Homo sapiens appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago and for most of the Old Stone Age lived nowhere else. People hunted and gathered in small bands, made tools of stone, bone and antler, and used fire, which earlier humans had mastered long before. About 70,000 years ago a group left Africa. By 65,000 years ago people had reached Australia, by 45,000 years ago Europe and Central Asia, and by about 21,000 years ago the Americas. They painted caves such as Chauvet and Lascaux, carved figures and made beads. They shared the world with other kinds of humans, among them the Neanderthals, who died out about 40,000 years ago. The age ended with the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago.
First Homo sapiens
Africa
Bones from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco show our species by about 300,000 years ago.
The oldest known Homo sapiens bones come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and are about 300,000 years old, found with stone tools and signs of fire. The skulls have faces much like ours but a longer, lower braincase, which suggests that the modern head took shape step by step. Other early finds come from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia and Florisbad in South Africa. These sites are spread across the continent, so our species probably did not arise in one small place. For most of the next 230,000 years people lived in Africa, apart from short stays in the Levant that left no lasting settlement, until a group left about 70,000 years ago.
Two abalone shells at Blombos Cave in South Africa held a ready-mixed ochre paint.
In 2008 archaeologists at Blombos Cave, on the south coast of South Africa, found two abalone shells that held a reddish paste. The mixture was about 100,000 years old. It was made from ground ochre, crushed animal bone, charcoal and a liquid, stirred with a bone and stored in the shells. It is the oldest known paint workshop, and it shows that people followed a recipe with several steps and planned ahead. The same cave holds shell beads about 75,000 years old. A stone flake from the cave with a crosshatch drawing followed about 27,000 years later.
A group left Africa, and its descendants settled every other continent but Antarctica.
The ancestors of nearly all people living outside Africa today left the continent about 70,000 years ago, probably by crossing from the Horn of Africa to Arabia or by going up the Nile into the Levant. Earlier groups had reached the Middle East, but they left few or no descendants. DNA suggests that the main group was small, perhaps a few thousand people. By about 65,000 years ago some of their descendants had reached Australia, and by 45,000 years ago Europe. The date and route are debated, and some researchers argue for several waves between 120,000 and 50,000 years ago.
People have lived in Australia for about 65,000 years, and their cultures continue.
People reached Australia, then joined to New Guinea as one landmass, about 65,000 years ago according to finds at Madjedbebe in the Northern Territory. The date is debated, and other estimates are about 50,000 years ago. They spread across the continent and adapted to deserts, coasts and rainforest. Before 1788 there were more than 200 languages, each tied to its own country, and the rock art is among the oldest known. Britain claimed the east coast in 1770 and settled at Sydney in 1788, and the population then fell sharply from disease and violence. Indigenous Australians now number about 800,000.
Settlers crossed open sea from Southeast Asia to reach the continent of Australia.
People reached Australia about 65,000 years ago, according to finds at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. Excavations in 2012 and 2015 found stone tools, ground ochre and the oldest known edge-ground axe heads in layers of that age. The date is debated, and some researchers prefer about 50,000 years ago. Australia was never joined to Asia, so the first settlers crossed open sea from the islands of Southeast Asia, probably on rafts or boats. At the time Australia and New Guinea formed one landmass, called Sahul. Their descendants spread to every part of it, and the Aboriginal Australians item follows their cultures to today.
Modern humans probably came along the coast from Arabia, in a debated time window.
People probably reached South Asia about 65,000 years ago, along the coast from Arabia. The date is debated, with estimates between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago. At Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, stone tools lay both below and above the ash of the Toba eruption of about 74,000 years ago. Some researchers think modern humans made them, while others credit earlier human species. The firmest evidence is later: at Fa-Hien Cave in Sri Lanka, hunters made bone arrow points by about 48,000 years ago. Many people in South Asia today descend partly from these first settlers. The first farming in the region began at Mehrgarh, about 7000 BCE.
A red painting of a pig and human-like figures in Sulawesi is 51,200 years old.
In the limestone cave of Leang Karampuang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a red painting shows a pig and three human-like figures. A layer of calcite that grew over the painting was dated by uranium-series analysis, and in 2024 researchers reported that the art is at least 51,200 years old. It is the oldest known figurative painting, and the figures seem to form a scene, which makes it the oldest known picture that tells a story. Other Sulawesi caves hold older-looking work, such as a warty pig at Leang Tedongnge that is at least 45,500 years old. The Chauvet Cave paintings in France came about 15,000 years later.
Modern humans reached Europe, where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
Modern humans arrived in Europe about 45,000 years ago. The oldest firmly dated remains are from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, while older traces from Grotte Mandrin in France, about 54,000 years old, are still debated. They found a continent already held by Neanderthals. The two groups met and mixed, and people outside Africa today carry one to two percent Neanderthal DNA. The newcomers made blades, beads and carved ivory, and by about 36,000 years ago they painted the walls of Chauvet Cave. The last Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago.
A thigh bone from Siberia gave one of the oldest genomes of Homo sapiens.
In 2008 a thigh bone was found on the bank of the Irtysh river near Ust'-Ishim in western Siberia. Radiocarbon dating showed that the man died about 45,000 years ago, and in 2014 researchers sequenced his genome, one of the oldest of Homo sapiens. About two percent of it was Neanderthal, in long unbroken stretches, so his ancestors had mixed with Neanderthals 7,000 to 13,000 years before he lived. He was about equally related to people today in Europe and East Asia, which suggests that he came from a group that lived before those two lines divided. People were living even farther north about 13,000 years later, at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site.
The first widespread culture of modern humans in Europe, with carvings, flutes and cave art.
The Aurignacian was the first widespread culture of modern humans in Europe, lasting from about 43,000 to 26,000 years ago. It is named after a rock shelter at Aurignac in southern France. Its people made blades, bone points and beads of ivory and shell. In the caves of the Swabian Jura in Germany they carved the oldest known figurative sculptures and made flutes from bird bone and mammoth ivory, the oldest known musical instruments. Painters were at work in Chauvet Cave in France. The Gravettian culture, with its Venus figurines and mammoth hunting, spread across Europe from about 33,000 years ago and replaced it.
Neanderthals, who had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, vanished.
Neanderthals, a human species that lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, died out about 40,000 years ago. A 2014 study that radiocarbon-dated bones and tools from 40 sites put their disappearance between about 41,000 and 39,000 years ago, in the same few thousand years in which Homo sapiens spread across Europe. The causes are debated: small and shrinking groups, a cooling climate, competition with the newcomers and disease have all been proposed. The two species also mixed, and people outside Africa today carry one to two percent Neanderthal DNA. Some Iberian groups may have lasted a few thousand years longer. The newcomers' Aurignacian culture then spread across the continent.
Painters in southern France drew lions, rhinoceroses and horses on cave walls.
In December 1994 three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, found a cave in the Ardèche valley in southern France whose walls were covered with paintings. The art includes more than 400 animals, among them lions, rhinoceroses, bears, horses and mammoths, drawn in charcoal and red ochre. The oldest paintings were made about 36,000 years ago, though the dating is debated, and a second group followed several thousand years later. A rockfall sealed the entrance about 21,000 years ago, which kept the walls in good condition. Painters at Lascaux, also in France, worked about 19,000 years after the first artists at Chauvet.
Ice sheets reached their greatest extent and sea level fell about 120 metres.
The Last Glacial Maximum was the time, from about 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, when the ice sheets of the last ice age were at their largest. Ice several kilometres thick covered Canada and northern Europe, and sea level stood about 120 metres lower than today. Britain was joined to the continent, and a land bridge called Beringia joined Siberia to Alaska. People in Europe retreated to warmer refuges in Iberia, southern France, Italy and the Balkans, and large parts of Africa and Asia turned dry. Some hunters lived in houses made of mammoth bones. The footprints at White Sands in New Mexico date from the same cold. Warming began about 19,000 years ago.
Human footprints in New Mexico are 21,000 to 23,000 years old, a debated date.
In 2021 researchers reported human footprints preserved in mud at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, on the shore of the dried-up Lake Otero. Seeds of the water plant Ruppia in the same layers dated the prints to 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, and tests in 2023 using pollen and optical dating gave the same range. Most of the prints were made by teenagers and children, and some lay inside the tracks of giant ground sloths. If the dates hold, people lived in the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis culture, which had long been thought the first. The dates are debated, and other early sites, such as Paisley Caves in Oregon, are about 14,000 years old.
Hunter-gatherers in Xianren Cave, China, cooked food in clay pots about 20,000 years ago.
In Xianren Cave in Jiangxi province, southern China, archaeologists found pottery fragments about 20,000 years old, the oldest known pottery in the world. The thin-walled pots had soot on the outside, so people had used them over fires to cook food. Their makers were hunter-gatherers who had not begun farming, which shows that pottery came long before agriculture. Fired clay figurines were made earlier, between about 29,000 and 25,000 years ago at Dolní Věstonice in what is now Czechia, but they were not vessels. Pottery appeared next in Japan, where people of the Jōmon culture were making cord-marked pots by about 16,000 years ago.
Hunter-gatherer-fishers in Japan lived in villages and made cord-marked pottery for 13,000 years.
The Jōmon were hunter-gatherer-fishers who lived on the Japanese islands from about 14,000 to 300 BCE. Their name means cord-marked, from the rope patterns pressed into their clay pots, some of the oldest pottery known. Unlike most hunter-gatherers they lived in villages through the year, on the shellfish, nuts and game of a rich coast and forest. At Sannai-Maruyama in northern Honshu, a village of hundreds of pit houses stood from about 3900 to 2200 BCE, with a great hall raised on six huge chestnut posts. Wet-rice farming reached Japan from Korea about 300 BCE, and the Yayoi period began.
Hunter-gatherers in the Levant lived in stone-built villages before farming began.
The Natufian culture lived in the Levant, in what is now Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, from about 12,500 to 9500 BCE. Dorothy Garrod, a British archaeologist, found its remains in 1928 at Shuqba Cave in Wadi Natuf and named it. The Natufians hunted gazelle and gathered wild wheat and barley with flint-edged sickles. Many lived in round stone houses in villages such as Ain Mallaha for most of the year, thousands of years before any farming. At Shubayqa 1 in Jordan, charred crumbs show that they baked flatbread about 14,400 years ago. Genetic studies show that the first farmers of the Levant descended mainly from Natufians. Farming began in the region soon after, and Jericho had a wall by about 8000 BCE.
The New Stone Age began when people in several parts of the world learned to grow crops and keep animals. Wheat and barley were farmed in the Fertile Crescent about 9000 BCE, rice on the Yangtze and maize in Mexico about 7000 BCE. Farming fed larger, settled communities: Çatalhöyük in Anatolia held several thousand people. Pottery, weaving and polished stone tools became common, and later copper was smelted. Cattle, sheep and goats gave meat, milk and wool, and the wheel appeared about 3500 BCE. By the end of the age the first cities were rising in southern Mesopotamia.
About five million people alive
World
Estimates put the world population at about five million as farming began.
Hunter-gatherers raised carved stone pillars on a hill in Turkey, before farming.
Göbekli Tepe, on a hill in south-eastern Turkey, has circles of T-shaped limestone pillars, the tallest about 5.5 metres high and weighing several tonnes. Hunter-gatherers raised them from about 9500 BCE, more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge, and carved them with foxes, boars, snakes and birds. The builders had no pottery and, so far as is known, no farming. The site was filled in about 8000 BCE and lay hidden until Klaus Schmidt began to excavate it in 1995. It showed that large shared building projects can come before settled farming, though how the builders were fed is still debated.
People in the Fertile Crescent began to sow wheat, barley, lentils and peas.
In the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land from the Jordan valley through south-eastern Turkey to the Zagros mountains, people began to sow and harvest wheat, barley, lentils and peas from about 9000 BCE. Wild stands of these plants had grown there since the end of the ice age, and Natufian villagers had already gathered them. Farming took thousands of years to become the main source of food, and it began separately in China and Mesoamerica. It fed the first towns, such as Jericho and Çatalhöyük, and farmers carried it into Europe with the Linear Pottery culture, about 5500 BCE.
A town in central Turkey of mud-brick houses entered through the roof.
Çatalhöyük was a town on the Konya plain in central Turkey with, at its height, between 5,000 and 8,000 people. Its mud-brick houses stood wall to wall with no streets, and people climbed in and out through holes in the roofs. They buried the dead under the floors, and painted walls with bulls, hunts and handprints. James Mellaart began excavating in 1958, and a team led by Ian Hodder has worked there since 1993. People left the town about 5700 BCE. By then the centre of change had moved south-east, to the farming villages of the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia.
Farmers in southern Mexico bred maize from teosinte, a wild grass.
Maize was bred from teosinte, a wild grass of southern Mexico whose ears hold only a few hard kernels. Genetic studies point to a single origin in the Balsas River valley, about 9,000 years ago, in about 7000 BCE. The oldest cobs found, from Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, are about 6,000 years old and shorter than a thumb. Over thousands of years farmers chose plants with larger ears, and maize spread north into what is now the United States and south to the Andes. It became the staple food of the Olmec and the Maya, and today it is one of the most widely grown crops in the world.
A farming village at the Bolan Pass, the oldest known in South Asia.
Mehrgarh lies at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, Pakistan, and holds the oldest known farming village in South Asia, dated from about 7000 BCE, though some dates are later. Its people grew wheat and barley, herded goats, sheep and cattle, and lived in mud-brick houses with storerooms. Graves held beads of turquoise and shell, which shows trade with the coast and with Afghanistan. Cotton seeds date from about 5000 BCE, and some teeth had been drilled. Jean-François Jarrige found the site in 1974. People left it about 2600 BCE, and the later cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation grew in the same region.
Villagers in the lower Yangtze valley grew rice in wet fields.
Rice was first farmed in the lower Yangtze valley, and the date is debated. At Shangshan in Zhejiang, people gathered and tended wild rice from about 9000 BCE, and by about 7000 BCE villages in the region were growing it as a crop, though plants with grains that stay on the stalk spread only over the following thousands of years. Wet fields suited rice, and the Yangtze delta was full of marsh and shallow lakes. By about 5000 BCE the Hemudu culture grew rice in flooded plots and lived in timber houses on stilts. Rice later spread to South and Southeast Asia and became the main food of billions of people.
Farming villages in southern Mesopotamia grew into the first towns, with temples.
The Ubaid period was the first culture to spread across Mesopotamia, named after Tell al-Ubaid, a mound near Ur in southern Iraq. Villagers watered barley and wheat from canals, kept sheep, goats and cattle, and made pottery painted with dark geometric patterns. By about 5000 BCE a shrine at Eridu was being rebuilt on the same spot again and again, growing into a large temple on a platform. Ubaid pottery turned up from the Persian Gulf to south-eastern Turkey, though whether it shows trade or a shared fashion is debated. About 4000 BCE the Ubaid way of life gave way to the larger, more crowded cities of Sumer.
Farmers spread from Hungary to the Rhine and built long timber houses.
The Linear Pottery culture was the first farming culture of central Europe. From about 5500 BCE its people carried wheat, barley, cattle and sheep from Hungary along the Danube, Rhine and Elbe, and made pots cut with lines, which gave the culture its name. They lived in villages of timber longhouses, some about 45 metres long. A pit at Talheim in Germany held the bodies of 34 people killed about 5000 BCE, which shows that farming villages also fought. Ancient DNA shows the farmers descended from people in Anatolia and mixed little at first with local hunter-gatherers. Later farmers in western Europe raised megaliths such as the Carnac stones.
Millet farmers along the middle Yellow River made red pottery painted in black.
The Yangshao culture was a group of millet-farming villages along the middle Yellow River, named after the village in Henan where Johan Gunnar Andersson found the first site in 1921. People kept pigs and dogs and made red pottery painted in black with fish, faces and geometric patterns. At Banpo near Xi'an, dug from 1953, round huts stood inside a ditch, with the graves outside it, and some pots carried marks that scholars do not generally read as writing. About 3000 BCE the Longshan culture, with its faster potter's wheel and walled towns, replaced the Yangshao villages across much of the Yellow River plain.
Farming villages along the Nile in Upper Egypt grew into small kingdoms.
The Naqada culture grew up along the Nile in Upper Egypt, named after the town of Naqada, where Flinders Petrie dug cemeteries in 1895. Its people lived in farming villages and made red pottery with black rims and vessels of fine stone. By about 3500 BCE some graves were far richer than others, and Hierakonpolis, Naqada and Abydos had become small kingdoms that traded with Nubia and the Levant. A painted tomb at Hierakonpolis dates from this time. About 3150 BCE the south took the whole valley, and tradition credits Narmer with uniting Egypt, the start of Ancient Egypt.
Cities in southern Mesopotamia built temples, canals and the first writing.
Sumer was a group of city-states in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where Uruk, Ur and Lagash grew from farming villages. Farmers dug canals to water their fields, and temples stored grain for the city. About 3200 BCE scribes in Uruk began to write on clay, and the Sumerians went on to record laws, hymns and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Uruk held tens of thousands of people by 2800 BCE, among the largest cities of its time. About 2334 BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerian cities and joined them in an empire. Sumerian stayed in use as a written language of religion and scholarship until about the first century CE.
Hunters on the Kazakh steppe lived on horses, which they kept and may have ridden.
The Botai culture was a group of hunter-herders on the steppe of northern Kazakhstan, named after the village of Botai. Their sites hold huge numbers of horse bones, and fat from mare's milk was found on their pots, which is the oldest known sign that people kept horses. Some horse teeth are worn as by a bit, though that is debated. Ancient DNA published in 2018 showed that Botai horses were ancestors of the Przewalski's horse, not of the domestic horse, which came from elsewhere. Modern horses descend from stock that the Yamnaya culture of the western steppe spread about 3000 BCE.
People on Peru's dry coast built stone platform mounds and plazas in river valleys.
The Norte Chico civilisation, also called Caral-Supe, grew up in the river valleys of Peru's dry north-central coast, about 200 kilometres north of Lima. Its people built twenty or more settlements with stone platform mounds and sunken circular plazas. Caral, the largest, dates from about 2600 BCE and has a main platform about 18 metres high, among the oldest known urban centres in the Americas. They had no pottery, which surprised archaeologists, and ate beans, squash and fish from the sea, while growing cotton for fishing nets. The civilisation faded about 1800 BCE, for reasons that are debated.
The summer rains moved south and the green Sahara dried out.
For several thousand years after about 12,000 BCE the Sahara held grassland, lakes and rivers, and herders painted cattle and giraffes on the rock walls of Tassili n'Ajjer. A slow change in the tilt of Earth's axis weakened the summer monsoon, and the rains shifted south. How fast the land dried is debated, but by about 3500 BCE the Sahara was turning to the desert it is today. People left for the Nile valley, the Sahel and the highlands, and the crowding of people along the Nile helped to build the villages of the Naqada culture and the state that followed it, Ancient Egypt.
The oldest known wheels were potters' wheels in Mesopotamia, soon followed by carts.
The oldest known wheels were potters' wheels in Mesopotamia, from about 3500 BCE, and wheels for carts and wagons followed within a few centuries. Pictures of wagons from the same time appear on a pot from Bronocice in Poland and on clay tablets from Uruk. The oldest wheel that survives, found in the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia, dates from about 3150 BCE and is made of ash and oak, with its axle. Wheeled vehicles appeared in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and central Europe at about the same time, and where the idea began is debated. About 2000 BCE people on the steppe fitted chariots with spoked wheels.
Uruk grew from two villages into a city of tens of thousands of people.
Uruk, on the Euphrates in southern Iraq, grew from two villages, Eanna and Kullaba, into a city of tens of thousands of people by about 3500 BCE. It had a central district of large temples, bevel-rimmed clay bowls made by the thousand to hand out rations, and cylinder seals to mark goods. Its walls were later said to have been built by the king Gilgamesh. Uruk gave its name to a whole period of southern Mesopotamian history, and about 3200 BCE its scribes made the oldest known writing, recorded on the timeline as writing invented in Sumer.
Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, gave the age its name, and the trade in metal crossed great distances. The first states and the first writing appeared: cuneiform in Sumer about 3200 BCE, hieroglyphs in Egypt, and later Chinese characters on the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty. Rivers fed the first large civilisations: the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow River. Kings built pyramids and ziggurats, and Hammurabi of Babylon issued a law code about 1754 BCE. Horse-drawn chariots changed warfare. In Mexico the Olmec began to build. Around 1200 BCE the age ended in the eastern Mediterranean, where many of its great powers collapsed within a generation.
Indus Valley Civilisation
South Asia
Planned brick cities with drains and standard weights grew along the Indus and its tributaries.
The Indus Valley Civilisation grew along the Indus river and its tributaries, in what is now Pakistan and north-west India, with large cities at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Its towns were laid out on grids, with brick houses, covered drains and public baths, and its people used standard weights and a script that nobody has yet read. They traded by land and sea with Mesopotamia, which called the region Meluhha. After about 1900 BCE the cities were slowly left, perhaps as the monsoon weakened and rivers shifted; the cause is debated. People moved east and south, and the Vedic period followed about 1500 BCE.
Steppe herders with ox wagons buried their dead in mounds and spread across Eurasia.
The Yamnaya were herders of cattle and sheep on the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas. They buried their dead in earth mounds called kurgans and were among the first to use wagons with solid wheels, pulled by oxen, and to ride horses, which let them move herds across the grassland. Ancient DNA shows that from about 3000 BCE their descendants spread west into Europe and east towards Central Asia, and much of the ancestry of present-day Europeans traces back to them. Many linguists think they spoke an early form of Indo-European, though this is debated. Related people later built the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures.
Scribes in Uruk drew signs in clay to keep accounts.
The oldest known writing comes from Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, from about 3200 BCE. It began as pictures drawn in wet clay to count grain, beer and livestock for the temples. Over the next centuries the pictures turned into wedge-shaped signs, now called cuneiform, that could spell out sounds and record laws, letters and poems such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Egypt had hieroglyphs at about the same time, and people in China and Mesoamerica later invented writing on their own. Around 1050 BCE the Phoenicians made an alphabet of 22 letters, far fewer signs to learn than cuneiform's hundreds.
Pharaohs ruled the Nile valley for about three thousand years, until Rome took it.
Egypt was united under a single king, traditionally Narmer, about 3150 BCE, and pharaohs ruled it for about three thousand years. The Nile flooded each year and left black silt that made the valley one of the richest farmlands of the ancient world. Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza in the Old Kingdom, wrote in hieroglyphs and mummified their dead. Foreign rulers and native dynasties took turns after the New Kingdom ended about 1069 BCE. The last pharaoh was Cleopatra VII, who died in 30 BCE when Octavian took Egypt for Rome.
Narmer, king of Upper Egypt, is said to have joined the Nile valley and delta.
Narmer, a king from Upper Egypt, is traditionally said to have joined the Nile valley and the delta into one kingdom about 3150 BCE. The Narmer Palette, a carved slab of slate found at Hierakonpolis, shows him in the white crown of the south on one side and the red crown of the north on the other. Whether Narmer or his successor Aha was the first king of a united Egypt, and whether the union came by conquest or slowly, is debated. His reign began the First Dynasty, Memphis became the capital, and within about 450 years the kings of the Old Kingdom were building pyramids.
Palace-building traders on Crete wrote Linear A and painted bulls and dolphins on walls.
