century AD: wheelbarrow invented in China
33 AD: Paul converted
80 AD: compass in use in China
170s AD: four Christian Gospels emerge
before 242 AD: Neoplatonism flourishes in Alexandria
431 AD: Mary beatified as the Mother of God
570 AD: birth of Muhammad
633 AD: Qu’ran collated
eighth century AD: crop rotation system introduced
751 AD: paper reaches the West from China
904–906 AD: gunpowder first used in anger in China
after 1001 AD: Leif Eriksson explores Vinland
1087 AD: Irnerius teaches law at Bologna University
1094/1117 AD: first named teachers at Oxford
late thirteenth/early fourteenth century AD: origins of capitalism and banking in Italy
early fourteenth century AD: explosion of universities in Europe, first hints of perspective in Western art
late fourteenth century AD: double entry bookkeeping in use
1403 AD: movable type in use in Korea
1440 AD: invention of printing
after 1450 AD: rediscovery of Plato in Europe
1506 AD: first printed map to show America
1517 AD: Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church: the Reformation
1519 AD: Magellan discovers southern route to Pacific and his assistant Sebastián del Cano circumnavigates the earth
1525 AD: Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, led by Anabaptists
1543 AD: Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs; Vesalius, The Structure of the Human Body
1605 AD: Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; William Shakespeare, King Lear and Macbeth; Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 1 (part 2, 1615)
1619 AD: René Descartes conceives the significance of doubt, and the mind-body dualism
after 1625 AD: rise of the novel
1669 AD: fossils first recognised as residue of living creatures
1670 AD: Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus
1675–1683 AD: Van Leeuwenhoek discovers protozoa, spermatoza, bacteria
early eighteenth century AD: rise of newspapers; learned journals and concert halls proliferate – emergence of the ‘public sphere’; Index of Prohibited Books in China
1721 AD: first factory, in Derby
1729 AD: electricity transmitted over distance
1740s AD: David Hume attacks Christianity
after 1750 AD: the Great Awakening in America
1760 AD: Industrial Revolution begins
1789 AD: French Revolution, Declaration of the Rights of Man, in France; Bentham, ‘felicific calculus’
1790 AD: the term ‘middle classes’ first used
late eighteenth century AD: textual criticism of the Bible begins at Göttingen; vulcanism and neptunism – rival theories of the history of the earth
1805 AD: Beethoven, Eroica symphony
1816 AD: first functioning telegraph; the term ‘Hindoo’ first used (hitherto ‘Gentoo’)
1831 AD: British Association for the Advancement of Science formed
after 1833AD: the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’ introduced
1838 AD: Comte coins the term ‘sociology’, the term ‘palaeontology’ first used
1840 AD: Louis Agassiz identifies the ice age
1848 AD: revolution in several European cities; Robert Owen shows vertebrates have a similar structure
1856 AD: Neanderthal skull discovered in Germany
1859 AD: Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, identifies natural selection as the mechanism by means of which evolution proceeds; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
1864, 1879, 1893 and 1899 AD: papal edicts against modernism, biblical criticism and science
1874 AD: Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, opened
1880 AD: Jacob Breuer treats Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O’)
1885 AD: Pasteur discovers rabies vaccine
1897 AD: discovery of the electron – founding of particle physics; Emile Durkheim, Suicide
1899–1900 AD: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, lays the foundations of psychoanalysis
Introduction
The Most Important Ideas in History: Some Candidates
In 1936, a collection of papers by Sir Isaac Newton, the British physicist and natural philosopher, which had been considered to be ‘of no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, came up for auction at Sotheby’s, the international salesroom, in London. The papers were bought by another Cambridge man, the distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes (later Lord Keynes). He spent several years studying the documents – mainly manuscripts and notebooks – and in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in London in which he presented an entirely new view of ‘history’s most renowned and exalted scientist’. ‘In the eighteenth century and since,’ Keynes told the club, ‘Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.’1