The Minoans lived on Crete and built the oldest known civilisation in Europe. Their rulers had palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia, with storerooms, workshops, running water and wall paintings of bull-leaping, dolphins and processions. Arthur Evans, who dug Knossos from 1900, named them after the legendary King Minos. Minoan ships traded with Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant. They wrote in Linear A, which has not been deciphered. About 1600 BCE the Thera eruption struck the island with ash and waves, though how much damage it did is debated. About 1450 BCE the palaces burned, and the Mycenaeans from the mainland took Knossos.
Farmers from Taiwan began sailing out to the Philippines and the islands beyond.
Farmers who spoke early Austronesian languages left Taiwan about 3000 BCE and began one of the last great sea migrations in history. They sailed in outrigger canoes, first to the Philippines and then to Indonesia, carrying rice, millet, pigs, dogs and chickens. Most linguists and geneticists hold that all Austronesian languages come from Taiwan, though the route and timing are still argued. About 1500 BCE sailors reached the Mariana Islands, and the Lapita culture soon carried the voyages into the Pacific. Today more than 1,200 Austronesian languages are spoken, from Madagascar to Easter Island.
Neolithic builders raised stone circles on Salisbury Plain over about a thousand years.
Stonehenge is a ring of standing stones on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It began about 3000 BCE as a circular ditch and bank with wooden posts and pits holding cremated remains. About 2500 BCE builders raised the large sarsen stones, up to about 7 metres tall and 25 tonnes, in a circle with stone lintels, and brought smaller bluestones about 240 kilometres from the Preseli Hills in Wales. What it was used for is debated: a burial ground, a calendar for the midsummer sunrise and a place of gathering have all been suggested. Bell Beaker people, newcomers from the continent, buried their dead around it from about 2500 BCE.
Kings ruled from Memphis and built the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza.
The Old Kingdom was the age of the pyramid builders, from the Third Dynasty about 2686 BCE to the end of the Sixth about 2181 BCE. Kings ruled from Memphis through a class of salaried officials and raised stone tombs at Saqqara and Giza. The Step Pyramid of Djoser came first, and the Great Pyramid of Khufu followed. Later kings built smaller pyramids and carved religious texts inside them. Droughts, the growing power of provincial governors and the very long reign of Pepi II wore down the crown, and Egypt split into rival regions. The Middle Kingdom reunited it about 2055 BCE.
Khufu's tomb at Giza, 146.6 metres high, was the tallest structure for about 3,800 years.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu and finished about 2560 BCE. It rose to 146.6 metres, and it stayed the tallest structure in the world for nearly 4,000 years, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England passed it in the early 1300s. About 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite went into it. Skilled workers, fed and housed in a town beside the site, built it in about 20 years. Khufu's son Khafre and his grandson Menkaure added the two other large pyramids at Giza. It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.
Kerma was a Nubian kingdom on the Nile that rivalled Egypt before being conquered.
The Kerma culture was a kingdom in Nubia, on the Nile in what is now northern Sudan, with its capital at Kerma. Its rulers were buried under huge round mounds, some with hundreds of sacrificed attendants. Kerma traded gold, ivory and ebony with Egypt and grew strong enough to threaten Egyptian forts at the second cataract. Egyptian kings of the New Kingdom, led by Thutmose I, conquered it about 1500 BCE and ruled Nubia for about four centuries. After Egypt withdrew, the Kingdom of Kush grew up in the same land.
Oasis towns with mud-brick forts traded between Mesopotamia and the Indus.
The Oxus civilisation, also called the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, was a group of towns around oases in the deserts of present-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Irrigation fed fields of wheat and barley around mud-brick fortified towns such as Gonur Depe, where archaeologists found a palace, temples and shaft graves. Its people made seals, gold and silver vessels and carved stone, and traded lapis lazuli from Badakhshan towards Mesopotamia and the Indus. No writing has been found. The towns were left by about 1700 BCE, as rivers shifted and the climate dried. Where the people went, and how they relate to the Indo-Iranian speakers, is debated.
Sargon of Akkad joined the Mesopotamian city-states into the oldest known empire.
The Akkadian Empire was the oldest known empire, built by Sargon of Akkad from his new capital, Akkad, whose site has never been found. Its armies joined the Sumerian cities and reached from the Persian Gulf towards the Mediterranean. Akkadian, a Semitic language, became the language of government and was written beside Sumerian. Sargon's grandson Naram-Sin called himself king of the four quarters of the world. Rebellion, raids by the Gutians and perhaps drought ended the empire about 2154 BCE. Later Assyrian and Babylonian kings spoke dialects of Akkadian, and Hammurabi was one of them.
Sargon founded Akkad and conquered the Sumerian cities, ruling from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.
Sargon, according to later legend a cupbearer to the king of Kish, took power in southern Mesopotamia about 2334 BCE and founded the city of Akkad. He beat Lugalzagesi of Uruk, took the Sumerian city-states one by one and ruled from the Persian Gulf towards the Mediterranean, in what is the oldest known empire. He put his own governors in the cities. His daughter Enheduanna served as high priestess of the moon god at Ur and wrote hymns, and she is the oldest known named author. By tradition he ruled for 56 years. His sons and his grandson Naram-Sin held the Akkadian Empire together for another 150 years or so.
A Mesopotamian poem about a king of Uruk who sought eternal life.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of literature, grew from Sumerian poems about the king of Uruk, written down about 2100 BCE. It follows Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, who kill the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh goes in search of eternal life and learns that it is not meant for people. The best-known version, in Akkadian on twelve clay tablets, was put together between about 1300 and 1000 BCE. Copies were found in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, and in 1872 George Smith read its flood story, which resembles the story of Noah.
Assur on the Tigris became a kingdom, then the largest empire the Near East had seen.
Assyria began as a city-state around the city of Assur on the Tigris, in northern Mesopotamia, and became one of the longest-lasting states of the ancient Near East. About 1900 BCE merchants from Assur ran a trading network into Anatolia and left more than 20,000 clay tablets at Kanesh. Assyria was a rival of Babylon for centuries and, as the Neo-Assyrian Empire from about 911 BCE, took Egypt in 671 BCE. Its capital Nineveh fell to Babylonians and Medes in 612 BCE, and the last Assyrian army was beaten in 609 BCE.
Bantu-speaking farmers spread from West Africa across central, eastern and southern Africa.
Speakers of the Bantu languages began to spread from the area of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon about 2000 BCE. Over some 2,500 years they carried farming, and later iron working, east and south across central, eastern and southern Africa. They met hunter-gatherers and herders and, in many places, settled among them or replaced them. More than 300 million people now speak a Bantu language, among them Swahili, Zulu and Shona. When the movement began, how many waves it had and whether it was mostly migration or the spread of ideas are all debated.
Maya city-states in Mexico and Central America wrote in hieroglyphs and charted the planets.
The Maya lived in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras, where they built dozens of city-states, among them Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque and Copán. The first villages date from about 2000 BCE, and the first cities rose about 600 BCE. The Maya wrote in a hieroglyphic script, kept a calendar of days in cycles of 260 and 365, and charted Venus and eclipses. In the Classic period, about 250 to 900 CE, millions lived in the lowlands. Many southern cities were then left, with drought, war and overuse of land suggested as causes. Maya states in the north lasted, and the last independent city, Tayasal, fell to Spain in 1697.
The oldest known chariots with spoked wheels were buried in the southern Urals.
The oldest known chariots with spoked wheels were buried in graves of the Sintashta culture, in the southern Urals, about 2000 BCE. A spoked wheel was much lighter than a solid disc, so a pair of horses could pull a driver and a warrior at speed. The graves held horse sacrifices and weapons. The invention spread south and west: chariots were used in the Near East by about 1700 BCE, in Egypt by about 1600 BCE and in China under the Shang by about 1250 BCE. Thousands of them fought at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE.
Amorite kings made Babylon the leading city of Mesopotamia, until the Hittites sacked it.
Babylon was a small town on the Euphrates until Amorite kings made it a power. Its first dynasty, founded by Sumu-abum about 1894 BCE, grew under Hammurabi, who ruled from 1792 to 1750 BCE and conquered Mari, Eshnunna, Larsa and the rest of southern Mesopotamia. Officials, canals and written law held his empire together. His successors lost ground, and in 1595 BCE the Hittite king Mursili I raided Babylon and carried off the statue of the god Marduk. The Kassites took over the city next and kept it for about four centuries.
Babylon's king had 282 laws carved on a stone pillar, now in the Louvre.
The Code of Hammurabi was a set of 282 laws carved on a black basalt pillar about 1754 BCE by order of Hammurabi, king of Babylon. It is one of the oldest known written legal codes. Its rules cover trade, debt, marriage, wages and injury, and many follow the rule of an eye for an eye, though the punishment differed with the rank of the victim. At the top, the king is shown receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash. A king of Elam carried the pillar off to Susa in the 12th century BCE, and French archaeologists found it there in 1901. It now stands in the Louvre in Paris.
Warrior kings on the Greek mainland built fortress palaces and wrote Linear B.
Mycenaean Greece was a set of palace kingdoms on the Greek mainland, named after Mycenae in the Peloponnese, where early kings were buried with gold masks and weapons in shaft graves. Kings ruled from fortified palaces at Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns, with walls of huge stones and the Lion Gate. Palace scribes wrote an early form of Greek in the Linear B script, which Michael Ventris deciphered in 1952, to list goods and workers. The Mycenaeans traded around the Mediterranean and took over Crete. Between about 1200 and 1050 BCE the palaces burned or were left in the Bronze Age collapse. Memories of the age lived on in Homer's epics.
Hittite kings ruled Anatolia from Hattusa and fought Egypt for control of Syria.
The Hittites ruled central Anatolia from their capital Hattusa, whose ruins lie near Boğazkale in Turkey. They spoke the oldest written Indo-European language known and kept archives of clay tablets in cuneiform. Under Suppiluliuma I, about 1350 BCE, they took northern Syria from the kingdom of Mitanni. They fought Egypt at Kadesh in 1274 BCE and made peace with Ramesses II in 1259 BCE. About 1180 BCE Hattusa was burned and the empire broke up in the Bronze Age collapse, though small Neo-Hittite states lived on in northern Syria for several centuries.
Seafarers with stamped pottery settled islands from New Guinea to Samoa.
The Lapita culture is known from pottery stamped with patterns made by toothed tools, found on islands from New Guinea to Samoa. Its people spoke Austronesian languages and appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago about 1600 BCE. They crossed hundreds of kilometres of open sea in sailing canoes, carrying pigs, chickens, dogs, taro and yams, and settled islands that nobody had lived on before, among them Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga. By about 800 BCE they had reached Tonga and Samoa. Their descendants became the Polynesians, who later sailed on to Tahiti, Hawaii and New Zealand.
Mexico's first great civilisation carved colossal stone heads on the Gulf coast.
The Olmec lived on the Gulf coast of Mexico, in the hot lowlands of present-day Veracruz and Tabasco, and are often called the first major civilisation of Mesoamerica. Their centres at San Lorenzo, and later La Venta, had earthen mounds, plazas and basalt heads up to 3.4 metres tall, each carved with a different face. The stone was carried many kilometres from the hills. Olmec traders moved jade and obsidian over long distances, and Olmec styles in art and religion appear at sites across the region. The dates are debated: San Lorenzo flourished from about 1400 BCE and La Venta until about 400 BCE. Later Maya and Aztec cultures kept some of their ideas.
The Shang kings, rulers of the Yellow River plain, cast bronzes and kept oracle bones.
The Shang dynasty ruled the Yellow River plain and is the oldest Chinese dynasty known from writing. Its kings held court at Yin, near Anyang, from about 1300 BCE. Foundries there cast ritual bronze vessels, among them a cauldron of 832 kilograms. Kings asked their ancestors for advice by cracking heated animal bones and recording the questions on them, the oldest known Chinese writing. Royal tombs held chariots and human sacrifices. About 1046 BCE the Zhou, a western vassal state, beat the Shang at the Battle of Muye and founded the Zhou dynasty.
Egypt's empire reached from Nubia to the Euphrates under kings such as Ramesses II.
The New Kingdom, from about 1550 to 1069 BCE, was the richest and best-known age of Egypt. Ahmose I drove the Hyksos, foreign rulers of the Nile delta, out of Egypt and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty. His successors pushed the border south into Nubia and north-east towards the Euphrates. Kings were buried in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes, among them Tutankhamun, whose tomb Howard Carter found in 1922. The Ramesside kings fought the Hittites at Kadesh. Raids by the Sea Peoples, a weaker crown and priests who held much of the land wore the kingdom down, and it broke apart after the death of Ramesses XI.
Nok people in central Nigeria made terracotta figures, among the oldest large sculptures in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Nok culture lived on the plateau of central Nigeria. It is known for terracotta heads and figures, some almost life-size, with elaborate hairstyles and pierced eyes, and they are among the oldest large sculptures in sub-Saharan Africa. Nok people farmed millet, and they smelted iron, with the oldest furnaces dated to about 800 BCE. The dates of the culture and of its iron working are debated. Why the Nok settlements were left in the first centuries CE is not known. Ife, to the south-west, made lifelike heads in terracotta and brass from about 1100 CE.
A collection of 1,028 Sanskrit hymns, passed on by memory for centuries.
The Rigveda is the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest texts still in use. It holds 1,028 hymns in Vedic Sanskrit, arranged in ten books, most of them praising gods such as Agni, Indra and Soma. Priestly families composed them in the Punjab between about 1500 and 1000 BCE and passed them on by exact chanting for many centuries before anyone wrote them down. The oldest surviving manuscripts date only from about the 11th century CE. The hymns are the main source for early Vedic life, and they are still chanted at Hindu ceremonies. The Upanishads, composed from about 800 BCE, grew out of the later Vedas.
Cattle herders in the Punjab became farmers on the Ganges plain, and composed the Vedas.
The Vedic period is the age in northern India when the Vedas were composed, from about 1500 to 500 BCE. Indo-Aryan-speaking groups lived first in the Punjab as cattle herders and later farmed the Ganges plain, where small kingdoms grew up. Where these groups came from is debated; most scholars point to the Central Asian steppe. Priests passed on hymns, rituals and later philosophy by memory in Vedic Sanskrit, for many centuries before they were written down. Early forms of the caste system appeared. By the end of the period the sixteen Mahajanapada states had risen, and teachers such as the Buddha were preaching.
The oldest known Olmec centre, in Veracruz, held colossal heads and stone drains.
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, in southern Veracruz, was the oldest known Olmec centre and the largest settlement in Mesoamerica in its day. People lived there by about 1400 BCE, and it flourished from about 1200 to 900 BCE. Workers shaped a long plateau into a platform with mounds, plazas and a system of stone drains. They carved ten colossal basalt heads, some weighing more than 20 tonnes, from stone brought from the Tuxtla mountains, dozens of kilometres away. About 900 BCE the site was largely abandoned and its monuments were broken and buried, possibly after rivers shifted. La Venta, in Tabasco, then became the main Olmec centre.
Ramesses II and the Hittite king fought with thousands of chariots near the Orontes.
The Battle of Kadesh was fought in 1274 BCE between Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Muwatalli II at Kadesh, on the Orontes river in present-day Syria. Thousands of chariots took part, and it is often called the largest chariot battle ever fought. Two Hittite spies fed Ramesses false news that the Hittite army was far away. One of his divisions was ambushed and broke, and the king rallied the rest and held the field. Both sides claimed a victory, and Ramesses had the battle carved on temple walls. Sixteen years later the two kings signed the oldest surviving peace treaty.
Shang kings cracked heated bones and scratched the questions and answers on them.
Shang kings put questions to their ancestors by scratching them on ox shoulder blades and turtle shells, heating the bone until it cracked and reading the cracks. Some inscriptions also record the answer and what happened next. The earliest date from about 1250 BCE. About 150,000 pieces have been found since 1899, when a scholar in Beijing noticed marks on bones sold as medicine. The pieces carry about 4,500 different characters, of which about a third are read with confidence. They are the oldest known Chinese writing, and many of the signs are the ancestors of modern characters. The Zhou later took over the Shang writing.
Iron was harder to work than bronze but far more plentiful, so ordinary farmers and soldiers could afford iron tools and weapons. Large empires grew: Assyria, then Persia, which by 500 BCE ruled from Egypt to the Indus. The alphabet made reading and writing easier to learn, and coins made trade easier. Greek city-states and Rome appeared. In the same centuries China, India and Greece produced thinkers whose ideas are still read: Confucius, the Buddha and the first Greek philosophers. Iron working spread south of the Sahara, and in China the Zhou kings lost real power to their lords. The age ends as the Persian Wars with Greece began, in 499 BCE.
Bronze Age collapse
Middle East, Europe, Africa
Within decades, palace states from Greece to Syria burned, fell or lost their trade.
Between about 1200 and 1150 BCE, most of the great states of the eastern Mediterranean fell. The Mycenaean palaces in Greece were burned or left. The Hittite capital Hattusa was abandoned about 1180 BCE, and the Syrian port of Ugarit was destroyed. Egypt survived, but Ramesses III had to fight off the Sea Peoples, and its empire in Canaan was lost. Trade in tin, and with it bronze, broke down, and Greek writing in Linear B vanished for centuries. Historians still debate the cause, whether earthquakes, drought, migrations, invasion or revolt, and many think it was several together. Smaller states followed, among them Phoenicia, Israel and Judah.
Smiths in Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levant began making iron tools and weapons in quantity.
Iron objects were made long before 1200 BCE, but mostly from meteorites or in small amounts. From about 1300 to 1100 BCE smiths in Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levant smelted iron in quantity. Iron ore is common, while bronze needs copper and tin, and tin came from a few distant mines through long trade routes. When those routes broke in the Bronze Age collapse, iron became the cheaper metal. Smiths learned that hammering iron with charcoal made it harder, which gave steel. Ironworking spread through the Mediterranean and to South Asia within a century or two, and later to central Europe, where the Hallstatt culture used it. Exact dates and routes are debated.
Trading city-states on the Lebanese coast sent ships and colonists around the Mediterranean.
Phoenicia was a string of independent port cities on the coast of what is now Lebanon, among them Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. Their people traded timber from the cedars of Lebanon, glass and a purple dye made from sea snails. Their ships sailed the whole Mediterranean, and they founded colonies in Cyprus, Sicily, North Africa and Spain, among them Carthage. Each city had its own king. The cities fell in turn under Assyria, Babylon and Persia, and the Persian kings used their fleets. In 332 BCE Alexander the Great besieged Tyre for seven months, took it and sold many of its people as slaves.
A Nubian kingdom on the Nile ruled Egypt for a time and outlasted it by centuries.
Kush was a kingdom on the Nile in what is now northern Sudan, south of Egypt. Historians date its start anywhere from about 1070 to 780 BCE, and this is debated. Its kings ruled from Napata, worshipped Amun as the Egyptians did, and about 744 BCE took Egypt itself. After the Assyrians drove them out in 656 BCE they kept their own land. When an Egyptian army sacked Napata in about 591 BCE, the capital moved south to Meroë, where iron was worked and kings were buried under small steep pyramids. Kush declined and ended about 350 CE.
Merchants in Byblos and Tyre wrote with 22 letters, one for each consonant.
By about 1050 BCE the cities of Phoenicia, on the coast of what is now Lebanon, were writing with an alphabet of 22 letters. Each letter stood for a consonant and there were no vowels, so a scribe had far fewer signs to learn than in cuneiform or hieroglyphs. The signs came from older alphabets used in Canaan. Phoenician traders carried the script around the Mediterranean, to Carthage and beyond. The Greeks took it up in the 9th or 8th century BCE and added letters for vowels. The Etruscan and Latin alphabets came from the Greek one, and the Hebrew and Aramaic scripts grew out of the Phoenician.
The longest-ruling Chinese dynasty, whose kings lost power long before it ended.
The Zhou overthrew the Shang at the Battle of Muye in about 1046 BCE and ruled for about 800 years, the longest dynasty in Chinese history. Their kings gave land to relatives and allies, and as the lords grew strong they stopped obeying. After 770 BCE, when the court moved east to Luoyang, the kings were rulers in name only. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods followed, with constant war between states. Iron tools, coins and crossbows came into use, and Confucius, Laozi and Mozi taught in these centuries. In 256 BCE Qin took the last Zhou royal lands, and in 221 BCE it unified China.
Assyria, with iron weapons and siege engines, became the largest empire the Near East had seen.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire began in 911 BCE under Adad-nirari II and grew until it held Mesopotamia, the Levant and, for a time, Egypt. Its armies used iron weapons, cavalry and siege engines. Its kings moved conquered peoples to new lands; after Sargon II took Samaria, about 720 BCE, his records list 27,290 people deported from the kingdom of Israel. The capital moved from Assur to Kalhu, then to Nineveh, where palace walls were carved with lion hunts and battles. After the death of Ashurbanipal, civil war weakened Assyria. Babylon and the Medes took Nineveh in 612 BCE, and the last Assyrian force fell at Harran in 609 BCE.
A temple at Chavín de Huántar spread one art style across the Peruvian Andes.
The Chavín culture takes its name from Chavín de Huántar, a temple town high in the Andes of northern Peru. At the centre of its Old Temple stood the Lanzón, a carved granite shaft 4.53 metres tall that shows a fanged figure. Windowless stone galleries ran beneath the temple, built, it seems, to disorient visitors. Chavín art, full of jaguars, eagles and snakes, spread over the highlands and coast of Peru through trade and pilgrimage. The temple was used from about 900 to 200 BCE. After the culture faded, regional cultures grew up on the coast, among them Paracas and, later, Nazca.
Steppe warriors began to fight on horseback with short bows.
About 900 BCE warriors on the steppe began to fight on horseback in large numbers, in place of the chariot. Riders shot short composite bows, made of glued layers of wood, horn and sinew, and could shoot from the saddle without stirrups, which came much later. Small bands could strike from far away and ride off before an army of foot soldiers could answer. The Assyrians recorded raids by two such peoples, the Cimmerians and the Scythians, in the 7th century BCE. Later steppe peoples, from the Huns to the Mongols, fought in the same way and often beat the armies of settled states.
Lapita seafarers settled Tonga and Samoa, where Polynesian culture took shape.
Lapita seafarers sailed in large canoes from Fiji to Tonga and on to Samoa. Tonga was settled by about 900 BCE, and a site there at Nukuleka has a radiocarbon date of 888 BCE. Dates for Samoa are debated, and some are older. No one had lived on these islands before. Over the next centuries the settlers stopped decorating their pottery, and the language, customs and navigation of the Polynesians took shape. They stayed there for roughly 1,500 years. Voyagers then went east and settled the Cook and Society Islands, Hawaii, Easter Island and, last of all, New Zealand about 1250 to 1300 CE.
Horse-riding nomads of the steppe left no writing but kurgans full of gold.
The Scythians were nomads who spoke an Iranian language and lived on the steppe from the Black Sea eastward into Central Asia. They had no writing. What is known comes from Greek writers, above all Herodotus, and from their burial mounds, called kurgans, which hold gold ornaments, weapons, sacrificed horses and animal-style art. Herodotus wrote that they drank from the skulls of enemies, and that Darius I invaded their lands about 513 BCE and had to withdraw. From about the 3rd century BCE a related people, the Sarmatians, took over most of their grassland, and the name Scythian faded.
A Phoenician colony in Tunisia grew into a trading empire that fought Rome.
Carthage, on the coast of what is now Tunisia, was founded by settlers from the Phoenician city of Tyre, traditionally in 814 BCE under Queen Dido, whose existence is doubted. It grew into a trading city with a large navy and colonies in North Africa, Spain, Sardinia and Sicily. Magistrates called suffetes and a senate governed it. Carthage fought Rome in three Punic Wars from 264 BCE, and Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army and elephants in 218 BCE. In 146 BCE Rome took the city after a siege, burned it, and killed or enslaved its people.
Hundreds of independent Greek city-states shared a language and gods, and invented democracy.
From about 800 BCE, Greek speakers lived in hundreds of independent city-states around the Aegean and, through colonies, from the Black Sea to Sicily and southern Italy. They shared a language, gods and the Olympic Games. In the 5th century BCE Athens led the Greek defence against Persia, built the Parthenon, and was home to drama, history and the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta weakened the cities, and Macedon took control in the 4th century. Rome defeated the Greek cities in 146 BCE and sacked Corinth.
A mound in Tuva held a chief and rich grave goods from the early Scythian world.
Arzhan, in the Tuva region of southern Siberia, has several hundred kurgans, among them early royal burials of the Scythian world. The mound called Arzhan 1, excavated by Mikhail Gryaznov in the 1970s, dates to about 800 BCE. It held the oldest known set of what is called the Scythian triad: horse harness, weapons and animal-style art. A second mound, Arzhan 2, built about 650 to 600 BCE, was found untouched in 2001. It held a royal couple, sixteen sacrificed attendants and 9,300 objects, 5,700 of them gold, weighing about 20 kilograms. Animal-style art like this later spread west across the steppe.
Smiths in West and Central Africa were making iron by about 800 BCE, perhaps earlier.
People in West and Central Africa were smelting iron by the 9th to 8th centuries BCE. Furnaces and slag from the Nok culture in Nigeria are among the best-known sites. South of the Sahara, iron generally came before copper, and there was no Bronze Age. Some radiocarbon dates from Nigeria, Niger and the Central African Republic reach back to the third millennium BCE, but many scholars question them, so the date is debated. Whether Africans invented iron smelting themselves or learned it from the Mediterranean is also debated. The Bantu expansion later carried ironworking to eastern and southern Africa.
Peruvian desert people wove fine embroidered textiles and performed skull surgery.
The Paracas culture lived on the dry southern coast of Peru. Its people grew cotton and beans, fished and wove textiles of cotton and wool from llama and alpaca that are among the finest made in ancient America. The Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello found their cemetery on the Paracas peninsula: about 420 bodies, wrapped in embroidered cloth, buried between about 300 and 200 BCE. Paracas surgeons cut holes in the skull, a practice called trepanation, and many skulls show bone that had begun to heal, so most patients lived. The Nazca culture grew up in the same valleys and is known for the Nazca Lines.
Teachers in northern India wrote Sanskrit dialogues on the self, rebirth and release.
The Upanishads are Sanskrit texts, many of them dialogues between teachers and pupils, that ask what the self is and what lies behind the world. Their central ideas are atman, the self, and Brahman, the ultimate reality, and they treat rebirth and release from it, called moksha, as the aim of life. The oldest, such as the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya, were composed in prose between about 800 and 500 BCE, though dating is debated. They come at the end of the Vedas and are called Vedanta, the end of the Veda. They shaped later Hindu thought, and in 1657 the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh had 50 of them translated into Persian.
Greeks dated their first Olympics to 776 BCE, a footrace at Olympia for Zeus.
The Greeks dated their first Olympic Games to 776 BCE, a date worked out centuries later from lists of winners. Coroebus of Elis won the one foot race, the stadion, about 192 metres long. The Games honoured Zeus at Olympia and were held every four years, and a sacred truce let athletes and spectators travel safely from every Greek city. Wrestling, boxing and chariot racing were added later. Only free Greek men could compete. The Games lasted more than a thousand years and ended in the late 4th century CE under a Christian Roman emperor. The modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896.
Romans said Romulus founded the city on the Palatine Hill on 21 April 753 BCE.
According to Roman tradition, Romulus founded Rome on 21 April 753 BCE on the Palatine Hill, after he killed his twin brother Remus in a quarrel. The twins were sons of the god Mars and had been left to die as babies and suckled by a she-wolf. The scholar Varro worked out the date in the 1st century BCE. Archaeologists find that people lived on the Palatine Hill long before that, and that a city formed slowly from villages on the nearby hills. Romulus was the first of seven traditional kings. The last was driven out in 509 BCE, and the Roman Republic began.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, poems about Troy, were set down in Greek.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, two long Greek poems about the Trojan War and Odysseus's ten-year journey home, were composed and written down in the 8th century BCE, perhaps with the new Greek alphabet. The Iliad has 15,693 lines and the Odyssey 12,109. Ancient Greeks said a blind poet called Homer made them. Whether one poet or a long line of singers did so is still debated. The poems drew on stories sung for centuries, which kept memories of the Mycenaean age. Greek children learned from them for a thousand years, and the Roman poet Virgil modelled his Aeneid on them.
Kings from Kush ruled Egypt as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty until Assyria drove them out.
In the 8th century BCE Egypt was split between rival local kings. Piye, king of Kush, brought them under his rule and recorded it on a victory stela found at Jebel Barkal. His successors Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tantamani ruled as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, which is dated from 744 BCE. They restored temples and built small pyramids at home in Kush. Assyria, whose armies carried iron weapons, invaded under Esarhaddon in 671 BCE and under Ashurbanipal after him. The Kushites were driven back south by 656 BCE, and Egypt came under local rulers loyal to Assyria.
Lydian kings stamped lumps of electrum with a lion, and money in coins began.
The oldest known coins come from Lydia, a kingdom in western Anatolia, and are dated to about 650 to 600 BCE. They were small lumps of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, stamped with a lion. The stamp told the buyer the weight and metal and made them easier to trust than a lump weighed on the spot. Under King Croesus, about 560 BCE, Lydia minted separate gold and silver coins. Persia took Lydia in 546 BCE and issued its own gold coin, the daric. Greek cities began to mint coins soon after, and the habit spread across the Mediterranean and Asia. The exact dates are debated.
Babylon took most of Assyria's lands and rebuilt itself as the greatest city of its time.
Nabopolassar, a Chaldean, made himself king of Babylon in 626 BCE, rose against Assyria, and with the Medes destroyed Nineveh in 612 BCE. His son Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from 605 to 562 BCE, took Syria and Judah and rebuilt Babylon with a processional way and the Ishtar Gate, faced with blue glazed bricks. The last king, Nabonidus, spent years away at the oasis of Tayma in Arabia and angered the priests of Babylon by favouring the moon god Sin. In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus took the city without a long siege, and the empire ended.
Babylonians and Medes stormed Nineveh and ended the Assyrian Empire.
In 612 BCE the Babylonian king Nabopolassar and the Median king Cyaxares besieged Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, for about three months. The city fell in August. King Sin-shar-ishkun was killed, and the palaces were burned. A remnant of the Assyrian army, led by Ashur-uballit II, retreated to Harran and was defeated there in 609 BCE. The fire baked the clay tablets of the royal library, and they survived to be dug up in the 1850s. Babylon took most of the Assyrian lands, which became the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Medes took the north and east.
A city in the Guatemalan jungle built one of the largest pyramids by volume.
El Mirador, in the jungle of northern Guatemala, was settled from about 1000 BCE and had its first large buildings by about 600 BCE. It reached its height from about 300 BCE. Its largest pyramid, La Danta, is about 72 metres tall and holds some 2.8 million cubic metres of stone and fill, which makes it among the largest pyramids in the world by volume. Raised stone roads linked El Mirador to other cities in the Mirador Basin. The city was largely abandoned by about 150 CE, and the reason is debated. Later Maya cities, such as Tikal and Calakmul, rose to power in the Classic period.
Sixteen kingdoms and republics shared northern India before Magadha swallowed its neighbours.
The Mahajanapadas, "great realms", were sixteen states in northern India named in Buddhist and Jain texts, from Gandhara in the north-west to Anga in the east. Some, such as Kosala, Vatsa and Magadha, were monarchies. Others, such as the Vajji and Malla, were ruled by assemblies of clan chiefs. Cities grew along the Ganges, and punch-marked silver coins came into use. Both the Buddha and Mahavira taught in Kosala and Magadha. Magadha absorbed its neighbours one after another, and the Nanda dynasty took power there about 345 BCE. About 321 BCE Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nandas and founded the Maurya Empire.
Nebuchadnezzar II burned Jerusalem and its Temple and exiled its leaders to Babylon.
After King Zedekiah of Judah rebelled, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon besieged Jerusalem from 589 BCE. The city fell in the summer of 587 BCE, though some scholars give 586. Babylonian soldiers burned the Temple built by Solomon, the royal palace and the houses, and pulled down the walls. Many people died, and thousands more, among them the royal family, priests and craftsmen, were taken to Babylon. The Hebrew Bible calls this the Babylonian exile. It lasted until Cyrus of Persia took Babylon in 539 BCE and allowed the exiles to return and rebuild the Temple, which was finished about 516 BCE.
A prince in northern India gave up wealth and taught a way out of suffering.
Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini, in present-day Nepal, into the ruling family of the Shakya clan. According to Buddhist tradition he left his palace at 29 to look for a way out of suffering, and after years of study and fasting he found it, at about 35, while meditating under a tree at Bodh Gaya. He taught for some 45 years in the Ganges plain and gathered a community of monks and nuns. He died at Kushinagar, aged 80. The usual dates, 563 to 483 BCE, are debated, and some scholars place his death between about 410 and 400 BCE. Buddhism spread along trade routes and later became the main religion of much of East and Southeast Asia.
A teacher from the state of Lu whose sayings shaped Chinese ethics and government.
Confucius was born in the state of Lu, in present-day Shandong, and worked as a minor official before spending years travelling between courts, looking for a ruler who would follow his advice. He taught that a good society rests on moral example, respect within the family and learning, and that rulers should govern by virtue rather than force. He wrote no book himself: his pupils collected his sayings in the Analects after his death in 479 BCE. Under the Han dynasty his teaching became the basis of state education, and until 1905 Confucian texts were the core of the civil service examinations.
Persian kings ruled from Egypt to the Indus, the largest empire the world had seen.
Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, defeated the Median king Astyages about 550 BCE and within about ten years had taken Lydia and Babylon. His son Cambyses II added Egypt in 525 BCE, and Darius I pushed the border to the Indus. About 500 BCE the empire covered some 5.5 million square kilometres. It was ruled through provincial governors called satraps and linked by the Royal Road, about 2,700 kilometres from Sardis to Susa. Persian armies invaded Greece in 490 and 480 BCE and were beaten both times. In 330 BCE the empire ended, after Alexander the Great defeated Darius III and Darius was murdered by his own officers.
The Persian army entered Babylon and ended the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
In October 539 BCE Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian army at Opis, and his troops entered Babylon soon after with little fighting. King Nabonidus was captured. The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel now in the British Museum, records in Akkadian that Cyrus returned the gods to their temples and let displaced peoples go home. The Hebrew Bible says he allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Some have called the cylinder an early declaration of human rights, but many historians dispute that reading. Babylon became a Persian province, and the Achaemenid Empire now stretched from the Aegean to Central Asia.
Rome had no king: elected officials and the Senate ruled and won an empire.
According to Roman tradition the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out in 509 BCE, and two elected consuls took his place each year. The Senate advised them, and the people voted in assemblies. In its first 250 years the Republic won control of Italy. Three wars against Carthage, the last ending in 146 BCE with the city destroyed, made Rome the main power of the western Mediterranean. Conquest brought wealth and slaves to a few families and unrest to many. Civil wars between generals, from Marius and Sulla to Caesar and Pompey, ended the Republic. In 27 BCE the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus.
Cleisthenes reformed Athens so that its male citizens voted on laws in an assembly.
In 508 BCE the Athenian Cleisthenes proposed reforms after the people had risen against Isagoras, a rival who ruled with Spartan backing. He divided the citizens into ten new tribes, mixed by district, and set up a council of 500 members chosen by lot. The assembly, open to all adult male citizens, voted on laws and war. The Greeks called this demokratia, rule by the people. Women, enslaved people and foreigners, most of the people of Attica, had no vote. Athens kept this system, with short breaks, for nearly two centuries, and its fullest form came under Pericles in the 5th century BCE.
Great empires rose in every part of Eurasia: Persia, Rome, the Maurya and Gupta empires in India, and the Han in China. Each ruled tens of millions of people. Greek philosophers and scientists, Roman engineers and Indian mathematicians set down ideas that were studied for centuries afterwards. The Silk Road joined China to the Mediterranean, and with trade came religions: Buddhism spread across Asia, and Christianity began in Judea and became the Roman Empire's official religion in 380. In the Americas, Teotihuacan grew into one of the largest cities in the world, and in East Africa Aksum became a trading power. The age ended when the Western Roman Empire fell in 476.
Cast iron in China
East Asia and the Pacific
Chinese ironworkers poured molten iron into moulds nearly 2,000 years before Europeans did.
Greek city-states beat two Persian invasions and kept their independence.
The Greco-Persian Wars began in 499 BCE, when the Greek cities of Ionia rebelled against the Persian king, with help from Athens. Darius I sent an army across the Aegean, and the Athenians beat it at Marathon in 490 BCE. In 480 BCE Xerxes I led a much larger force into Greece. A small Greek army, among them 300 Spartans, held the pass at Thermopylae for three days before it was destroyed, and the Greek fleet won at Salamis. A year later the Greeks won on land at Plataea. Athens then led an alliance that carried the war to Persian lands, and a peace was made in 449 BCE. Athens and Sparta fought each other next, in the Peloponnesian War.
Seven Chinese states fought for control of the Zhou lands for over 250 years.
The Warring States period lasted from about 475 BCE to 221 BCE, after the Zhou kings had lost real power. Seven states, Qin, Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei, fought for the land. Iron tools and weapons, crossbows and cavalry made armies larger, and the wars were deadly. At Changping in 260 BCE the historian Sima Qian says Qin killed about 400,000 captured Zhao soldiers, a figure that is probably exaggerated. It was also an age of ideas. The Hundred Schools of Thought produced Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Fei and Mozi, and the book The Art of War is attributed to Sun Tzu. Qin, strengthened by the reforms of Shang Yang, won in 221 BCE.
Athens built a marble temple to Athena on the Acropolis under Pericles.
The Parthenon is a temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens, built between 447 and 432 BCE under the statesman Pericles. The architects were Ictinus and Callicrates, and the sculptor Phidias oversaw its carvings and made the statue of Athena inside, covered in gold and ivory. It was paid for in part with money from the Delian League, an alliance of Greek cities. It later served as a church and as a mosque. In 1687, while the Ottomans kept gunpowder in it, a Venetian shell hit it and blew up the middle of the building. In the early 1800s Lord Elgin took many of its sculptures to London; Greece has asked for them back.
Aristotle studied under Plato, tutored Alexander and wrote on logic, biology and ethics.
Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece and studied under Plato in Athens for about twenty years. He tutored the young Alexander the Great, and in 335 BCE he founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. He wrote on logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics and poetry, and he described some 500 kinds of animals. His writings on logic stayed the standard in Europe for about two thousand years. Many of his works were kept by scholars who wrote in Arabic, such as Ibn Rushd, and came back to Europe in Latin translation in the Middle Ages. He left Athens in 322 BCE and died the same year on the island of Euboea.
The king of Macedon conquered the Persian Empire and led his army to the Indus.
Alexander became king of Macedon at 20, in 336 BCE, when his father Philip II was murdered. In 334 BCE he crossed into Asia with about 40,000 men. He beat the Persians at Issus and Gaugamela, took Egypt, where he founded Alexandria, and reached the Indus. His army refused to go further east, and he turned back. His campaigns were brutal: at Tyre in 332 BCE about 8,000 people were killed and 30,000 sold into slavery, by the account of the historian Arrian. He died in Babylon in June 323 BCE, aged 32. His generals fought over the empire for decades and split it into kingdoms, which opened the Hellenistic period.
At Gaugamela, Alexander routed the army of Darius III and won the Persian empire.
On 1 October 331 BCE Alexander the Great met the Persian king Darius III at Gaugamela, on a plain in what is now northern Iraq. Alexander had about 47,000 men; ancient writers gave Darius hundreds of thousands, which modern historians cut sharply. Alexander led a cavalry charge at a gap in the Persian line, and Darius fled. Babylon and Susa opened their gates, and in 330 Alexander burned the palaces of Persepolis. Darius was killed that year by one of his own governors, Bessus. The Achaemenid Empire was finished. Alexander went on to Central Asia and India, and after his death his generals divided what he had won, as the Seleucid Empire and others.
Greek language and culture spread from Greece to Egypt and India after Alexander's death.
The Hellenistic period runs from the death of Alexander in 323 BCE to the Roman victory at Actium in 31 BCE, with Egypt falling a year later. Greek kings of the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid dynasties ruled lands from Greece to Central Asia, and Greek became the common language from Egypt to Afghanistan. Alexandria and Antioch were the largest cities. Scholars worked at the Library of Alexandria: Eratosthenes measured the Earth, and Aristarchus proposed that the Earth goes around the Sun. Greek sculptors and Indian craftsmen mixed their styles in the Buddhist art of Gandhara. Rome took one Hellenistic kingdom after another.
From Pataliputra, Maurya kings ruled most of the Indian subcontinent.
Chandragupta Maurya, advised by the minister Chanakya, took the Ganges kingdom of Magadha from the Nanda dynasty about 322 BCE and made Pataliputra his capital. About 305 BCE he beat Seleucus I, who gave up the lands west of the Indus for 500 war elephants. His grandson Ashoka ruled from about 268 BCE and held nearly the whole subcontinent, about five million square kilometres. The empire kept a large army and paid officials, and Ashoka had his edicts carved on rocks and pillars. After his death in about 232 BCE the empire weakened, and in about 185 BCE the general Pushyamitra Shunga killed the last Maurya king, Brihadratha.
A Greek-speaking dynasty held most of Alexander's Asian lands, from Syria to Persia.
Seleucus I, one of Alexander's generals, took Babylon in 312 BCE and built the largest of the kingdoms that split Alexander's empire. Its capital was Antioch in Syria, and Greek soldiers and settlers manned new cities across Persia and Mesopotamia. About 305 BCE Seleucus gave up his lands around the Indus to Chandragupta Maurya in return for 500 war elephants. Bactria and Parthia broke away in the 3rd century BCE, and Rome beat Antiochus III at Magnesia in 190 BCE. The Maccabees rebelled against Antiochus IV in Judaea. By 63 BCE only Syria was left, and Pompey made it a Roman province.
Euclid collected the geometry of his day into thirteen books built on proofs.
Euclid wrote the Elements in Alexandria about 300 BCE. Its thirteen books cover plane and solid geometry and the theory of numbers, and each result is proved from a short list of definitions and five postulates, the starting assumptions. One of its proofs shows that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Almost nothing is known of Euclid's life. The book was translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries, and in 1482 it was among the first mathematical works printed in Europe, in Venice. For some 2,000 years it was the standard textbook of geometry.
The Ptolemies gathered scrolls from across the Mediterranean into one great library.
The Library of Alexandria was founded in the early 3rd century BCE under Ptolemy I or his son Ptolemy II, as part of a scholars' institute called the Mouseion. The kings collected scrolls from across the Mediterranean, and ships that docked in the harbour were searched so that books could be copied. Ancient writers gave figures of hundreds of thousands of scrolls, but the real number is not known. Scholars there included Eratosthenes, who measured the size of the Earth about 240 BCE. The library declined over centuries rather than burning in one fire. Hypatia taught mathematics in the city around 400.
Rome and Carthage fought three wars over Sicily, Spain and North Africa.
The Punic Wars were three wars between Rome and Carthage. The first, from 264 to 241 BCE, was fought over Sicily, and Rome built a fleet to win it. In the second, from 218 to 201 BCE, Hannibal led an army with war elephants over the Alps and beat the Romans at Cannae in 216 BCE, where tens of thousands of Romans died. Scipio ended the war by defeating him at Zama in 202 BCE in North Africa. In the third, from 149 to 146 BCE, Rome besieged Carthage and destroyed it. Rome was left without a rival in the western Mediterranean, and it made Carthage's land the province of Africa.
After the bloody conquest of Kalinga, Ashoka embraced Buddhism and ruled by moral law.
About 261 BCE the Maurya emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on the east coast of India. His own Rock Edict XIII says that about 100,000 people were killed and 150,000 deported. He wrote that he felt remorse and turned to Buddhism and to what he called dhamma, a rule of kindness, honesty and tolerance. He had edicts carved on rocks and pillars in several languages across the empire, built rest houses and wells, and sent Buddhist envoys as far as the Hellenistic kingdoms. His son Mahinda carried Buddhism to Sri Lanka. How far Ashoka was a Buddhist himself is debated. The Lion Capital from one of his pillars is the emblem of India today.
Horse-archer kings ruled Iran and Mesopotamia and held off Rome for nearly five centuries.
Arsaces I, chief of the nomadic Parni, took the land of Parthia in north-east Iran from the Seleucids about 247 BCE. Under Mithridates I, from about 171 BCE, the Parthians took Persia and Mesopotamia and made Ctesiphon on the Tigris their capital. Their horse archers and armoured cavalry beat a Roman army under Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BCE. The empire grew rich from the Silk Road, which carried silk from China and goods from Rome through its lands. Wars with Rome and civil strife wore it down, and in 224 CE Ardashir I, a Persian vassal king, killed the last Parthian king and founded the Sasanian Empire.
The Qin created the first unified Chinese empire, then collapsed within fifteen years.
The state of Qin, in the west, conquered the six other states of the Warring States period between 230 and 221 BCE. Its king, Ying Zheng, took the title Shi Huangdi, First Emperor. He divided the empire into commanderies run by appointed officials, not by hereditary lords, and he standardised the script, coins, weights and measures, and the width of cart axles. He sent armies south and north, and he used huge numbers of conscripted workers on roads, walls and his tomb. He died in 210 BCE. His son was weak, and revolts broke out. In 206 BCE the rebel Liu Bang took the capital Xianyang, and in 202 BCE he founded the Han dynasty.
Qin conquered the last rival state and its king became the First Emperor.
In 221 BCE the army of Qin took Qi, the last of the rival states, and ended some 250 years of fighting between the kingdoms of China. Qin had defeated Han in 230 BCE, Zhao in 228, Wei in 225, Chu in 223 and Yan in 222. Its king, Ying Zheng, declared himself the First Emperor and ruled all the former kingdoms. The conquest was brutal, and later writers recorded great losses in the wars. The dynasty set up the first government that ruled all of China, with the same law, script and measures everywhere. It lasted only until 206 BCE, but the Han dynasty that followed kept most of its structure.
Qin joined older frontier walls into one long barrier against the Xiongnu.
After unifying China, the First Emperor ordered the walls that the northern states had built before to be joined and extended along the frontier with the Xiongnu. General Meng Tian was sent north with an army said to number 300,000 men, and conscripted workers built the wall mostly of rammed earth. Later dynasties repaired and added to it. The Han extended it far to the west, to guard the Silk Road. The Great Wall that visitors see today is mostly different: it is made of brick and stone, and the Ming dynasty built it between the 14th and 17th centuries.
Thousands of clay soldiers were buried beside the First Emperor's tomb near Xi'an.
The Terracotta Army is a set of clay soldiers buried near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, at the time of his burial in about 210 BCE. Farmers digging a well found it in 1974 near Xi'an. Archaeologists estimate that it holds about 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses. The figures were made in parts and each face differs; they were painted, and they once held real bronze weapons. The historian Sima Qian wrote that 700,000 workers built the whole tomb complex. The emperor's burial chamber itself has not been opened. Sima Qian described rivers of mercury in it, and tests have found mercury in the soil above.
A confederation of nomads on the Mongolian steppe that threatened Han China for 300 years.
The Xiongnu were a confederation of horse-riding nomads who lived on the steppe of Mongolia. About 209 BCE a leader named Modu Chanyu united the tribes and conquered his neighbours. In 200 BCE he trapped the first Han emperor, Gaozu, at Baideng, and for decades the Han paid the Xiongnu silk, grain and princesses in marriage to keep the peace. Emperor Wu of Han went to war against them from 133 BCE. The Xiongnu split in 54 BCE, and the southern branch submitted to the Han. Han armies beat the northern branch in 89 to 91 CE, and it moved west. Some historians link the Xiongnu to the later Huns, but the link is debated.
Four centuries of rule gave China a lasting model of government and a Confucian state.
Liu Bang, a village official turned rebel, beat his rival Xiang Yu in 202 BCE and became the first Han emperor. The dynasty ruled from Chang'an, and then from Luoyang after Wang Mang's short Xin dynasty from 9 to 23 CE. Emperor Wu, who ruled from 141 to 87 BCE, pushed the frontiers into Korea, Vietnam and Central Asia, and made Confucian teaching the basis of the state. A census in 2 CE counted about 58 million people. Paper and the seismoscope belong to the Han. Famine, rebellions such as the Yellow Turbans in 184 and the power of generals broke the dynasty, and in 220 the last emperor gave way. Three Kingdoms followed.
After a three-year siege, Roman troops burned Carthage and enslaved its survivors.
In the spring of 146 BCE a Roman army under Scipio Aemilianus broke into Carthage after a siege of about three years. Street fighting went on for six days, and most of the city's people died in the siege or the assault. About 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. The city burned for days and its walls were pulled down. The story that the Romans sowed the ground with salt is a later invention. Rome made the land the province of Africa, and in the same year it destroyed the Greek city of Corinth. Carthage was refounded as a Roman city about a century later and became one of the largest in the western empire.
Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Middle East
Zhang Qian's journey west for the Han emperor opened a trade route across Asia.
In about 138 BCE the Han emperor Wu sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, west with about 100 men to find the Yuezhi and ally with them against the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu captured him and held him for about ten years. He escaped, reached Ferghana and Bactria, and came back in 126 BCE with one companion and news of rich lands and of Ferghana's large horses. Emperor Wu then sent embassies and armies west, and by about 130 BCE trade was moving along a chain of routes joining China, Central Asia, Parthia and Rome. Traders carried silk, glass, horses and spices, and religions and diseases travelled too. The name Silk Road was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen.
Caesar conquered Gaul, won a civil war and was made dictator of Rome for life.
Julius Caesar was a Roman politician and general. As governor he conquered Gaul between 58 and 50 BCE; ancient writers claimed that about a million Gauls died and as many were enslaved, figures historians think too high. In 49 BCE he crossed the Rubicon with his army, which began a civil war against Pompey, and he won it. He was named dictator for life in 44 BCE. He also reformed the calendar: the Julian calendar of 365 days with a leap year came into use in 45 BCE. A group of senators who feared he would make himself king stabbed him to death on 15 March 44 BCE. His adopted heir Octavian became the first Roman emperor, Augustus.
People on the dry coast of Peru drew giant figures on the desert, the Nazca Lines.
The Nazca culture lived on the dry south coast of Peru. Its people grew maize and beans in river valleys and made painted pottery in many colours, and they held ceremonies at the centre of Cahuachi. They are best known for the Nazca Lines, drawings of a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider and other figures, some more than 90 metres long, made by moving dark stones to show the pale ground below. What they were for is debated; ideas include paths for ritual walks and offerings for water. Nazca farmers also dug spiral-shaped wells and underground channels to reach water, and some are still in use. The culture faded about 800, possibly after drought and floods.
A planned city in the Valley of Mexico became one of the largest in the world.
Teotihuacan lies about 50 kilometres north-east of Mexico City. It grew from about 100 BCE, and by about 450 CE it had perhaps 125,000 people, which made it one of the largest cities in the world. It was laid out on a grid along the Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, and thousands of apartment compounds with painted walls. Its obsidian tools were traded across Mesoamerica, and its influence reached Maya cities such as Tikal, which an army linked to Teotihuacan took in 378. Its builders' language is not known; the Aztecs gave the city its name centuries later. About 550 its centre was burned, and the city declined.
Senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death in Rome on the Ides of March.
On 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides of March, more than sixty senators led by Brutus and Cassius attacked Julius Caesar at a meeting of the Senate in Pompey's Theatre in Rome. According to the biographer Suetonius he took 23 stab wounds. The killers said they were saving the Republic from a man who had made himself dictator for life. Instead the killing started another round of civil wars. Caesar's adopted heir Octavian and his general Mark Antony beat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BCE, then fought each other. After Octavian won at Actium in 31 BCE, the Senate gave him the name Augustus in 27 BCE, and the Roman Empire began.
A Korean kingdom held Manchuria and northern Korea and fended off China for centuries.
Goguryeo was a kingdom of northern Korea and Manchuria, founded, by tradition, in 37 BCE by Jumong. Its capital moved from the Yalu valley to Pyongyang in 427. Under Gwanggaeto the Great, who ruled from 391 to 413, and his son Jangsu it was the strongest of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, with Baekje and Silla. Goguryeo beat the huge Sui invasions of 612 and later, among them the victory of General Eulji Mundeok at the Salsu River. In 668 the Tang dynasty and Silla together conquered it. The English name Korea comes from Goryeo, the later dynasty that took Goguryeo's name.
Emperors in Rome ruled the whole Mediterranean for four centuries.
In 27 BCE the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus, and Rome's republic became a monarchy in all but name. At its largest, under Trajan in 117 CE, the empire covered about five million square kilometres, from Britain to Mesopotamia.
The third century brought civil wars, plague and invasions. Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople in 330, and after 395 the empire was split for good between an eastern and a western emperor. The western half fell in 476; the eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453.
A Jewish preacher from Galilee, crucified under Pontius Pilate, whose followers began Christianity.
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish teacher from Galilee, born in the last years of Herod the Great, before 4 BCE. Historians agree that he was baptised by John the Baptist, taught in Galilee and Judaea, and was crucified in Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, in 30 or 33 CE. His followers believe that he rose from the dead and that he was the Messiah, the Christ. Paul of Tarsus and others carried the message across the Roman Empire. Christianity has more than two billion followers today. Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 ended its persecution, and in 380 it became the religion of the Roman state.
A Central Asian empire joined Bactria and northern India and spread Buddhism along the Silk Road.
The Kushan Empire grew from the Yuezhi, a people who had moved from north-west China to Bactria, in what is now Afghanistan. About 30 CE their leader Kujula Kadphises united the tribes. At its height the empire stretched from Bactria across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Ganges plain. It lay in the middle of the Silk Road and taxed the trade between Rome, Parthia, India and China. Its coins carried Greek, Iranian and Indian gods and the Buddha. Under Kanishka, from about 127, Buddhism spread to Central Asia and China, and artists in Gandhara carved the Buddha in a Greek style. The Sasanians took the western lands about 230, and the Gupta Empire took the east in the 4th century.
Buddhism came to Han China along the Silk Road from Central Asia and India.
Buddhism came to China along the Silk Road from India and Central Asia, mostly through the Kushan lands. The first sure reference to it is from 65 CE, in the Book of the Later Han, which mentions a Buddhist community at the court of Prince Ying. A later tradition says that Emperor Ming dreamed of a golden figure and sent envoys west, and that the White Horse Temple was then built near Luoyang. From about 148 foreign monks, among them the Parthian An Shigao, translated Buddhist texts into Chinese in Luoyang. Buddhism spread widely after the fall of the Han in 220, and by the 6th century it had large monasteries in both north and south. Chan, known in Japan as Zen, grew from it.
Titus took Jerusalem after a siege and burned the Jewish temple.
In 66 CE Jews in Judaea rose against Roman rule. In the spring of 70 the general Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem, and the city fell in late summer. The Second Temple, the centre of Jewish worship, was burned. The historian Josephus, who was there, wrote that 1.1 million people died in the siege and 97,000 were taken prisoner; historians think his figures are too high. The Arch of Titus in Rome shows soldiers carrying off the temple's menorah. The temple was never rebuilt, and Judaism came to centre on the synagogue and the rabbis. Another Jewish revolt, led by Bar Kokhba, was put down in 135.
Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and rock.
In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, erupted. The traditional date is 24 August, though some evidence points to October. A column of ash rose about 33 kilometres. Pompeii was buried under up to six metres of ash and pumice, and the nearby town of Herculaneum was buried by clouds of hot gas and rock. About 2,000 people are thought to have died at Pompeii. Pliny the Elder, a Roman commander and writer, sailed across the bay to rescue people and died on the shore; his nephew Pliny the Younger described the eruption in two letters. Pompeii lay under the ground until it was found in 1748, and its streets, houses and wall paintings are still being dug out.
Moche farmers on Peru's north coast built adobe temples and made lifelike portrait pots.
The Moche lived on the north coast of Peru, in river valleys cut off from each other by desert. They dug irrigation canals to grow maize, beans and squash, and they built large adobe temple mounds, among them the Huaca de la Luna and the Huaca del Sol. Their potters made lifelike portrait vessels and pots showing animals and ritual combat. In 1987 the archaeologist Walter Alva found the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, buried about 250 CE with gold, silver and turquoise ornaments. Many prisoners were sacrificed to the gods. The Moche societies ended about 800. Floods and drought linked to climate shifts are suggested, but the cause is debated.
Cai Lun, a Han court official, presented paper made from bark, rags and old nets.
In 105 CE the court official Cai Lun presented the Han emperor He with paper made from tree bark, hemp, rags and old fishing nets. Earlier fragments of paper, from the 2nd century BCE, have been found in tombs, so Cai Lun probably improved the method rather than inventing it. Paper was cheaper than silk and lighter than bamboo strips, and it spread across China. It reached Korea and Japan in the following centuries. Paper-makers in Samarkand learned the craft by about 751, and from the Islamic world it reached Europe through Spain in the 12th century. In the 1450s Gutenberg printed most copies of his Bible on paper in Mainz.
A trading kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands linked Rome, Arabia and India by the Red Sea.
Aksum was a trading kingdom in the highlands of what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, with its port at Adulis on the Red Sea. It sent ivory, gold and tortoiseshell to Egypt, Rome, Arabia and India, and by about 270 its kings were minting their own coins. They raised carved stone stelae over their tombs; the largest, now fallen, stood about 33 metres tall. King Ezana took up Christianity about 330. In the 6th century Aksum crossed the Red Sea and held part of Yemen. After a Persian conquest of Yemen in about 570 and the rise of Muslim control of the Red Sea, trade shrank and the kingdom faded by about 960.
Persian kings made Zoroastrianism the state religion and fought Rome and Byzantium for four centuries.
Ardashir I, a Persian ruler from Fars, defeated the last Parthian king in 224 and was crowned at Ctesiphon. The Sasanians ruled more closely than the Parthians had and made Zoroastrianism the state religion. In 260 Shapur I beat the Roman army at Edessa and took the emperor Valerian prisoner. The last great war with the Byzantines, from 602 to 628, took Egypt and Jerusalem for a time and left both empires exhausted. Arab armies of the Rashidun caliphate then won at al-Qadisiyyah in about 636 and Nahavand in 642. Yazdegerd III, the last shah, was killed in 651.
Maya city-states under divine kings built stone temples and carved their history in glyphs.
The Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE, was the height of Maya civilisation. In the lowlands of present-day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and southern Mexico, dozens of city-states such as Tikal, Calakmul, Copán and Palenque were each ruled by a divine king, and they allied and fought one another. Kings recorded their births, wars and rituals in hieroglyphs on stone stelae. K'inich Janaab' Pakal ruled Palenque for 68 years, from 615 to 683. From about 800 the cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned one after another. Drought, war and too many people for the land are all offered as causes, and the collapse is still debated. Maya people continued in the north.
A West African state grew rich by taxing the trade in gold and salt.
The Ghana Empire, also called Wagadu, lay in what is now south-eastern Mauritania and western Mali, not in the modern country of Ghana, which took the name in 1957 in its honour. Its kings, from the Soninke people, taxed the gold that came north from the forests and the salt that camel caravans carried south from the Sahara. The Arab geographer al-Bakri described the king's court in 1068. Almoravid armies from the north attacked the empire in the 11th century. When it ended is debated, from about 1076 to the mid-13th century, when the Mali Empire took over its lands.
Kings in northern India ruled a rich empire with advances in mathematics, astronomy and art.
The Gupta Empire grew from Magadha, in the Ganges plain, about 320 CE, when Chandragupta I took the title of great king. His son Samudragupta and grandson Chandragupta II, who ruled from about 375, brought most of northern India under them. The Chinese monk Faxian travelled through the empire in the early 5th century and found it well ordered. Under the Guptas, mathematicians such as Aryabhata worked out astronomy and a decimal place-value system, and Sanskrit writers such as Kalidasa, often placed in this age, wrote plays and poems. Raids by the Alchon Huns from about 500 weakened the empire, and by about 550 it had broken into smaller kingdoms.
Mounted nomads from the steppe pushed the Goths into Roman lands, and Attila raided the empire.
The Huns were mounted nomads from the steppe east of the Volga; where they came from is debated. About 370 they moved into the lands north of the Black Sea, and in 376 they drove the Goths across the Danube into the Roman Empire. By the 430s their kings ruled from the plain of Hungary and took gold from both Roman empires, in the 440s 2,100 pounds a year from the East. Attila, who ruled from 434, raided the Balkans and invaded Gaul, where a Roman and Gothic army stopped him at the Catalaunian Plains in 451. He invaded Italy in 452 and died in 453. His sons quarrelled, subject peoples rebelled, and the empire was gone by 469.
Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and others moved into the Roman Empire's lands.
The Migration Period was an age when peoples from beyond the Roman frontier moved into the empire. It is usually dated from about 375, when the arrival of the Huns pushed the Goths to the Danube, to 568, when the Lombards entered Italy. In 378 the Goths beat a Roman army at Adrianople and killed the emperor Valens. Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine in 406, and the Vandals later took Carthage in 439. Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed to Britain, and Franks settled in Gaul. Rome's western half dissolved into kingdoms ruled by these peoples. Historians disagree about how much was invasion and how much slow settlement.
The eastern half of the Roman Empire lasted another thousand years from Constantinople.
After 395 the Roman Empire had two emperors, and the eastern half, ruled from Constantinople, outlived the western by almost a thousand years. Its people called themselves Romans and spoke Greek; the name Byzantine was given later. Under Justinian in the 6th century it won back Italy and North Africa and built the Hagia Sophia, finished in 537. In the 7th century Arab armies took Syria, Egypt and North Africa, and later the Seljuk Turks took most of Anatolia. In 1204 knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, and the empire never fully recovered. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took the city on 29 May 1453.
A Germanic general deposed the last western emperor and ruled Italy himself.
In 476 Odoacer, a Germanic commander of the army in Italy, deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus, who was about sixteen, and sent the imperial regalia to the eastern emperor in Constantinople. He did not kill Romulus but pensioned him off, and he ruled Italy as king. By then the western provinces were already held by others: Visigoths in Spain and southern Gaul, Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, Vandals in North Africa, and Angles and Saxons in Britain. Whether 476 really ended Rome is debated, since many Romans kept living as before. In 493 the Ostrogoth Theodoric killed Odoacer and ruled Italy. The eastern empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, went on.
The Franks, under Clovis and his heirs, built the largest kingdom in post-Roman western Europe.
Francia was the kingdom of the Franks, which began when Clovis I became king of the Salian Franks in 481. He beat the last Roman ruler in Gaul in 486 and the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507, and he took Catholic Christianity, which won him the support of the Gallo-Roman bishops. His Merovingian dynasty was replaced in 751 by the Carolingians. Charles Martel won at Tours in 732, and his grandson Charlemagne conquered Saxony, Bavaria and Lombard Italy and was crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun divided the empire among Charlemagne's three grandsons, and the western part became the base of France.
Aryabhata wrote the Aryabhatiya, with astronomy, trigonometry and a value of pi.
In 499 CE the mathematician Aryabhata finished the Aryabhatiya, a work of 121 verses on mathematics and astronomy. He wrote that he was 23 years old. He explained day and night by the Earth turning on its axis, rather than the sky turning around it, and he explained eclipses as shadows of the Earth and the Moon rather than the work of a demon. He gave pi as 3.1416, a close value, and a table of sines, and he used a place-value system for numbers. The work was translated into Arabic and was known to scholars in the Islamic world. India named its first satellite Aryabhata, launched in 1975.
After the Western Roman Empire fell, Europe divided into many kingdoms, while Islam rose in Arabia in the 7th century and within a hundred years ruled from Spain to the Indus. The Tang and Song dynasties made China one of the richest and most inventive societies of its time: paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass came from there. The Mongols conquered most of Asia in the 13th century. In West Africa the empires of Ghana and Mali grew rich on gold, and in the Americas the Maya cities and later the Aztec and Inca built great states. The Black Death killed a third or more of Europe's people in 1346–1353. Printing with movable type began in Europe about 1440, Constantinople fell in 1453 and Columbus sailed in 1492.
Marajoara culture
Americas
Marajoara people built earth mounds and painted pottery on Marajó Island in the Amazon delta.
Emperor Justinian had Roman law collected into a single code, published in 529.
Justinian I became Byzantine emperor in 527 and soon set a commission under the jurist Tribonian to sort out the Roman laws, which had piled up over a thousand years and often contradicted each other. The Code of Justinian was published in April 529. In 533 came the Digest, a summary of the writings of the great Roman jurists in 50 books, and a short textbook, the Institutes. Together with the later laws, the Novels, they are now called the Corpus Juris Civilis.
The code was written in Latin, though most of the empire spoke Greek. It was little used in western Europe until scholars at Bologna began to study it in the 11th century, and it became the base of civil law in much of Europe.
Plague spread from Egypt around the Mediterranean and returned for two centuries.
In 541 plague reached the port of Pelusium in Egypt. It was caused by the same bacterium as the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, and it came to Constantinople in 542. The historian Procopius wrote that 10,000 people died there each day at the worst, a figure historians doubt. Emperor Justinian caught the disease and recovered. The first outbreak spread across the Mediterranean world and into northern Europe and Arabia by 549.
The plague came back in waves until about 750. The total deaths are uncertain, and estimates for the whole pandemic run from 15 to 100 million. It weakened Justinian's wars to retake the western empire. The second great plague pandemic, the Black Death, began in 1346.
Turkic khagans ruled the steppe from Manchuria to the Black Sea for two centuries.
In 552 Bumin Qaghan, a Turkic chief, overthrew the Rouran, who had ruled the Mongolian steppe, and took the title khagan. His brother Istemi led the western tribes, and the Göktürks came to control the steppe from Manchuria towards the Black Sea. They traded silk with Sogdian merchants and sent envoys to Constantinople. The realm split into an eastern and a western khaganate in the 580s. Tang China beat the eastern one in 630, and a second eastern khaganate rose in 682. Its rulers had their deeds carved on stone pillars in the Orkhon valley, among the oldest known writing in a Turkic language. In 744 the Uyghurs and their allies overthrew the last khagan.
The Prophet of Islam preached in Mecca and Medina and united Arabia.
Muhammad was born in Mecca about 570 and worked as a merchant. About 610, aged about 40, he said that the angel Gabriel had given him the first words of the Quran in a cave on Mount Hira, and he began to preach one God. Opposition in Mecca forced him and his followers to move to Medina in 622, an event called the Hijra. After years of war with Mecca he took the city in 630, and by his death in Medina on 8 June 632 most of Arabia had accepted Islam. His successors, the first four caliphs of the Rashidun Caliphate, then led Arab armies out of Arabia. Today about two billion people are Muslims.
The Sui reunited China after almost three centuries of division and built the Grand Canal.
Yang Jian, a general of the northern courts, took the throne in 581 as Emperor Wen and conquered the southern kingdom of Chen in 589. China was one empire again for the first time in almost three centuries. The Sui built a new capital at Daxing, later called Chang'an, and joined older canals into the Grand Canal, which carried grain between the Yangtze and the Yellow River. His son Emperor Yang spent men and money on the canal, on rebuilding Luoyang and on failed wars against Goguryeo in Korea. Rebellions broke out, and Yang was killed in 618. Li Yuan, one of his generals, founded the Tang dynasty the same year.
From Chang'an the Tang ruled China and much of Inner Asia for nearly three centuries.
Li Yuan proclaimed the Tang dynasty on 18 June 618, after the Sui collapsed. Its capital, Chang'an, was among the largest cities in the world. By 661 the empire covered about 5.4 million square kilometres, and it fought for the Silk Road trade routes across Inner Asia. Wu Zetian ruled as emperor from 690 to 705, the only woman to do so. The poets Li Bai and Du Fu wrote under the Tang, and printing began to spread. The An Lushan rebellion, from 755 to 763, left the Tang weak, and governors in the provinces kept much of their own power. In 907 Zhu Wen deposed the last emperor, and China split into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. The Song reunited most of it in 960.
Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina, the start of the Muslim calendar.
In 622 Muhammad and his followers left Mecca, where they were persecuted, for the oasis city of Yathrib, later called Medina. The Muslims went in small groups over some weeks, and Muhammad left last, with his friend Abu Bakr. The people of Yathrib, tired of feuds between their own clans, had asked him to arbitrate, and he drew up an agreement that joined the Muslims, the other clans and the Jewish tribes of the city into one community. The Hijra, meaning migration, marked a turn from preaching to governing. Years later Caliph Umar made 622 the first year of the Islamic calendar. Muhammad took Mecca in 630.
Brahmagupta gave the oldest known rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying with zero.
In 628 the astronomer Brahmagupta, then about 30 and working in Bhillamala in Rajasthan, finished the Brahmasphutasiddhanta. It is the oldest known text to treat zero as a number with rules of its own, and not only as an empty place in a written number, which Babylonian scribes and Indian writers had used before. He wrote that a debt added to zero is a debt, and that zero minus a debt is a fortune. His rule for dividing by zero was wrong, since he said that zero divided by zero is zero. His work was translated into Arabic in the late 700s. Al-Khwarizmi spread Indian numerals, and Fibonacci brought them to Europe in 1202.
Four caliphs after Muhammad led Arab armies across Persia, Syria and Egypt.
After Muhammad died in 632 the community chose Abu Bakr as caliph, meaning successor. He and the next three caliphs, Umar, Uthman and Ali, are called the Rashidun, the rightly guided. In about thirty years Arab armies took Syria and Egypt from the Byzantine Empire, after the battle of Yarmouk in 636, and conquered the Sasanian Empire of Persia, whose last king died in 651. Uthman was killed by rebels in 656, and Ali was killed in 661 during the first civil war over who should lead. Muawiya, the governor of Syria, then became caliph and founded the Umayyad Caliphate. The split between Sunni and Shia Muslims goes back to this struggle.
Srivijaya was a Buddhist sea power in Sumatra that taxed the trade through the Malacca Strait.
Srivijaya was a trading kingdom on Sumatra, centred on Palembang, whose ships and ports controlled the sea route between China and India. The Chinese monk Yijing stayed there in 671 to study Buddhist texts, and a stone inscription of 682 is the oldest record of it by name. Kings grew rich by taxing the ships that passed, and the kingdom was a centre of Buddhist learning with ties to Bengal. The Chola Empire of southern India raided its ports in 1025. Chinese records kept using the name Sanfoqi for centuries, and when the kingdom ended is debated. Scholars forgot it until George Cœdès described it in 1918. Majapahit later held the same waters.
Caliphs in Damascus ruled from Spain to the Indus.
Muawiya became caliph in 661 and made Damascus the capital, and the office passed in his family, the Umayyads. His successors took North Africa and, in 711, most of Spain, and they reached the Indus valley and Central Asia in the east. Under Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 685, Arabic became the language of government and the Dome of the Rock was finished in Jerusalem in 691 or 692. Most people in the empire were not Muslims at first, and non-Arab converts resented paying higher taxes and having less standing than Arabs. A revolt from Khorasan, led by the Abbasids, beat the last caliph, Marwan II, in 750. One Umayyad prince escaped to Spain and founded a rule in Córdoba.
Muslim states ruled most of Iberia and then shrank to Granada over 781 years.
Al-Andalus was the name for the parts of Spain and Portugal under Muslim rule. After the conquest of 711 it was a province of the Umayyad caliphate. In 756 Abd al-Rahman I, an Umayyad who had escaped the Abbasids, set up an emirate at Córdoba, and in 929 Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph. The caliphate broke into small kingdoms, the taifas, in 1031. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived under Muslim rulers, who taxed non-Muslims, and Arabic scholarship, from medicine to philosophy, passed from Al-Andalus to the rest of Europe. Christian kingdoms took Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. Granada held out as a small emirate until it fell in 1492.
Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar and beat the Visigothic king Roderic.
In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber commander serving the Umayyad governor of North Africa, crossed the strait with about 7,000 men and landed at the rock now called Gibraltar, from Jabal Tariq, "Tariq's mountain". He beat the Visigothic king Roderic in battle, probably in July, and Roderic was killed. More troops followed, and within a few years most of the Iberian peninsula was under Muslim rule. Only a strip of mountains in the north stayed Christian. Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees and raided Gaul until Charles Martel's Franks stopped one near Tours in 732. The conquered land became Al-Andalus, which lasted until 1492.
King of the Franks who ruled most of western Europe and was crowned emperor.
Charlemagne, born in about 747, became king of the Franks in 768 and ruled alone from 771. He conquered the Lombards in Italy in 774 and fought the pagan Saxons for about 30 years. In 782, according to the Frankish annals, he had 4,500 Saxons beheaded at Verden. His empire stretched from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and south into Italy. He held court at Aachen and gathered scholars such as Alcuin of York, and the clear small script written in his schools, Carolingian minuscule, is the base of modern lower-case letters.
On Christmas Day 800 the pope crowned him emperor. He died in 814, and in 843 his grandsons split the empire into three parts that grew into France and Germany.
Caliphs in Baghdad ruled the Muslim world, then reigned as figureheads.
The Abbasids, descendants of Muhammad's uncle al-Abbas, came to power in 750 after a revolt that beat the last Umayyad caliph. In 762 Caliph al-Mansur founded a new capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris. Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809, is remembered as the caliph at the height of the empire's wealth. The caliphs paid for scholars and translators, and the age is called the Islamic Golden Age. Their rule over distant provinces weakened from the 9th century, and the Iranian Buyids took Baghdad in 945 and the Seljuks in 1055, leaving the caliphs with religious authority only. In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad and killed the caliph. The Mamluks later kept an Abbasid caliph in Cairo as a figurehead.
Scholars in Baghdad and other cities advanced mathematics, medicine, astronomy and optics.
Under the Abbasid caliphs, scholars in Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba and other cities translated Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic and added to them. Al-Khwarizmi wrote on algebra about 820, the physician Ibn Sina finished his Canon of Medicine in 1025, and in Cairo Ibn al-Haytham wrote the Book of Optics about 1011 to 1021. Paper, which Arab sources say came to Samarkand after the Battle of Talas in 751, made books cheaper. Historians disagree about when the age began and ended: some end it with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and others put the end later. Latin translations of Arabic works carried much of this learning to Europe from the 12th century.
Scandinavians raided, traded and settled from Russia to Greenland for almost three centuries.
The Viking Age began in 793 with the raid on Lindisfarne and ended in 1066, when the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada was killed at Stamford Bridge in England. Seafarers from Norway, Denmark and Sweden sailed in clinker-built longships that could cross open sea and also go up shallow rivers. They raided monasteries and towns, took slaves, and also traded and farmed. Danes settled in eastern England, the Danelaw, and in 911 a band under Rollo was given land in Normandy. Swedes travelled down the rivers of Russia and helped found Kievan Rus'. Norse settlers reached Iceland about 870 and Greenland about 985, and Leif Erikson reached North America about 1000.
Norse raiders plundered the monastery on Holy Island, off Northumbria, in June 793.
On 8 June 793 raiders from Scandinavia landed on Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, off the coast of Northumbria in England, and attacked its monastery. They killed some of the monks, took others as slaves and carried off treasure. The monastery was one of the holiest places in England. The scholar Alcuin of York, who was at Charlemagne's court, wrote that never before had such terror appeared in Britain. Raids on other coastal monasteries followed, among them Iona in 795, and in 865 a large Danish army came to England to stay. Historians use the Lindisfarne raid to mark the start of the Viking Age, although earlier raids may have happened.
Emperors and the Fujiwara family ruled Japan from Kyoto, and court women wrote its classics.
Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō, now Kyoto, in 794, and it stayed the seat of the court for over a thousand years. From the ninth century the Fujiwara family held power by marrying daughters to emperors and ruling as regents. Court women wrote in the kana script, which fits spoken Japanese: Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon the Pillow Book. Landowners in the provinces trained warriors, and the samurai grew strong. Two warrior clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, fought the Genpei War from 1180, and the Minamoto won at Dan-no-ura in 1185. Minamoto no Yoritomo then set up the Kamakura shogunate.
On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome.
On 25 December 800 Pope Leo III placed a crown on Charlemagne's head in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, and the crowd hailed him as emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne had come to Rome to hear charges against Leo, who had been attacked in the street by Roman rivals the year before. The Frankish writer Einhard said Charlemagne would not have entered the church that day had he known what the pope planned.
No emperor had ruled in the West since 476, and the court at Constantinople, where Empress Irene reigned, held that the Roman Empire was still its own. The coronation tied the popes to the Frankish kings. Otto I, king of Germany, was crowned emperor in Rome in 962, which is taken as the start of the Holy Roman Empire.
Maize farmers in the south-east built towns around earthen platform mounds.
The Mississippian culture was a set of Native American societies that built towns around flat-topped earth mounds along the Mississippi and its tributaries and across the south-east of what is now the United States. The mainstream range is about 800 to 1600 CE, and where it begins is debated, because it depends on whether a transitional phase of about 900 to 1000 is counted. Farmers grew maize, and chiefs lived in buildings on top of the mounds. Cahokia, in Illinois, was the largest town, and Moundville in Alabama, Etowah in Georgia and Spiro in Oklahoma were other centres. Cahokia was left by about 1350. The Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto, from 1539 to 1543, met some of the last large chiefdoms, and disease and violence broke them up.
Cities of the southern Maya lowlands stopped building monuments and lost most of their people.
Between about 800 and 900 CE the great cities of the southern Maya lowlands, in what is now Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico, declined and emptied. Kings stopped raising stone monuments with dated inscriptions; the last known one, at Toniná, is dated 909. Tikal and the other large cities lost most of their people. Drought, war between the cities, over-use of farmland and the end of trade routes are all proposed, and the cause is debated. The Maya did not disappear. Cities in the northern Yucatán, such as Chichén Itzá, grew as the southern ones fell, and millions of Maya people still live in the region today.
The Khmer built Angkor and ruled most of mainland Southeast Asia.
In 802 the Khmer prince Jayavarman II proclaimed himself universal ruler on Phnom Kulen, in what is now Cambodia. His successors built a capital at Angkor, with a network of reservoirs and canals that fed rice fields. The area around Angkor had perhaps 700,000 to 900,000 people in the 1200s. Suryavarman II built Angkor Wat, and Jayavarman VII built Angkor Thom and the Bayon, and, says tradition, 102 hospitals. At its largest the empire covered about a million square kilometres. Ayutthaya took Angkor in 1352 and again in 1394, and in 1431 the king left it for the Phnom Penh area. Drought, floods, war and a change of religion are all given as causes.
Caliph al-Ma’mun backed a library and translation centre in Baghdad.
The House of Wisdom was a library and centre of translation in Baghdad. It grew from a book collection begun under Harun al-Rashid, and Caliph al-Ma'mun, who ruled from 813 to 833, gave it his support, about 830 by the usual dating. Scholars there translated Greek works on medicine, mathematics and philosophy into Arabic, among them the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Arabic and Persian authors wrote new ones. The mathematician al-Khwarizmi worked there, and his book on algebra gave the subject its name. How formal an institution it was, and how much happened there rather than in other libraries, is debated. After the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, later writers said that so many books were thrown into the Tigris that it ran black.
Tamil kings built a naval empire that reached Sri Lanka, Bengal and Southeast Asia.
The medieval Cholas rose from Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, where Vijayalaya took the city about 848. Rajaraja I (985–1014) conquered southern India and northern Sri Lanka and built the Brihadisvara Temple at Thanjavur. His son Rajendra I sent an army to the Ganges and, in 1025, a fleet that raided the ports of Srivijaya, the Southeast Asian sea empire. Chola merchants traded with China, and Chola bronze statues, such as the dancing Shiva, are well known. After a defeat by the Pandyas in 1215–1216 the Cholas lost ground, and Pandya kings took their lands. Rajendra III was the last ruler, and the dynasty ended in 1279. The Vijayanagara Empire rose in the same south in 1336.
A Buddhist scroll printed in 868 is the oldest known dated printed book.
The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text, was printed with carved wooden blocks in 868, in the ninth year of Emperor Yizong. Its end note says it was made by a man named Wang Jie, to hand out for free in memory of his parents. The scroll is about five metres long. A monk, Wang Yuanlu, found it in 1900 in a sealed cave at Mogao, near Dunhuang, with thousands of other manuscripts, and Aurel Stein bought it in 1907. It is now in the British Library. Earlier printed paper exists, but this is the oldest with a date. Under the Song, printing grew into a large trade in books, and movable type followed in the eleventh century.
A union of East Slavic princes around Kyiv ruled from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Kievan Rus' was a loose state of East Slavic princedoms ruled from Kyiv by the Rurikid dynasty, whose founders came from Scandinavia. By the traditional account, Prince Oleg took Kyiv in 882 and joined it with Novgorod. His successor Vladimir the Great was baptised in 988, and the land took Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople. Yaroslav the Wise, who ruled until 1054, had the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv built and a law code written. After his death the princes fought over the throne and the state split into rival principalities. In December 1240 a Mongol army under Batu Khan sacked Kyiv. Ukraine, Russia and Belarus all trace their history to Rus'. The Grand Duchy of Moscow later grew out of it.
Shia caliphs began in Tunisia and ruled Egypt from Cairo, a city they founded.
The Fatimids, followers of Isma'ili Shia Islam, overthrew the Aghlabid rulers of Tunisia in 909, and Abdallah al-Mahdi was proclaimed caliph in 910. They claimed descent from Muhammad's daughter Fatima and rejected the authority of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. In 969 their general Jawhar took Egypt and founded Cairo, and the caliph al-Mu'izz arrived there in 973. Al-Azhar, built in Cairo from 970, became a teaching institution in 988. At their height the Fatimids held North Africa, Sicily, Syria and Arabia's west coast. Famine, revolts and fighting between their generals weakened the state, and in 1171 Saladin ended the caliphate and founded the Ayyubid dynasty.
Goryeo united the Korean peninsula in 936 and gave Korea its English name.
General Wang Geon took the throne in 918, moved the capital to Kaesong and by 936 had absorbed the last rival kingdoms of the peninsula. Buddhism was the state religion. Craftsmen made celadon pottery, and in the thirteenth century monks carved the Tripitaka Koreana, more than 80,000 woodblocks of the Buddhist canon. A book printed with movable metal type in 1377, the Jikji, is the oldest surviving one. Military families held real power from 1170 to 1270. The Mongols invaded from 1231 to 1259, and Goryeo became a vassal of the Yuan dynasty. In 1392 the general Yi Seong-gye took the throne and founded Joseon.
Kings ruled England for 780 years, until it joined Scotland to form Great Britain.
In 927 Æthelstan of Wessex took York from the Vikings and became king of all the English, and he is often counted as the first king of England. The Normans conquered the kingdom in 1066, and French became the language of the court for generations. Barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta in 1215, and a council of nobles and commons grew into Parliament. Edward I conquered Wales in 1282–1283. The Hundred Years' War with France ended with England losing nearly all its land there except Calais, and the Wars of the Roses followed from 1455. Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534. The Acts of Union in 1707 joined England and Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain.
The fire lance, a gunpowder tube on a spear, is the ancestor of the gun.
Gunpowder was found in China, by alchemists, in the ninth century. The oldest known picture of a gunpowder weapon is a silk painting from Dunhuang, dated to about 950, that shows a fire lance. It was a tube of gunpowder tied to a spear, and it threw flame at the enemy. The oldest record of one used in battle is from 1132, when Song soldiers held the city of De'an with fire lances against the Jin. Later versions fired pellets, and by the 1200s soldiers carried metal hand cannons. Gunpowder weapons travelled west with the Mongol Empire, and by the 1300s cannon were in use across Europe and the Middle East.
The Song ruled China from Kaifeng and then Hangzhou, and printed the first banknotes.
Taizu, a general, took the throne in 960 and ruled from Kaifeng. The Song never held the north-east or the north-west, and paid silver to the Liao and later the Xia to keep the peace. Trade and cities grew. The dynasty issued paper money, used the compass and fire lances, and printed books in large numbers. In 1127 the Jurchen Jin captured Kaifeng and the emperor, and the court fled south to Hangzhou. The Southern Song held the Yangtze and the south for another 150 years. The Mongols took Hangzhou in 1276, and the last Song fleet was beaten at Yamen in 1279. The Yuan dynasty then ruled all of China.
Capital
Kaifeng; Hangzhou from 1127
Founded by
Emperor Taizu, 960
People
About 90 million under the Northern Song (estimate)
A union of German, Italian and Bohemian lands under an elected emperor lasted 844 years.
On 2 February 962 Pope John XII crowned the German king Otto I emperor in Rome, and the realm that followed him was later called the Holy Roman Empire. It covered Germany, Bohemia, northern Italy and for a time Burgundy. The emperor was elected, and from 1356 seven prince-electors chose him. He ruled over hundreds of princes, bishops and free cities that kept their own laws and armies. Emperors fought the popes over who should appoint bishops, and Martin Luther began the Reformation in its lands in 1517. Voltaire later joked that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. After defeats by Napoleon, Francis II gave up the title of emperor on 6 August 1806.
Hugh Capet began a dynasty that slowly built France from a small royal domain.
In 987 the nobles of West Francia elected Hugh Capet king, and his family, the Capetians, held the throne for most of the next eight centuries. At first the king controlled little more than the land around Paris and Orléans, and dukes such as the Duke of Normandy were stronger. Philip II took Normandy from the English king in 1204 and beat him at Bouvines in 1214. Kings added land by war, marriage and inheritance and built a royal army and tax system. The Hundred Years' War with England, from 1337 to 1453, nearly broke the kingdom, and Joan of Arc helped to turn it. The monarchy was abolished in 1792, during the French Revolution.
Norse sailors from Greenland built a camp at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.
The Icelandic sagas say that Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, sailed west from Greenland about 1000 CE and reached lands he called Helluland, Markland and Vinland. The sagas disagree on the details, but archaeology backs them. At L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remains of Norse timber-and-turf buildings in 1960. A study of tree rings in 2021 dated wood cut there to 1021 CE. It is the only Norse site in North America that is confirmed. The Norse stayed only a short time, perhaps because of fights with the local people and the distance from Greenland. About 500 years later Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
Turkish sultans ruled from Central Asia to Anatolia and opened Anatolia to Turks.
The Seljuks were Oghuz Turks from Central Asia. Tughril and his brother Chaghri founded the empire in 1037 and beat the Ghaznavids at Dandanqan in 1040. Tughril entered Baghdad in 1055 and became the Abbasid caliph's protector with the title of sultan. In 1071 Alp Arslan beat the Byzantines at Manzikert, which opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement. Under Malik-Shah the empire covered about 3.9 million square kilometres and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk set up a network of schools. After Malik-Shah died in 1092 his sons fought over the realm and it broke into smaller states. Byzantine appeals for help against the Turks led to the First Crusade in 1096.
William of Normandy beat King Harold at Hastings and became king of England.
When the English king Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was crowned, and William, Duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had promised him the throne. Harold beat a Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge in September and then marched south. On 14 October William's army beat his at Hastings, and Harold was killed. William was crowned king in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. He put down risings, including the harsh campaign called the Harrying of the North in 1069–1070, built castles across the country and gave most of the land to Norman lords. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded who held it. French became the language of the English court, and England's kings held land in France until the end of the Hundred Years' War.
Shen Kuo wrote that a needle rubbed on lodestone points south, not quite true south.
Shen Kuo, a Song official, scientist and mapmaker, described the magnetic needle compass in his Dream Pool Essays, finished about 1088. He wrote that a needle rubbed with lodestone and hung from a thread points south, and he noticed that it points a little east of true south. This is one of the earliest known notes on magnetic declination. Chinese diviners had used lodestone spoons earlier, and the needle compass came into use at sea during the Song. Ming fleets under Zheng He later steered by compass bearings, and the instrument reached the Islamic world and Europe in the following centuries.
Western European armies fought for the Holy Land for almost two centuries.
In 1095 Pope Urban II called on Western Christians to help the Byzantine emperor and take Jerusalem from Muslim rulers. The First Crusade (1096–1099) took the city in July 1099 with a massacre of its people and set up four Crusader states along the coast of the Levant. Muslim armies under Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, later crusades failed to win it back, and the last Crusader stronghold, Acre, fell in 1291. Crusading was also used against pagans in the Baltic and heretics in southern France, and the Fourth Crusade turned on Constantinople in 1204. The wars left lasting mistrust, and also brought trade and ideas between Europe and the Middle East.
Shona rulers built a stone city in southern Africa and traded gold to the coast.
Great Zimbabwe was a city on the plateau of what is now southern Zimbabwe. People settled the site about 1000 CE, and stone building began in the 11th century. The ruling people, ancestors of the Shona, grew rich by trading gold and ivory to Swahili ports such as Sofala, and the city was the capital from the 13th century. Its Great Enclosure has dry-stone walls up to 11 metres high and about 250 metres long, built without mortar. Traditional estimates of its population are 18,000 to 20,000, but a recent study says it was never above 10,000. The city declined in the 15th century for reasons not known, and it was left by the 16th or 17th century.
King Suryavarman II built a temple to Vishnu, the largest religious complex in the world.
Suryavarman II began Angkor Wat in the early twelfth century, and it was finished about 1150. It was a temple to the Hindu god Vishnu and may also have been meant as the king's tomb. The complex covers 162.6 hectares, inside an outer wall measuring 1,024 by 802 metres and a moat, and the central tower rises 65 metres. Its walls carry long reliefs of Hindu epics and of the king's own army. From the late thirteenth century it slowly became a Buddhist temple, and it has stayed one. When the Khmer court left Angkor in 1431, the temple was still in use, and the site was never forgotten. It is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Born Temüjin, he united the Mongol tribes and began the conquest of Eurasia.
Temüjin was born about 1162 (the year is debated, and some sources say 1155 or 1167) among the Borjigin, a Mongol clan. His father was killed by Tatars when he was a boy, and the family lived in poverty before he built a following of allies and sworn companions. By 1206 he had beaten every rival on the steppe and was named Genghis Khan. He invaded the Khwarazmian Empire in 1219, and cities that held out, among them Merv and Nishapur, were destroyed and their people killed. He died in 1227 during a campaign against the Western Xia, and the place of his grave is not known. His sons and grandsons made the Mongol Empire the largest land empire in history.
The obas of Edo ruled a forest kingdom in Nigeria famous for its brass work.
The Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, began in 1180 by the usual dating, when the oba monarchy replaced the older line of ogiso kings. Its capital was Edo, today's Benin City. Oba Ewuare, who came to power about 1440, built a rampart and moat of about 11 kilometres around his palace and enlarged the kingdom. Portuguese traders arrived in 1485. Guilds of brass casters in the city made the plaques and heads now called the Benin Bronzes. In 1897 a British force took Benin City after an ambush on a British delegation, looted the royal palace and annexed the kingdom. The oba is still a title in Nigeria, with no political power.
Warriors under a shogun ruled Japan from Kamakura while the emperor stayed in Kyoto.
After the Genpei War, Minamoto no Yoritomo set up his government in the eastern town of Kamakura. He named military governors and stewards to hold the provinces, and the court in Kyoto kept the emperor as a figurehead. From 1203 the Hōjō family ruled as regents, and the later shoguns were figureheads too. Kublai Khan sent fleets against Japan in 1274 and 1281. Samurai and storms drove them off, and storms later called kamikaze, "divine wind", wrecked much of the second fleet. The war gave the shogunate no land to pay its warriors, and they grew angry. Emperor Go-Daigo rebelled, Ashikaga Takauji changed sides, and Kamakura fell in 1333.
Five Muslim dynasties ruled northern India from Delhi for more than three centuries.
In 1206 Qutb ud-Din Aibak, a former slave general of Muhammad of Ghor, became the first sultan, ruling from Lahore. Five dynasties followed: the Mamluk, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi. The sultans made Delhi their capital and began the Qutb Minar there. They held back several Mongol invasions, and under the Khalji and Tughlaq sultans they ruled most of the subcontinent. Razia Sultana ruled from 1236 to 1240, the only woman to be sultan. In December 1398 Timur sacked Delhi, and estimates of the dead run from 100,000 to 200,000. The sultanate never recovered its power, and in 1526 Babur beat the last sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, at Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire.
A council of chiefs named Temüjin Genghis Khan, ruler of all the steppe peoples.
By 1206 Temüjin had defeated the Tatars, Naimans and Merkits, and his own old allies the Kereit, and he ruled the steppe from the Altai mountains to Manchuria. In the spring of that year the chiefs met at a kuriltai, an assembly, near the Onon River and gave him the title Genghis Khan. He then rebuilt Mongol society for war: tribes were broken up into units of ten, a hundred and a thousand men, promotion went by merit, and a code of law was set down. A script adapted from the Uyghur one was used to write Mongol. From 1207 he attacked the Western Xia in northern China.
Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Middle East, Europe
Horsemen from the steppe conquered the largest land empire in history.
Temüjin was proclaimed Genghis Khan, "universal ruler", of the Mongols in 1206. His cavalry, trained from childhood on the steppe, destroyed the Khwarazmian empire in Central Asia and took northern China. Under his sons and grandsons the Mongols took Russia and, in 1258, Baghdad. At its largest, in the late 13th century, the empire covered about 24 million square kilometres, from Korea to Hungary. It joined East and West: the Mongols protected trade routes and moved messages across the continent with a relay of riders. The conquests killed millions, and the Black Death may have spread along Mongol trade routes. After 1260 the empire split into four khanates, one of them the Yuan dynasty in China, which fell in 1368.
English barons made King John accept limits on his power at Runnymede.
On 15 June 1215 King John met rebel barons at Runnymede, by the Thames, and sealed a charter of 63 clauses. They had risen against his heavy taxes, his loss of Normandy and his seizure of nobles' property. The charter promised that the king would not take money without consent and that no free man would be jailed or stripped of his land except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Pope Innocent III annulled it within weeks, and civil war followed, the First Barons' War. After John died in 1216, the charter was reissued in changed form, finally in 1225. A few clauses are still law in England today, and later writers cited it against royal power.
Mandinka kings ruled West Africa, grew rich on gold and salt, and held Timbuktu.
About 1235 Sundiata Keita, a Mandinka prince, defeated the king of the Sosso at the battle of Kirina and founded the Mali Empire on the upper Niger. Mali sat between the gold fields to the south and the salt of the Sahara to the north, and its kings taxed the trade between them. In the 14th century it ruled from the Atlantic coast to beyond Gao and took Timbuktu. Its most famous king, Mansa Musa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Mali weakened in the 15th century as provinces broke away, and the Songhai Empire took most of its land. A small Mali kingdom lasted until about 1670.
Batu's Mongol successors ruled the steppe from Siberia to the Danube and taxed the Russian princes.
The Golden Horde was the western part of the Mongol Empire, the lands given to Genghis Khan's eldest son Jochi. His son Batu invaded Rus in 1237–1240 and burned Kyiv, then set up his capital, Sarai, on the lower Volga about 1242. The Russian princes paid tribute to the khan and travelled to Sarai to be confirmed in their rule. Özbeg Khan made Islam the state religion in 1313. Moscow beat a Horde army at Kulikovo in 1380, though Tokhtamysh sacked the city two years later, and the Great Stand on the Ugra river in 1480 is seen as the end of Mongol rule over Russia. The Horde broke into smaller khanates, and the Crimean Khanate sacked Sarai in 1502. The Kazakh Khanate was one of its heirs.
Slave soldiers seized Egypt, stopped the Mongols and ended the Crusader states.
The Mamluks were slave soldiers, bought young and trained for war. In 1250 the regiments of the Ayyubid sultan seized power in Egypt, and later sultans came from their own ranks rather than from a family line. In 1260 a Mamluk army under Qutuz and Baybars beat the Mongols at Ain Jalut in Palestine, a rare defeat of the Mongols in open battle. Baybars and his successors then took the Crusader strongholds, and Acre fell in 1291. The sultans ruled Egypt and Syria from Cairo and sheltered an Abbasid caliph there as a figurehead. The Black Death reached Egypt in 1347, and the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks in 1516 and took Cairo in January 1517.
Hulagu’s army took Baghdad in February 1258 and killed the last Abbasid caliph.
In January 1258 Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, besieged Baghdad with a Mongol army. The caliph al-Musta'sim surrendered on 10 February, and the Mongols sacked the city from 13 February for about a week. The death toll is unknown: estimates run from about 200,000 to two million. The caliph was executed on 20 February with his family. Stories that the Tigris ran black with ink are late, and historians think large libraries were open again within two years. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad ended. Hulagu founded the Ilkhanate, with its capital at Tabriz, and in 1260 the Mamluks stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut.
Christian emperors ruled the Ethiopian highlands from 1270 until 1974.
In 1270 Yekuno Amlak overthrew the last Zagwe king and became emperor of Ethiopia. He and his heirs, the Solomonic dynasty, said they descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and they ruled from a succession of royal camps and later from Gondar. Amda Seyon I, who ruled from 1314 to 1344, enlarged the empire. The empire fought the Muslim sultanate of Adal in the 1520s and 1530s, and Portuguese soldiers helped to turn the war in 1543. It was one of the few African states to keep its independence against European conquest: Emperor Menelik II beat an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. The monarchy ended when the army deposed Haile Selassie in 1974.
Kublai Khan ruled China from Dadu as the Mongol emperor, and the Yuan fell in 1368.
Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, named his dynasty Great Yuan in 1271 and ruled from Dadu, now Beijing. Hangzhou fell in 1276, and the last Song resistance ended at Yamen in 1279, so the Yuan ruled all of China, the first time a foreign people had. Wikipedia puts the empire's area at about 11 million square kilometres in 1310. The court used Mongol and Chinese, and paper money replaced coins. The Venetian Marco Polo described the court in a book that Europeans read for centuries. Floods, famine and the Red Turban rebellion, from 1351, wore the dynasty down. Ming forces took Dadu on 14 September 1368, and the Mongol court withdrew to the steppe.
Polynesian voyagers from eastern Polynesia reached Aotearoa in ocean-going canoes.
Voyagers from eastern Polynesia sailed in large double-hulled canoes, waka, to Aotearoa, among the last large lands settled by people. Oral tradition names the homeland Hawaiki, which researchers think was in the Society Islands. The date is debated: rat bones and gnawed seeds point to about 1280, and the oldest firm archaeological sites are from after an eruption of about 1314. The settlers hunted moa, flightless birds weighing 20 to 250 kilograms, to extinction, and they fished, gathered and grew kumara, the sweet potato. Tribes called iwi grew up in separate regions. The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted the country in 1642, and James Cook charted it in 1769.
Majapahit was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom in East Java that claimed much of the archipelago.
Raden Wijaya founded Majapahit in 1293, after he used a Mongol army sent by Kublai Khan against a rival and then drove it out of Java. The capital was near Trowulan in East Java. The kingdom was at its height under Queen Tribhuwana and her son Hayam Wuruk, who ruled from 1350 to 1389, and his minister Gajah Mada, who swore an oath not to rest until the islands were united. A poem of 1365, the Nagarakretagama, lists about 98 tributary lands, from Sumatra towards New Guinea, though how far its power really reached is debated. A civil war weakened it, and it fell to the sultanate of Demak in 1527; dates for the end range from 1478.
A Turkish dynasty from Anatolia ruled the eastern Mediterranean for over six centuries.
Osman I founded the Ottoman state about 1299 in north-west Anatolia, a small border emirate. His heirs took Bursa, crossed into Europe and made Edirne their capital in the 1360s. In 1453 Mehmed II took Constantinople and ended the Byzantine Empire. Selim I took Syria and Egypt from the Mamluks in 1516 and 1517. Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, brought the empire to its peak in the Balkans, Hungary, Iraq and North Africa. Its largest extent was in 1683, about 5.2 million square kilometres. The empire shrank through the 19th century, and it fought on the German side in the First World War. The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922.
The ruler of Mali crossed the Sahara to Mecca, giving away gold in Cairo.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, travelled about 4,300 kilometres to Mecca with a large caravan. He reached Cairo in July and stayed about three months. Later Arab writers said he gave away so much gold that its price fell there, and that his train held 12,000 attendants. These numbers are probably exaggerated, and historians still argue over how far the gold price fell. On the way home he borrowed money from Egyptian merchants. In 1327 he had the Djinguereber mosque built in Timbuktu. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows him holding a gold nugget, and Mali became known in Europe and the Middle East as a land of gold.
Hindu kings ruled southern India from Hampi and held back the Deccan sultanates.
The brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I founded the empire in 1336 on the Tungabhadra river in what is now Karnataka. Their capital, Vijayanagara, now the ruins at Hampi, grew into one of the largest cities in India and was a centre of trade in cotton, spices and horses. Under Krishnadevaraya (1509–1529) the empire reached its height, and its writers used Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit. On 23 January 1565 an alliance of Deccan sultans beat its army at Talikota, and the victors sacked the capital over several months. The kings kept a smaller state from Penukonda, Chandragiri and Vellore until it ended in 1646.
Plague killed perhaps a third or more of Europe's people in seven years.
The Black Death was a plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas on rats. It probably began in Central Asia and travelled along trade routes to the Black Sea. By 1347 it had reached Sicily by ship, and by 1353 it had spread across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The number of dead is uncertain, and estimates for Europe run from a third to a half of its people. Whole villages were left empty. With so few workers left, wages rose, serfdom weakened in western Europe, and the Church lost some of its standing. The plague came back every few years for centuries.
The Ming drove out the Mongols, built the Forbidden City and rebuilt the Great Wall.
Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant who rose through the rebel armies, took Dadu in 1368 and made Nanjing his capital as the Hongwu Emperor. His son the Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing, where the Forbidden City was built between 1407 and 1420. Most of the Great Wall that survives was built under the Ming. Zheng He's fleets sailed to the Indian Ocean in his reign. Silver from the Americas and Japan paid for much Ming trade, and the population grew to an estimated 160 to 200 million. Droughts, unpaid soldiers and a silver shortage ended it. In 1644 the rebel Li Zicheng took Beijing, the last emperor killed himself, and the Manchu Qing dynasty took power.
Timur and his heirs ruled Central Asia and Iran from Samarkand and Herat.
In 1370 Timur, a Turco-Mongol warlord of the Barlas tribe, made himself ruler of Transoxiana from Samarkand. In 35 years of war he took Iran and Iraq, broke the Golden Horde, sacked Delhi in 1398 and beat the Ottoman sultan Bayezid at Ankara in 1402. He died in 1405 on the way to invade China. The empire then split among his heirs. His son Shah Rukh ruled from Herat, and his grandson Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand, where he built an observatory. Persian was the language of the court, and Timurid painting, poetry and architecture were at their height at Herat. Uzbeks under Shaybani Khan took Samarkand in 1501 and Herat in 1507. Babur, a Timurid prince, went on to found the Mughal Empire in India.
The Joseon kingdom ruled Korea from Seoul for 505 years under Confucian rules.
Yi Seong-gye overthrew Goryeo in 1392 and made Hanseong, now Seoul, his capital. The state took Neo-Confucianism as its ideology and discouraged Buddhism. King Sejong, who ruled from 1418 to 1450, backed work in science and farming and had the Korean alphabet, Hangul, made in 1443. Japan invaded from 1592 to 1598, and the Manchus invaded in 1627 and again in 1636 and 1637. Korea then kept to itself for most of the next two centuries. Joseon ended in 1897, when Gojong declared the Korean Empire, and Japan annexed Korea in 1910.
Scholars and artists in Italian cities revived Greek and Roman learning and made new art.
The Renaissance, French for "rebirth", began in the city-states of Italy, above all Florence, in the 1300s and 1400s, and spread north across Europe. Scholars called humanists studied Greek and Roman writers, and rich families such as the Medici paid for art. Brunelleschi finished the dome of Florence Cathedral in 1436. Painters learned to show depth with perspective, and Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael worked in Florence and Rome. The printing press spread new books quickly, and Greek scholars who left Constantinople after 1453 brought more manuscripts. When the period began and ended is debated, and some historians dislike the name. It overlapped the Reformation and the voyages of exploration, and led into the scientific revolution.
Admiral Zheng He led seven Ming fleets across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa.
The Yongle Emperor sent the eunuch admiral Zheng He on seven voyages between 1405 and 1433. The first fleet left Suzhou in July 1405 with 317 ships and almost 28,000 men. The fleets called at ports in Southeast Asia, India and Sri Lanka, then reached Hormuz, Arabia and the Swahili coast of East Africa, where Malindi sent a giraffe back to the Ming court. Claims that the largest treasure ships were 135 metres long are doubted, and the biggest were probably no more than about 75 metres. The Hongxi Emperor halted the voyages in 1424, and the last one sailed under the Xuande Emperor. The Ming turned its money to defence against the Mongols in the north.
Europe, Africa, Americas, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific
Portugal took Ceuta in 1415 and built trading posts and colonies on four continents.
The Portuguese Empire began in 1415, when King John I took Ceuta, a Muslim port in Morocco. His son Henry the Navigator backed voyages down the coast of Africa, and in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 shared the unclaimed world between Portugal and Spain, and in 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed Brazil. Portugal built forts and trading posts from West Africa to Goa, Malacca and Macau and held a near-monopoly on the seaborne slave trade from Africa for over a century. Brazil became independent in 1822, and the last colony, Macau, was handed to China in 1999.
Three cities of the Valley of Mexico ruled their neighbours and collected tribute.
In 1428 the Mexica of Tenochtitlan joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in the Triple Alliance and defeated the city of Azcapotzalco. The alliance then conquered most of central Mexico, from the Gulf coast to the Pacific. It ruled by tribute: conquered towns kept their own rulers and sent cloth, maize, cacao and warriors to the three capitals. Tenochtitlan, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, had perhaps 200,000 people when Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519. Cortés and several hundred Spaniards, with thousands of Indigenous allies who resented Aztec tribute, besieged the city. Smallpox killed many of its people, and it fell on 13 August 1521. The Spanish built Mexico City on its ruins, and it became the capital of New Spain, part of the Spanish Empire.
Capital
Tenochtitlan, on an island in Lake Texcoco
Founded by
Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Tlacopan
The Inca ruled the Andes from Cusco and joined it with a road network.
About 1438 the Inca ruler Pachacuti beat the Chanka and began to turn the kingdom of Cusco into an empire. Within 90 years it ran about 4,000 kilometres along the Andes, from what is now Ecuador to central Chile, and the Inca called it Tawantinsuyu, "the four parts together". About 40,000 kilometres of roads linked it, and runners carried messages along them. The Inca had no writing known today; officials kept records on quipus, bundles of knotted cords. About 1527 the ruler Huayna Capac died, probably of an epidemic, and his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa fought a civil war. In November 1532 Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spaniards captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca. He was killed in 1533, and the Spanish took Cusco.
Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz printed with movable metal type and a screw press.
Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany, developed printing with movable metal type in Europe about 1440. He cast each letter separately in an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, set the letters in a frame, and used an oil-based ink and a press adapted from the wine press. His Bible of about 1455, printed in about 180 copies, is the first major book printed this way in Europe. Movable type had been used in China and Korea centuries earlier. Printing spread fast, and by 1500 presses across Europe had made an estimated 20 million books. Books became cheaper and ideas moved quickly, and Luther's pamphlets, printed from 1517, helped the Reformation spread.
King Sejong published a new alphabet of 28 letters for writing Korean.
Korean had been written with Chinese characters, which few people outside the elite could learn. King Sejong had a new alphabet made and introduced it to his court in late 1443. In 1446 it was published in a book called Hunminjeongeum, "Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People", with 28 letters. Many scholars think Sejong took a large personal part in the design. Officials who wrote in Chinese objected, and for centuries the elite wrote in Chinese characters. The alphabet got the name Hangul only in the early 1910s. Today Korean uses 24 basic letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and Hangul is the official script of both Koreas.
Five nations in what is now New York joined under the Great Law of Peace.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also called the Iroquois or the Six Nations, joined five nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, in what is now upstate New York. By tradition the Peacemaker, Dekanawida, and Hiawatha brought the Great Law of Peace to nations that were at war with each other. The date is debated: oral histories and scholars give anything from 1142 to the 1600s, and many archaeologists favour about 1450. Clan mothers chose the chiefs who sat on the council. The Tuscarora joined about 1722, which made six nations. The confederacy split over the American Revolution, and many Haudenosaunee moved to Canada. It still exists, and its council fire is at Onondaga.
Founded by
The Peacemaker and Hiawatha, by tradition
People
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca; Tuscarora later
Ottoman forces took the Byzantine capital on 29 May 1453 after a 53-day siege.
Sultan Mehmed II, aged 21, besieged Constantinople from 6 April 1453 with an army of 50,000 to 80,000 men against about 7,000 defenders. The city's triple land walls had held for a thousand years, but the Ottomans brought huge cannon, one cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban, and dragged ships overland to enter the Golden Horn. The final assault came before dawn on 29 May, and Emperor Constantine XI died fighting. The sultan made the city his capital, later called Istanbul, and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The date is often used to mark the end of the Middle Ages.
Songhai rulers took the Niger trade from Mali and ruled from Gao.
The Songhai Empire grew from the city of Gao on the Niger. Sonni Ali, who ruled from 1464, took Timbuktu in 1468 and Djenné in 1473 after a siege of about seven years. Askia Muhammad, who seized the throne in 1493, set up provinces under governors, made Islamic scholarship a part of the state and standardised weights and measures. In 1528 the empire covered about 1.4 million square kilometres, more than Mali had. After his reign it was weakened by civil wars. In 1591 the sultan of Morocco sent an army with guns across the Sahara. It beat the Songhai at Tondibi and sacked Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, and the empire broke up.
Nomadic Kazakh clans formed a khanate on the steppe that lasted until Russian rule.
Two sultans, Kerei and Janibek, led followers away from the Uzbek khan Abu'l-Khayr and settled on the steppe east of the Syr Darya. Kazakh tradition dates the khanate to 1465, and Russian historians date it to about 1470; the date is debated. Under Kasym Khan (1511–1518) it reached the Ural mountains and had about a million people. Later the Kazakhs divided into three hordes, the Senior, Middle and Junior zhuz, and from 1643 they fought Dzungar invasions. In 1731 the khan of the Junior zhuz swore allegiance to Russia, and Russia abolished the khans' power in 1822–1824. Kenesary Khan, proclaimed khan in 1841 during a long revolt against Russia, was killed in 1847.
Columbus sailed west from Spain and landed on an island in the Bahamas.
On 12 October 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator in Spanish service, landed on an island in the Bahamas after more than a month at sea. He believed he had reached islands off Asia. The Taíno people who lived there were part of a network of island communities across the Caribbean. Columbus made three more voyages, and Spain began to settle Hispaniola. Vikings had reached North America about 1000 CE, but Columbus's voyage began lasting contact between the Americas and the rest of the world. Within a few decades diseases from Europe had killed most of the islands' people, and Spanish conquistadors went on to take Mexico and Peru.
Europe, Americas, East Asia and the Pacific, Africa
Spain held colonies across the Americas, the Philippines and parts of Africa.
Spain's empire began in 1492, the year Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada and sent Columbus across the Atlantic. Conquistadors took the Aztec Empire in 1519–1521 and the Inca Empire from 1532, helped by local allies and by smallpox. At the siege of Tenochtitlan alone at least 100,000 Aztecs died. Silver from Potosí and Mexico paid for Spain's wars in Europe, and ships from Manila linked the Philippines to Acapulco from 1565. Indigenous people were forced to work for Spanish settlers and Africans were enslaved, and disease killed a large share of the Indigenous population. At its largest, in 1780, the empire covered about 13.7 million square kilometres. Most of Spanish America won independence between 1808 and 1826. The Spanish–American War cost Spain Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898.
Crops, animals and diseases began to cross the Atlantic in both directions.
On his second voyage in 1493 Columbus brought horses, pigs, cattle, wheat and sugar cane to the island of Hispaniola. In the other direction went maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao and tobacco, which changed farming and eating in Europe, Africa and Asia. Diseases did the most harm. Smallpox, measles and influenza were new to the Americas, and estimates of the dead run as high as nine in ten people in some regions, though the totals are debated. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean needed workers, and about 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in slave ships between 1501 and 1866. Spain claimed the islands and then the mainland, and its empire grew from them.
Four Portuguese ships reached Calicut on 20 May 1498, the first by sea from Europe.
Vasco da Gama left Lisbon on 8 July 1497 with four ships and about 170 men, sailed round Africa and reached the port of Calicut, now Kozhikode, on the Malabar coast on 20 May 1498. The Zamorin, the ruler of Calicut, received him, but the gifts he brought were too poor to impress the court, and the Portuguese were asked to pay customs duty and did not win a trade treaty. About 55 men came home after two years, with a small cargo of spices. It was the first voyage from Europe to India by sea. Portugal sent a larger fleet under Cabral in 1500, took Goa in 1510 and went on to build a chain of forts and trading posts around the Indian Ocean.
Ships linked every ocean for the first time. Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and Britain built empires overseas, and the Atlantic slave trade carried millions of Africans to the Americas. Diseases from Europe killed most of the Americas' people. In Europe the Reformation split the Western Church, the scientific revolution produced the laws of Newton, and revolutions in America in 1776 and in France in 1789 challenged kings. In Asia the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires and the Ming and Qing dynasties ruled the largest states. World population rose from about 500 million to about one billion. The age ends in 1800, as steam power began to change how people worked.
Colonial Brazil
Americas
Portugal settled Brazil's coast, planted sugar and brought more enslaved Africans than anywhere else.
Colonial Brazil began in 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the coast and claimed it for Portugal. At first the Portuguese cut brazilwood and cared little for the land; from the 1530s the Crown gave out captaincies and settlers planted sugar. Planters used Indigenous labour and then enslaved Africans, and Brazil took about 4.8 million of the Africans brought to the Americas, more than any other place. Gold found in Minas Gerais in the 1690s drew thousands of settlers, and the capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. In 1808 the Portuguese court fled Napoleon to Rio, and in 1815 Brazil became a kingdom beside Portugal.
Shahs from Tabriz and Isfahan ruled Iran and made it a Shia country.
In 1501 Ismail I, the young head of the Safavid Sufi order, took Tabriz and crowned himself shah of Iran. He made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion in a land that was mostly Sunni. The Ottomans beat him at Chaldiran in 1514, but the dynasty held on. Under Abbas I, who ruled from 1588 to 1629, the capital moved to Isfahan and the empire reached about 2.9 million square kilometres in 1630.
Afghan rebels took Isfahan in 1722, and the dynasty ended in 1736 when the general Nader Shah was crowned. Iran was later ruled by the Qajar dynasty, from 1789.
Shah Ismail I declared Twelver Shia Islam the faith of his new Iranian state.
After taking Tabriz in 1501, Ismail I proclaimed Twelver Shia Islam the religion of his realm. Most of his subjects were Sunni, and Shia Muslims were found mainly in places such as Gilan, Mazandaran and Qom. Sunni judges and preachers who refused to accept the change were killed or removed, and Shia scholars from Arab lands were brought in to teach the faith.
The conversion took about a century. By the end of the 1500s most Iranians were Shia, and Sunni Islam had mostly disappeared from the central provinces. The split deepened the rivalry with the Sunni Ottomans, which broke into war at Chaldiran in 1514.
Martin Luther sent his objections to the sale of indulgences to a bishop.
On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. A later story says he nailed them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, but historians doubt it. Printers copied the theses, and within weeks they had spread across Germany.
Pope Leo X condemned Luther's teaching in 1520, and Emperor Charles V outlawed him at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Luther was hidden at Wartburg Castle, where he translated the Gospels and the apostles' letters into German. The dispute grew into the Reformation.
Protestant churches broke from Rome, and Europe fought over religion for a century.
The Reformation began in 1517, when Martin Luther, a monk and professor at Wittenberg, attacked the sale of indulgences. His ideas, spread by the printing press, split Western Christianity. Lutheran churches took hold in northern Germany and Scandinavia, Reformed churches under John Calvin in Switzerland, Scotland and the Dutch Republic, and Henry VIII broke the English church from Rome in 1534.
The Catholic Church answered with the Council of Trent and the Jesuits. Religious wars followed, the worst of them the Thirty Years' War, which the Peace of Westphalia ended in 1648.
Diseases from Europe, such as smallpox, killed a large share of the Americas' people.
Smallpox reached Hispaniola in 1518, and over the following decades smallpox, measles, typhus and other diseases from Europe and Africa spread through the Americas, where nobody had immunity to them. An epidemic in Tenochtitlan in 1520 helped the Spanish take the Aztec capital, and another reached the Inca lands before Pizarro did. Estimates of the population before 1492 run from about 8 million to more than 100 million, and the share that died is put at 50 to 90 per cent in many regions, so both the dates and the toll are debated. Fields and towns were left empty. The Spanish and Portuguese then brought enslaved Africans to work where Indigenous labour had gone, which fed the Atlantic slave trade.
Magellan's fleet left Spain in 1519, and one ship under Elcano returned in 1522.
Five ships under Ferdinand Magellan left Spain in 1519 to find a western route to the Spice Islands. They passed the strait now named after him in late 1520 and crossed the Pacific, a voyage of about three months in which the crews ran short of food. Magellan was killed in a fight on Mactan, in the Philippines, on 27 April 1521. Juan Sebastián Elcano took command of the Victoria and sailed home by the Cape of Good Hope, reaching Spain on 6 September 1522. Of about 270 men who set out, 18 came back on the Victoria. The voyage showed that the earth could be circled by sea and how large the Pacific was.
Cortés and thousands of Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521 after a siege.
In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with about 500 men and 11 ships. Joined by Tlaxcala and other peoples who paid tribute to the Aztecs, he marched to Tenochtitlan and seized the emperor Moctezuma II. The Spanish were driven out on the Noche Triste in June 1520. Smallpox then struck the city, and in 1521 a siege by Cortés and tens of thousands of allies starved it; Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521. Tens of thousands of people died. The Spanish built Mexico City on the ruins and made the land the viceroyalty of New Spain.
Spain ruled Mexico, Central America and the south-west of today's US from Mexico City.
New Spain was the Spanish viceroyalty founded after Hernán Cortés took Tenochtitlan in 1521, with its capital at Mexico City, built on the ruins. The first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, took office in 1535. It covered Mexico, Central America, Florida, much of the south-western United States and, through the Manila galleons, the Philippines. Silver from Zacatecas and Guanajuato made it rich and filled the treasure fleets to Spain. Indigenous peoples owed tribute and forced labour, and millions died of disease. Society was ranked by birth, with Spain-born officials at the top. A war for independence, begun in 1810 by the priest Miguel Hidalgo, ended New Spain in 1821.
Ships carried about 12.5 million Africans to the Americas as slaves over three centuries.
Between about 1526 and 1867, European and American traders shipped about 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves, most of them to Brazil and the Caribbean. About 10.7 million survived the voyage, which took weeks or months in crowded ships. Portugal began the trade, and Britain, France, Spain, the Dutch Republic and Denmark–Norway joined it, buying captives from African rulers and merchants. Enslaved people worked on sugar, tobacco, cotton and coffee plantations and in silver mines. Britain banned the trade for its ships in 1807 and the United States in 1808, but it went on until the last known voyage, to Cuba, in 1867.
The Habsburgs ruled Austria, Bohemia and Hungary as separate crowns from Vienna.
The Habsburg monarchy began in 1526, when Ferdinand I was elected king of Bohemia and Hungary after Louis II died at the Battle of Mohács. The Habsburgs already held Austria, and for most of the period they were also elected Holy Roman emperors. Their lands were a union of crowns, each with its own laws, ruled from Vienna.
The Ottomans took most of Hungary and besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683; after the second siege the Habsburgs won Hungary back by 1699. In 1804 Francis II declared himself emperor of Austria, and the monarchy became the Austrian Empire.
Muslim emperors from Delhi and Agra ruled most of northern India for over three centuries.
Babur, a prince from Central Asia descended from Timur, beat the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire. His grandson Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, took most of northern India and ran it through a salaried nobility. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, and under Aurangzeb the empire reached about four million square kilometres in 1690, with perhaps 150 million people.
After Aurangzeb died in 1707 the emperors lost power to the Marathas, to regional governors and to the East India Company. Company troops took Delhi in 1857, and the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was exiled to Burma.
Pizarro took the Inca emperor prisoner in 1532, and Spain ruled the Andes by 1572.
In 1532 Francisco Pizarro and about 168 Spanish soldiers reached Cajamarca, in the Andes of present-day Peru, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa had just won a civil war against his half-brother Huáscar. Pizarro ambushed Atahualpa's escort and took him prisoner. Atahualpa filled a room with gold and silver as a ransom, and the Spanish killed him in 1533 anyway. They took Cusco that year. Epidemics had already weakened the empire. Manco Inca rebelled in 1536 and held out at Vilcabamba, and the last Inca ruler, Túpac Amaru, was executed in 1572. Spain then governed through the Viceroyalty of Peru.
A Spanish viceroy in Lima governed most of South America and drew silver from Potosí.
The Viceroyalty of Peru was created in 1542 to rule Spain's lands in South America, with its capital at Lima, which Pizarro had founded in 1535. At first it held nearly all of Spanish South America. Silver from Potosí, found in 1545, paid for much of Spain's empire, and Indigenous people were made to work in the mines under the mita, a labour draft in which many died. In the 1700s Spain cut the viceroyalty down by creating those of New Granada in 1739 and the Río de la Plata in 1776. Túpac Amaru II rose against it in 1780. Its last army lost at Ayacucho in December 1824.
European scholars replaced much of ancient natural philosophy with observation, measurement and mathematics.
The Scientific Revolution is the name for the years between Copernicus and Newton, when European scholars replaced much of ancient natural philosophy with observation, measurement and mathematics. It began in 1543, when Copernicus published his Sun-centred model and Andreas Vesalius his book on human anatomy. In 1609 Johannes Kepler showed that planets move in ellipses, and in 1610 Galileo reported four moons of Jupiter. William Harvey described the circulation of the blood in 1628.
The period is usually said to end with Newton's Principia in 1687. The Enlightenment followed.
Ivan IV took the title tsar in 1547, and Moscow ruled the Volga and Siberia.
In 1547 Ivan IV was crowned the first tsar of all Russia, which turned the Grand Duchy of Moscow into a tsardom. His armies took Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, which opened the Volga and the road east into Siberia. His later years brought the oprichnina, a terror against the nobility, and a lost war in Livonia.
After the old dynasty died out in 1598, the Time of Troubles brought famine, civil war and a Polish occupation of Moscow, until the Romanov dynasty began in 1613. Peter the Great took the title emperor in 1721, and the Russian Empire replaced the tsardom.
The Cossack Yermak beat the Siberian khan and opened the way for Russia's conquest of Siberia.
Yermak, a Cossack leader hired by the Stroganov merchant family, crossed the Ural Mountains with several hundred men in 1581. In October 1582 his guns beat the army of Khan Kuchum of the Siberian Khanate and took Qashliq, the khan's capital on the Irtysh River. Yermak drowned in 1585 during a night ambush.
Russian forts followed: Tyumen in 1586 and Tobolsk in 1587. Over the next decades Russia conquered the peoples of Siberia, who were forced to pay tribute in furs, and Russian explorers reached the Pacific in 1639. The Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 set the first border with the Qing.
Nzinga fought Portugal for decades to keep the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba independent.
Nzinga was born about 1583, the sister of the king of Ndongo, in present-day Angola. In 1622 she went to Luanda as his envoy to talk with the Portuguese governor, and after her brother died she took power herself. She fought Portugal for most of her reign, joined the Dutch when they took Luanda in 1641, and from the 1630s ruled the neighbouring kingdom of Matamba, where runaway slaves found shelter. The Portuguese retook Luanda in 1648, and she made peace with them in the 1650s. She died in 1663, about 80 years old. From Luanda, Portugal shipped captives to Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade.
A Moroccan army with muskets and cannon beat the Songhai at Tondibi, near Gao.
On 13 March 1591 a Moroccan army of about 4,000 men with muskets and cannon met the Songhai army at Tondibi, north of Gao, in present-day Mali. The Moroccans had crossed the Sahara on the orders of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, who wanted control of the gold and salt trade. The Songhai army was much larger, but its cattle charge was turned back by gunfire and the army broke. The Moroccans went on to take Gao and Timbuktu. The Songhai Empire split into smaller states. Morocco kept a garrison on the Niger, but its hold faded within a few decades.
Shah Abbas I moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and built a new city centre.
In 1598 Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, in central Iran, far from the Ottoman frontier. He laid out a great square, the Naqsh-e Jahan, with the royal palace of Ali Qapu on one side and the Shah Mosque, begun in 1611, on another. Tree-lined avenues, bridges over the Zayandeh River and covered bazaars joined the new quarter to the old town. Isfahan became known by the saying "Isfahan is half the world". Afghan rebels took the city in 1722 after a long siege, and the Safavid dynasty ended in 1736.
Europe, South Asia, Africa, Americas, East Asia and the Pacific
Britain ruled colonies on every continent and, by 1920, about a quarter of the world's land.
The British Empire grew from English trading posts and colonies founded from about 1600 in North America, the Caribbean and India. British ships carried about three million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic before Parliament banned the trade in 1807, and an act of 1833 ended slavery in most of the empire from 1834.
Britain gained Canada from France after the Seven Years' War, and the East India Company ruled much of India until the Crown took over in 1858. In 1920 the empire covered about 35.5 million square kilometres. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, and the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 is the usual end date.
London merchants received a royal charter and a monopoly on English trade with Asia.
On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a group of London merchants, giving them a monopoly on English trade with the East Indies. The company first traded in spices, then in cotton, silk, indigo and tea. It built trading posts at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, and after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 it ruled Bengal with its own army.
By 1800 it governed large parts of India. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 Parliament took control from the company in 1858, and the Crown ruled India directly.
Shoguns ruled Japan from Edo in about 250 years of peace, until the Meiji Restoration.
Tokugawa Ieyasu won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and in 1603 the emperor named him shogun. He ruled from Edo, now Tokyo, while the emperor stayed in Kyoto. About 270 regional lords, the daimyo, kept their own domains but had to spend alternate years in Edo and leave their families there as hostages. Peace lasted about 250 years, and Edo had over a million people by about 1800. In 1639 the shogunate closed Japan to almost all foreign trade.
Commodore Perry arrived in Edo Bay with four warships in 1853, and the shogunate signed treaties that opened Japanese ports. After a short civil war the last shogun gave up power, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the shogunate.
Britain's colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, home to 2.5 million by 1776.
The Thirteen Colonies were the British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America that became the United States. The first lasting one was Virginia, at Jamestown in 1607; the last, Georgia, was founded in 1732. By 1776 about 2.5 million people lived in them, among them about 500,000 enslaved Africans. New England lived by farming, fishing and trade, and the southern colonies grew tobacco and rice with enslaved labour. After the Seven Years' War, Britain taxed the colonies to pay its debts, and the colonists protested that they had no say in it. Fighting began at Lexington in 1775, and on 4 July 1776 Congress declared independence.
A religious revolt in Bohemia grew into a war across the Holy Roman Empire.
The Thirty Years' War began in 1618, when Protestant nobles in Bohemia threw two imperial officials out of a window in Prague. A revolt against the Catholic Habsburg emperor grew into a general European war, with Spain, France, Sweden and Denmark all taking part, and most of the fighting took place in the Holy Roman Empire.
Armies lived off the land. Famine and disease killed between 4.5 and 8 million soldiers and civilians, among the worst losses in European history. The Peace of Westphalia ended the war in 1648.
Shah Jahan built a white marble tomb at Agra for his wife Mumtaz Mahal.
Shah Jahan began the Taj Mahal at Agra in 1632, a year after his wife Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child. About 20,000 workers raised a white marble tomb on a platform beside the Yamuna River, topped by a dome about 73 metres high. The main building was finished about 1643 and the gardens, gatehouse and mosques by 1653. Ustad Ahmad Lahori is usually named as its chief architect.
In 1658 Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb took the throne and held his father prisoner in Agra Fort until his death in 1666. Shah Jahan was buried in the Taj Mahal beside his wife.
Oirat Mongols ruled Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin until the Qing destroyed them.
The Dzungars, a western Mongol people called Oirats who followed Tibetan Buddhism, formed their khanate in 1634 under Erdeni Batur. Under Galdan, from 1671, they took the Tarim Basin and beat the Khalkha Mongols. In 1717 Tsewang Rabtan's army took Lhasa, and the Qing drove it out in 1720.
After a civil war following the death of the ruler Galdan Tseren in 1745, a Qing army invaded in 1755. By 1758 the khanate had been destroyed. Qing troops, on the orders of the Qianlong Emperor, killed Dzungar people on a huge scale. Historians estimate 420,000 to 600,000 deaths, about 70 to 80 percent of the Dzungars, from killing and disease, and many describe it as a genocide.
The shogunate expelled the Portuguese and ended almost all foreign trade and travel.
Through edicts issued between 1633 and 1639, the Tokugawa shogunate shut Japan to most foreigners and forbade Japanese to travel abroad. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637, led largely by Catholic peasants, hardened the policy, and in 1639 the Portuguese were expelled. Christianity was banned. Dutch merchants were confined to the island of Dejima at Nagasaki, and Chinese traders came to Nagasaki; Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Ainu were reached through three other gateways.
The policy, later called sakoku, lasted more than 200 years. It ended when Commodore Perry arrived in 1853 and the Convention of Kanagawa of 1854 opened two ports to American ships.
Manchu emperors ruled China from Beijing and doubled its size, until the 1912 revolution.
The Qing began as a Manchu state in north-east China, named Great Qing by Hong Taiji in 1636. In 1644 rebels took Beijing and the last Ming emperor killed himself. The Ming general Wu Sangui let Manchu armies through the Great Wall, and they took the city and made it their capital. The emperors Kangxi and Qianlong then added Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet and, after crushing the Dzungars, Xinjiang, so that the empire reached about 14.7 million square kilometres in 1790.
Defeat by Britain in the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and a lost war with Japan weakened the dynasty. After the Xinhai Revolution, the child emperor Puyi abdicated on 12 February 1912, ending imperial rule in China.
Shivaji and his successors built a Hindu Maratha state that came to rule much of India.
Shivaji, a Maratha lord from western India, was crowned Chhatrapati, or king, at Raigad on 6 June 1674 after years of fighting the Mughals and the sultanate of Bijapur. From the 1700s the hereditary prime ministers, the Peshwas, ruled from Pune, while four great houses, the Scindias, Gaekwads, Holkars and Bhonsles, governed their own territories. About 1760 the Marathas held roughly a third of the subcontinent, about 2.5 million square kilometres.
An Afghan army beat them at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761. They lost the Third Anglo-Maratha War to the East India Company, and in 1818 the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was removed and Company rule took over.
Writers argued that reason, not tradition or church, should guide thought and government.
The Enlightenment was a movement of writers and thinkers who held that reason, not tradition or religious authority, should guide thought about nature, society and government. It grew from the Scientific Revolution and from John Locke, who wrote in the 1680s about natural rights and government by consent. Historians date it differently; 1685 to 1815 is a common range.
Its centres were the salons and journals of Paris, London, Edinburgh and Amsterdam. Voltaire attacked religious intolerance, Montesquieu argued for separated powers, and Diderot edited the Encyclopédie, which appeared from 1751 to 1772. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Its ideas were taken up in the French Revolution of 1789.
Newton published the three laws of motion and the law of gravitation in one book.
On 5 July 1687 Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in London. Edmond Halley, an astronomer, had pressed him to write it and paid for the printing. In three books, written in Latin and in geometric proofs, it set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, and used them to explain the orbits of planets, moons and comets, and the tides.
Newton's mechanics became the base of physics for more than two centuries, until relativity and quantum theory. Writers of the Enlightenment held it up as proof that nature followed laws that reason could find.
Russia and Qing China signed a treaty that fixed their border along the Amur.
On 27 August 1689 envoys of Russia and Qing China met at Nerchinsk, in Siberia. Fyodor Golovin signed for the tsars and Songgotu for the Kangxi Emperor, and Jesuit priests translated, so the text was written in Latin. Russia gave up the fort of Albazin and the Amur valley, and the border ran along the Argun and Gorbitsa rivers and the Stanovoy Mountains. The line west of the Argun was left open because the Dzungars controlled that land.
The treaty opened trade between the two empires, confirmed in the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727. In 1858 and 1860 Russia took back the Amur lands north of the river from a weakened Qing.
Ashanti kings in Kumasi ruled much of present-day Ghana and grew rich on gold.
The Ashanti Empire was an Akan state in the forests of present-day Ghana, with its capital at Kumasi. About 1701 King Osei Tutu joined the Asante chiefdoms after beating Denkyira, and the Golden Stool, said to have come down from the sky, became the symbol of the union. The empire grew rich on gold, kola nuts and the sale of captives to European traders on the coast, and it ruled much of present-day Ghana. It beat a British force in 1824 and killed the governor. After several wars with Britain, the British took Kumasi in 1896 and exiled the king, and in 1901 the empire became a British protectorate.
Emperors in Saint Petersburg ruled from the Baltic across Siberia to the Pacific.
Peter the Great took the title emperor in 1721, after Russia won the Great Northern War against Sweden. His new capital, Saint Petersburg, stood on marshland on the Baltic coast, where building had begun in 1703. The empire spread east across Siberia and, for a time, into Alaska. Under Catherine the Great it took Crimea and, with Prussia and Austria, divided the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
At its largest, in 1895, it covered about 22.8 million square kilometres. Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. The empire ended in the February Revolution of 1917, when Nicholas II gave up the throne.
The East India Company ruled much of India until the Crown took over.
After Robert Clive beat the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757, the East India Company became a territorial power. In 1765 the Mughal emperor gave it the right to collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Its army grew from 154,500 men in 1806 to 350,538 in 1857, nearly nine in ten of them Indian soldiers. Company forces took over the Maratha lands in 1818 and the Sikh Empire in 1849.
In 1857 Indian soldiers rose against the Company, and the revolt lasted into 1858. Parliament then passed the Government of India Act 1858, and on 1 November 1858 the Crown took over the Company's territory, about 1.94 million square kilometres.
In Britain, machines and steam power began to replace hand work and animal power.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain about 1760, when machines and steam power started to replace hand work and animal power. Spinning machines such as the spinning jenny and Richard Arkwright's water frame made cotton cloth cheaply, and James Watt's improved steam engine, patented in 1769, drove machines with coal. Work moved from cottages to factories and towns grew quickly. Historians date it differently; 1760 to 1840 is the usual range.
Railways spread from the 1820s. Factories, coal mining and railways reached Belgium, France, the German states and the United States during the nineteenth century.
James Cook sailed three times to the Pacific and charted New Zealand, eastern Australia and Hawaii.
James Cook made three voyages for the Royal Navy. On the first, from 1768 to 1771, he observed the transit of Venus at Tahiti in 1769, charted the coasts of New Zealand and in 1770 claimed the east coast of Australia for Britain. On the second, from 1772 to 1775, he crossed the Antarctic Circle and found no great southern continent. On the third he sailed from 1776 to look for a passage along the north of America, and reached Hawaii in 1778.
Hawaiians killed Cook at Kealakekua Bay on 14 February 1779. His charts guided the British settlers who arrived in Australia in 1788.
Thirteen colonies fought Britain for independence, helped by France, and won in 1783.
The war began on 19 April 1775, when British troops and Massachusetts militia fought at Lexington and Concord. The colonies, led by the Continental Congress and General George Washington, fought to be free of British rule. France joined the Americans in 1778, and Spain and the Dutch Republic later fought Britain too. After Washington and a French fleet and army trapped Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, he surrendered in October 1781. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognised the United States, with a border west to the Mississippi. About 25,000 Americans died, most of disease, and tens of thousands of Loyalists left, many for Canada.
Thirteen former British colonies formed a federal republic that grew across North America.
The United States began when thirteen British colonies declared independence in 1776 and won the war in 1783. The Constitution of 1787 set up a federal republic with a president, a Congress and courts. The country grew west by purchase and war, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled its area. Native nations lost most of their land through treaties and wars. Slavery stayed legal in the South until the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment. Millions of immigrants arrived from Europe and later from Asia and Latin America. About 340 million people lived in the country in 2024.
Congress adopted Jefferson's statement that the thirteen colonies were independent, on 4 July 1776.
On 4 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote most of it. Congress had voted for independence on 2 July, and the declaration gave the reasons. It listed grievances against King George III and stated that all men are created equal, with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Fifty-six delegates signed it. Jefferson owned slaves, and a passage in his draft that condemned the slave trade was cut. The declaration was read aloud in towns and army camps, and the war that began in 1775 became a war for a new country. Britain recognised the United States in 1783.
The First Fleet landed about 1,400 people at Sydney Cove and founded a British penal colony.
The First Fleet, eleven ships carrying about 1,400 people, left Portsmouth in May 1787 under Captain Arthur Phillip and anchored at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. About 780 of them were convicts. The land belonged to Aboriginal peoples, the Eora around Sydney among them, who had lived in Australia for tens of thousands of years, and Britain took it without a treaty.
Phillip became the first governor of New South Wales. Britain sent more than 160,000 convicts to Australia until 1868, and settlers spread across the continent, taking Aboriginal land as they went.
French revolutionaries overthrew the king and ended feudal privilege.
The French Revolution began in 1789, when the Estates-General called by Louis XVI turned itself into a National Assembly and Parisians stormed the Bastille on 14 July. The Assembly abolished feudal privileges and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. France became a republic in 1792, and Louis XVI was guillotined in January 1793.
During the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794, about 17,000 people were officially executed, and many more died in prison or without trial. The revolution ended in November 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup.
Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose against France and founded Haiti in 1804.
In August 1791 enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of Hispaniola, rose against their owners. The colony made more sugar and coffee than any other in the world, with about half a million enslaved people. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man, became the leading general, and France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794. In 1802 Napoleon sent an army to restore slavery. Toussaint was captured and died in a French prison in 1803, but yellow fever and the rebels beat the army. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on 1 January 1804. Haiti was the second independent country in the Americas and the first run by formerly enslaved people.
Edward Jenner protected a boy from smallpox by inoculating him with cowpox.
On 14 May 1796 Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Gloucestershire, took matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the arm of James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. Jenner later exposed the boy to smallpox, and he did not fall ill. Dairymaids were known to catch cowpox and escape smallpox.
Jenner published his results in 1798 and called the method vaccination, from the Latin word for cow. Vaccination spread across the world. Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century, and in 1980 the World Health Organization declared it eradicated.
Machines and fossil fuels changed how people lived and worked. Steam engines, railways and telegraphs, and later electricity and cars, moved goods, people and news ever faster. Cities grew, and population rose from about one billion in 1800 to about 2.3 billion in 1940. European states and the United States took control of most of Africa and much of Asia. Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in 1859, and the work of physicists changed how people saw life and nature. Slavery was abolished across the Americas. Two world wars, in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, killed tens of millions of people, and the second ended with the first atomic bombs.
Dutch East Indies
East Asia and the Pacific
The Netherlands ruled the islands of present-day Indonesia as a colony.
The Dutch East Indies began on 1 January 1800, when the Dutch state took over the possessions of the Dutch East India Company, which had gone bankrupt. Under the Cultivation System of 1830 to 1870, Javanese villages had to grow export crops such as coffee and indigo for the government, which gave the Dutch state large profits, and Java suffered famines in the 1840s. The Dutch fought the Java War of 1825 to 1830 and the Aceh War from 1873 to 1904, and their rule covered the whole archipelago only in the early twentieth century. Japan occupied the islands from 1942 to 1945. Sukarno declared Indonesia independent on 17 August 1945, and after four years of war the Netherlands recognised its independence on 27 December 1949.
Great Britain and Ireland were joined in 1801, and the UK became the first industrial power.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed on 1 January 1801, when the Acts of Union joined the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland. Britain was the first country to industrialise, with coal, iron, cotton mills and railways, and by 1900 the British Empire ruled about a quarter of the world's land and people. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. Parliament grew more democratic through reform acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884 and the vote for women in 1918 and 1928. The Great Famine killed about a million people in Ireland in the late 1840s. After the Irish War of Independence, most of Ireland left in 1922, and in 1927 the state took its present name, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
France under Napoleon fought changing coalitions of European powers for twelve years.
The Napoleonic Wars were fought between France under Napoleon Bonaparte and coalitions of Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia and others. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804 and beat Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805. Britain, whose navy won at Trafalgar that year, stayed out of his reach. By 1810 he controlled most of western and central Europe. In 1812 about 600,000 men marched into Russia, and only a fraction came back. Allied armies entered Paris in 1814 and sent him to the island of Elba, and after his return in 1815 he lost at Waterloo. The Congress of Vienna then redrew the map. The wars killed several million soldiers and civilians, and they spread the ideas of the French Revolution, such as the legal code of 1804, across Europe.
Spain's colonies in the Americas fought for independence and became a dozen republics.
Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 removed King Ferdinand VII and left Spain's colonies in the Americas with no recognised ruler. Local councils took power in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Quito and elsewhere in 1809 and 1810, and war between independence fighters and royalists followed. Simón Bolívar led armies in the north that freed Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and José de San Martín crossed the Andes in 1817 to free Chile and then sailed to Peru. The royalists lost the Battle of Ayacucho on 9 December 1824, and their last stronghold on the mainland, at Callao, fell in 1826. Mexico became independent in 1821. About a dozen new republics emerged. Spain kept Cuba and Puerto Rico until 1898.
Shaka made a small chiefdom into a military kingdom in south-eastern Africa.
Shaka became chief of the Zulu in 1816 and made a small clan into a kingdom. He drilled men into age regiments, gave them a short stabbing spear, the iklwa, and taught them to surround an enemy in a formation called the buffalo horns. By his death in 1828, when his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana killed him, the kingdom controlled much of what is now KwaZulu-Natal. Dingane lost to Boer settlers at Blood River in 1838. In January 1879 the Zulu army under Cetshwayo wiped out a British column at Isandlwana, killing about 1,300 men, but Britain won the war within six months. It divided the kingdom among chiefs, and in 1897 the Zulu lands were annexed to the British colony of Natal.
The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in north-east England, hauled by steam locomotives.
The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825 in north-east England. It was the first public railway to use steam locomotives, on a line of about 40 kilometres built mainly to bring coal from the Durham pits to the port at Stockton. George Stephenson drove the first train, behind his engine Locomotion No. 1, with wagons of coal and flour and carriages of passengers. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway followed in 1830, and it ran passenger trains by timetable with steam alone. Within two decades railways crossed Britain and were being built in Belgium, France, Germany and the United States. They cut journey times from days to hours and moved coal, grain and soldiers faster than horses or canal boats could.
Parliament passed a law that freed about 800,000 enslaved people in the British colonies.
The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833 and took effect on 1 August 1834. It ended slavery in most British colonies, mainly in the Caribbean, with smaller numbers at the Cape and in Canada, and freed about 800,000 people. Children under six were freed at once, but adults had to keep working for their former owners as unpaid "apprentices" for four to six years, and the system ended early, in 1838, after protests. Parliament paid slave owners £20 million, about 40 per cent of its annual spending, and paid the enslaved nothing. Britain had banned the slave trade in 1807, and the Royal Navy later patrolled the West African coast against slave ships. Slavery in the United States ended in 1865.
Britain invaded Afghanistan to block Russia and lost an army in the retreat from Kabul.
Britain, afraid of Russian influence in Afghanistan, invaded from India in 1839 and put Shah Shuja on the throne in Kabul in place of Dost Mohammad. The British garrison stayed on, and Afghan anger grew. In November 1841 Kabul rose, and in December the British envoy William Macnaghten was killed at a meeting. On 6 January 1842 the garrison and its camp followers, about 16,500 people, left Kabul for Jalalabad and were attacked in the snowy mountain passes. Only one European, the army surgeon William Brydon, reached Jalalabad; some others were held captive. A British army went back to Kabul in 1842, burned part of the city and withdrew. Dost Mohammad returned to his throne. Britain fought a second Afghan war in 1878 to 1880.
Britain beat the Qing in a war over the opium trade and took Hong Kong.
British merchants paid for Chinese tea by selling Indian opium in China, though the Qing government had banned it. In 1839 the official Lin Zexu seized about 20,000 chests of opium at Canton and destroyed them. Britain sent warships, among them the steam-powered Nemesis, took coastal cities and sailed up the Yangtze towards Nanjing. In the Treaty of Nanjing of August 1842 China gave Hong Kong Island to Britain, paid 21 million silver dollars and opened five ports to British trade. More treaties of this kind followed, with the United States and France as well, and the Second Opium War of 1856 to 1860 added more. Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Ottoman sultans modernised the army, law and schools to hold the empire together.
The Tanzimat, meaning reorganisation, began with the Edict of Gülhane, issued by Sultan Abdulmecid I on 3 November 1839. It promised every subject security of life and property, fair taxes and army service, whatever their religion. Over the next decades the empire set up a conscript army, secular courts and state schools, issued banknotes and passed a land code in 1858. A reform decree in 1856 promised equality to non-Muslims. The state also borrowed heavily from European banks and stopped paying its debts in 1875. The period ended when the first Ottoman constitution and parliament were proclaimed in December 1876. Abdulhamid II suspended them in 1878 and ruled as an autocrat until the Young Turk revolution of 1908.
A Christian-inspired rebel kingdom fought the Qing in one of the deadliest wars ever.
Hong Xiuquan, who had failed the civil service examination several times, read Christian pamphlets and came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus. In 1850 he led a rising in Guangxi, and in 1853 his followers took Nanjing and made it the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. The Taiping banned opium, foot-binding and private property, and ruled tens of millions of people at their peak. Qing armies raised by provincial officials such as Zeng Guofan took Nanjing in July 1864, a month after Hong died. An estimated 20 to 30 million people died, most of them civilians, from fighting, famine and plague. The provincial armies stayed in the hands of their commanders, which weakened the Qing court.
Indian soldiers of the East India Company rose against it, and the Crown took over India.
The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 at Meerut, where Indian soldiers of the East India Company army, the sepoys, rose after a rumour that new rifle cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat, which offended Hindus and Muslims. They marched to Delhi and named the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as their leader. The revolt spread across the Ganges plain, with sieges at Kanpur and Lucknow, and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi fought the British in the field. Company troops, helped by Sikh and Gurkha regiments, retook Delhi in September 1857, and the last fighting ended in 1858. British reprisals killed many civilians. Bahadur Shah was exiled to Burma. Parliament abolished the Company in 1858, and the Crown took over India.
The British Crown ruled India directly for 89 years, through a viceroy.
The British Raj began on 1 November 1858, when Queen Victoria's proclamation put India under the Crown after the Indian Rebellion. A viceroy governed British India, and about 560 princely states kept their own rulers under British control. Victoria was named Empress of India in 1877. Railways and telegraphs spread, and the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. Famines in 1876 to 1878, 1896 to 1902 and 1943 killed millions of people. After Gandhi's campaigns and World War II, Britain agreed to leave. On 15 August 1947 the Raj was split into India and Pakistan. About 14 million people crossed the new borders, and estimates of the dead in the violence run from 200,000 to 2 million.
Darwin argued that all species descend from common ancestors and change by natural selection.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859, and the first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day. He had formed his ideas on the voyage of HMS Beagle in 1831 to 1836 and had worked on the book for twenty years. He published only after Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay in 1858 that reached the same conclusion. The book argued that species are not fixed: individuals vary, those better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring, and over long periods this produces new species. It set off a public argument about science and religion. Darwin knew nothing of genes; genetics, combined with his theory in the 1930s and 1940s, became the basis of modern biology.
Eleven slave states left the Union, and the war that followed killed over 600,000 soldiers.
The war began on 12 April 1861, when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Eleven Southern states, whose economies rested on slavery, had left the United States after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, and they formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people in Confederate territory free, and about 180,000 Black men served in the Union army. Battles such as Gettysburg in July 1863 cost tens of thousands of casualties. General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. At least 620,000 soldiers died, and some estimates are as high as 750,000, more than in any other American war. Slavery ended later that year.
The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, which had held about four million people in 1860.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on 6 December 1865, when Georgia became the 27th state to approve it. It said that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude could exist in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. About four million people had been enslaved in 1860. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had covered only the Confederate states, so slavery went on in Kentucky and Delaware until the amendment. Union soldiers had announced freedom in Galveston, Texas, on 19 June 1865, a date now marked as Juneteenth. The exception for punishment was soon used to lease out convicts as labourers. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of 1868 and 1870 gave citizenship and the vote to Black men. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so.
Russia conquered the khanates of Central Asia and ruled them from Tashkent.
Russia took Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868, and in 1867 it set up the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan, with Tashkent as its capital. The Emirate of Bukhara became a protectorate in 1868 and the Khanate of Khiva in 1873, and Russia abolished the Khanate of Kokand in 1876. Its last conquest was the Turkmen fortress of Geok Tepe in 1881. A railway across the desert from the Caspian Sea reached Samarkand in 1888, and the region became a supplier of cotton to Russian mills. Russian settlers came, mostly to the steppe. In 1916 the order to send local men to dig trenches for the war set off a revolt that was put down with thousands of deaths. After the Russian Revolution, the region became Soviet.
Japan industrialised, took colonies and went to war across Asia until defeat in 1945.
The Empire of Japan was the state that came out of the Meiji Restoration, and it was ruled in the name of the emperor. It won the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to 1895 and took Taiwan, beat Russia in 1904 to 1905 and annexed Korea in 1910. In 1931 its army seized Manchuria, and in 1937 it invaded China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 it took the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and Burma within months. Allied forces drove it back, and it surrendered in August 1945 after the atomic bombs. The United States occupied Japan until 1952. The empire ended when a new constitution took effect on 3 May 1947 and made the emperor a symbol.
Samurai reformers ended the shogunate and put the young Emperor Meiji at the head of Japan.
On 3 January 1868 samurai from the Satsuma and Chōshū domains and court nobles declared that power had returned to the emperor, the 15-year-old Meiji, ending the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for more than 250 years. The shogun's forces lost the Boshin War of 1868 and 1869, and Edo was renamed Tokyo and became the capital. The new government ended the domains and the privileges of the samurai, introduced conscription in 1873 and built schools, railways and factories. The first railway ran between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872. A constitution followed in 1889. Within 30 years Japan beat China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, and it had become the first industrial power in Asia.
Gandhi led India's independence movement through nonviolent resistance.
Mohandas Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, trained as a lawyer in London and worked in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. There he developed satyagraha, resistance without violence, after being thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage. Back in India he led the Indian National Congress campaigns of non-cooperation from 1920, the Salt March in 1930 and Quit India in 1942, and he was jailed many times. He was called Mahatma, great soul. He tried to prevent the partition of India in 1947. On 30 January 1948 Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, shot him dead in Delhi. His methods were later used by Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and by Nelson Mandela's movement.
Prussia and the other German states became one empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I.
The German Empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, near the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Wilhelm I of Prussia became German Emperor, and his chancellor Otto von Bismarck ran the new state, which joined 25 states under Prussian leadership. The Reichstag was elected by all men over 25, but the emperor chose the chancellor. Germany became the largest industrial economy in continental Europe, and from 1884 it took colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and built a large navy that worried Britain. The empire fought World War I with Austria-Hungary, and Wilhelm II gave up the throne on 9 November 1918, two days before the armistice. The Weimar Republic replaced it.
European powers conquered nearly all of Africa in about thirty years.
In 1870 European powers held about a tenth of Africa, mostly on the coast. After France occupied Tunisia in 1881 and Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, they raced to claim the interior. By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent. Britain took Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and southern Africa, France much of the north and west, Germany four colonies, Italy Libya, Somalia and Eritrea, Portugal Angola and Mozambique, and Belgium the Congo. Africans resisted at Isandlwana, at Omdurman, in Samori Ture's wars and at Adwa. Armies with machine guns won most of the wars. German troops killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in South West Africa in 1904 to 1908. Colonial rule ended in most of Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s.
Fourteen states met in Berlin to set rules for claiming African land; no African took part.
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called the Berlin Conference, which met from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885. Fourteen states took part, among them Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the United States. No African ruler was there. The conference agreed that a power could claim a stretch of coast only if it actually occupied it and told the others, and it opened the Congo and Niger rivers to free trade. It also recognised the claim of King Leopold II of Belgium to the Congo basin. The conference did not itself draw the map of Africa, but the rule of effective occupation sped up the Scramble for Africa, and by 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent.
King Leopold II ruled the Congo basin as his own property; forced labour killed millions.
The Congo Free State was the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, recognised by the powers at the Berlin Conference. His officials forced villagers to collect wild rubber and ivory, and the Force Publique, his army, took hostages, burned villages and cut off hands of people who fell short of quotas. Estimates of the dead from killing, forced labour, hunger and disease run from 1.5 million to 15 million, a wide range because there was no census. Photographs and reports by E. D. Morel and Roger Casement led to protests in Britain and the United States. Belgium took the colony from Leopold in 1908 and ruled it as the Belgian Congo until 1960.
Karl Benz patented a three-wheeled motor car with a petrol engine in Mannheim.
Karl Benz filed a patent for a motor car on 29 January 1886 in Mannheim, Germany. His Benz Patent-Motorwagen had three wheels and a single-cylinder petrol engine of 954 cubic centimetres that gave about three-quarters of a horsepower and a top speed of about 16 kilometres an hour. It is usually counted as the first practical car with an internal combustion engine. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach built a four-wheeled motor carriage in Stuttgart the same year. In August 1888 Benz's wife Bertha drove one 106 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her two sons, buying fuel at a pharmacy on the way, a trip often called the first long drive by car. Cars stayed expensive until Henry Ford began building them on an assembly line in 1913.
New Zealand was the first self-governing country where women could vote in national elections.
On 19 September 1893 the governor of New Zealand signed an electoral law that gave women the vote, making it the first self-governing country where women could vote in parliamentary elections. The campaign was led by Kate Sheppard, and a petition to Parliament that year carried nearly 32,000 signatures. Māori women, as well as Pākehā women, could vote. About 65 per cent of women voted in the election on 28 November 1893. Women could not stand for Parliament until 1919. Australia gave most women the federal vote in 1902, Finland followed in 1906 and Norway in 1913. Britain gave votes to women over 30 in 1918, and the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
Ethiopia beat an Italian army in 1896 and stayed independent.
On 1 March 1896 the army of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, perhaps 100,000 men, many carrying modern rifles, defeated about 17,700 Italian and Eritrean soldiers near Adwa, in northern Ethiopia. Italy had claimed that a treaty of 1889 made Ethiopia a protectorate, and Menelik had rejected that. About 6,000 Italians were killed and about 3,000 were taken prisoner. Empress Taytu brought her own troops and fought beside him. In the Treaty of Addis Ababa in October 1896, Italy recognised Ethiopia's independence. Adwa was one of the few defeats of a European army by an African state during the Scramble for Africa, and it made Ethiopia a symbol of resistance for Africans and for later pan-African movements. Italy invaded again in 1935.
Six British colonies joined as one federation on 1 January 1901.
The Commonwealth of Australia was founded on 1 January 1901, when six British colonies, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, federated after referendums in 1898 to 1900. Parliament first met in Melbourne, and moved to the new capital, Canberra, in 1927. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 kept non-European people out, in what was called the White Australia policy. Most women won the federal vote in 1902. Aboriginal Australians, who had lived on the continent for at least 50,000 years, were left out of the census and of most federal law until a referendum in 1967, which more than 90 per cent of voters approved. Australian troops fought at Gallipoli in 1915 and in both world wars.
The Wright brothers flew a powered aeroplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
On 17 December 1903 Orville Wright flew the Wright Flyer, a biplane of spruce and cloth, for 12 seconds and 36.5 metres over the sand dunes at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. His brother Wilbur made the longest of the four flights that day, 59 seconds and 260 metres. It is counted as the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered aircraft heavier than air. The brothers were bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, who built their own wind tunnel to test wing shapes and their own 12-horsepower engine, and they steered by twisting the wings. Aircraft were used in war within a decade, and in World War I thousands were built. Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 1909.
Einstein showed time and length depend on motion, and that mass and energy are equivalent.
In June 1905 Albert Einstein, a 26-year-old clerk at the patent office in Bern, sent the journal Annalen der Physik a paper titled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. It started from two assumptions: the laws of physics are the same for everyone moving at a steady speed, and light in empty space always travels at the same speed. From these he worked out that moving clocks run slower and moving objects shrink along their direction of travel. A short paper later that year showed that mass and energy are equivalent, written as E = mc². The same year he also published papers on the photoelectric effect and on Brownian motion. In 1915 he extended the theory to gravity as general relativity.
Mongol nobles declared independence from China and made the Bogd Khan their ruler.
On 1 December 1911, soon after the Xinhai Revolution began, Mongol nobles in Urga, now Ulaanbaatar, declared Mongolia independent of the Qing. They made the Jebtsundamba Khutughtu, the highest Buddhist lama in Mongolia, ruler as the Bogd Khan. Mongolia had been under Qing rule since 1691, and Mongol princes were deep in debt to Chinese merchants. Russia helped but would not recognise full independence, and in 1915 a treaty left Mongolia autonomous under Chinese rule. Chinese troops took Urga in 1919. The Russian baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg drove them out in 1921, and the Red Army and Mongol revolutionaries then took the capital. After the Bogd Khan died in 1924, Mongolia became a people's republic under Soviet influence.
An army uprising at Wuchang began the revolution that ended imperial rule in China.
The revolution began on 10 October 1911 at Wuchang, where soldiers of the Qing New Army mutinied after a bomb exploded in a revolutionary hideout and police found the membership lists. Province after province declared independence from the Qing within weeks. Sun Yat-sen, who had spent years abroad raising money, came back and was chosen provisional president of a republic, and he took office on 1 January 1912. On 12 February 1912 the six-year-old emperor Puyi gave up the throne, which ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. Sun then handed the presidency to the Qing general Yuan Shikai. The Republic of China followed, though China broke into rival warlord regions after Yuan died in 1916.
China's first republic struggled with warlords, Japanese invasion and civil war until 1949.
The Republic of China was founded on 1 January 1912 in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. Yuan Shikai held the office from March and tried to make himself emperor in 1915, and after his death in 1916 rival generals ruled the regions. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang took most of the country in the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 and made Nanjing the capital. It fought the Communists from 1927 and Japan from 1937. After 1945 the civil war began again, and the Communists took the mainland. Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949. The Republic's government moved to Taiwan, where it continues.
Two alliances of great powers fought a four-year war that killed about 20 million people.
The war began on 28 July 1914, a month after a Serbian nationalist killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo. Alliances pulled in Germany, Russia, France and Britain within days, and later the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Japan and the United States. On the Western Front the armies dug trenches from the Channel to Switzerland, and battles such as the Somme in 1916 cost hundreds of thousands of lives for a few kilometres of ground. Machine guns, poison gas, aircraft and tanks were all used at scale. The armistice came on 11 November 1918. Estimates of the dead run from 15 to 22 million, soldiers and civilians. Four empires were gone and the Russian Revolution had begun, and the peace left problems that led to the Second World War.
The Ottoman government killed about one to one and a half million Armenians.
On 24 April 1915 Ottoman police arrested about 250 Armenian leaders in Constantinople, the start of a campaign by the Committee of Union and Progress government to destroy the Armenian people of the empire. Men were shot or worked to death in labour battalions, and women, children and old people were marched into the Syrian desert towards Deir ez-Zor, where many died of hunger, thirst and massacre. Between one million and one and a half million Armenians were killed, most of the Armenians in the empire. Assyrian and Greek Christians were also killed. Historians and many governments call it genocide, and the Turkish government rejects the word. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide in 1944, cited the Armenian case.
Britain and France split the Ottoman Arab lands into mandates after World War I.
In the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916, Britain and France agreed how to share the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They had also made promises to others: the British to the Arab leader Hussein of Mecca in 1915 and to Zionists in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. At San Remo in April 1920 the Allies assigned the territories as League of Nations mandates. Britain received Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, and France received Syria and Lebanon. French troops took Damascus in July 1920 and ended the Arab kingdom of Syria, which had lasted only a few months. The new borders cut across peoples such as the Kurds, who were promised a possible state in 1920 and did not get one. The mandates ended between 1932 and 1948.
Two revolutions in 1917 ended the tsar's rule and brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In the February Revolution of 1917, strikes and mutinies in Petrograd, the capital, forced Tsar Nicholas II to give up the throne on 15 March in the modern calendar. A Provisional Government took over but kept Russia in World War I, and it lost support as the war went badly and food ran short. On 7 November the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, who had promised peace, land and bread, took the government buildings in Petrograd with little fighting. A civil war between the Red Army and its White opponents followed until 1922 and killed several million people through fighting, hunger and disease. The former tsar and his family were shot in July 1918. In 1922 the Bolsheviks founded the Soviet Union.
Mandela spent 27 years in prison for opposing apartheid and became South Africa's first Black president.
Nelson Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in a village in the Transkei, trained as a lawyer and joined the African National Congress in 1944. After the National Party came to power in 1948 and made apartheid, the system of racial separation, into law, he led campaigns against it and later helped start the ANC's armed wing. He was sentenced to life in prison at the Rivonia trial in 1964 and spent 18 of his 27 years in prison on Robben Island. He was released on 11 February 1990. He and President F. W. de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and in April 1994 he won the first election open to all races. He served one term as president and died on 5 December 2013.
An influenza pandemic infected about a third of the world and killed tens of millions.
The influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 was caused by an H1N1 virus. It was called Spanish flu because neutral Spain, with no wartime censorship, reported it openly; where it began is debated. It came in three waves, and the autumn of 1918 was the deadliest. Troop ships and trains carried it everywhere, and it killed an unusual number of healthy adults between 20 and 40. About 500 million people, a third of the world, were infected. Estimates of the dead run from 17 to 50 million, and some go as high as 100 million. In Western Samoa, about one person in five died within weeks after a ship reached Apia in November 1918. There was no vaccine and no antibiotic against the pneumonia that killed most victims.
A one-party communist state spanning northern Eurasia, it became a superpower and then dissolved.
The Soviet Union was founded on 30 December 1922, when the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Transcaucasian republics joined under Bolshevik rule. The Communist Party ran a planned economy, and under Joseph Stalin from the late 1920s it forced farms into collectives. Famine in 1932 and 1933 killed millions in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, and in 1937 and 1938 about 680,000 people were shot in the Great Terror, according to Soviet records. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people fighting Germany in World War II and took much of eastern Europe afterwards. It competed with the United States in the Cold War until the Communist Party lost control. The union dissolved on 26 December 1991 into 15 independent states.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded a secular republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 by Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk, who had led the Turkish War of Independence against occupying Greek, French, British and Italian forces. The Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923 recognised Turkey's borders. The sultanate had already been abolished in 1922, and the caliphate went in 1924. As president until 1938, Atatürk replaced Islamic law with a civil code in 1926, changed the script from Arabic to Latin letters in 1928 and gave women the vote in 1934. In 1923, more than a million Orthodox Christians were moved from Turkey to Greece in exchange for Muslims from Greece. Turkey stayed out of most of World War II and joined NATO in 1952.
Alexander Fleming noticed a mould that killed bacteria on a dish in his London laboratory.
In September 1928 Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist at St Mary's Hospital in London, came back from a holiday and found that a mould had grown on a dish of Staphylococcus bacteria, with a clear ring around it where the bacteria had died. The mould was Penicillium, and he published his finding in 1929. He could not purify the substance. Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their team at Oxford did so in 1939 to 1941, and the first patient they treated, in 1941, recovered at first and died when the supply ran out. During World War II factories in the United States began to make penicillin in large amounts. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and antibiotics became the standard treatment for infections.
The longest and deepest economic slump of the twentieth century hit nearly every country.
The Great Depression began with the Wall Street crash of October 1929, when share prices in New York fell sharply. Bank failures in the United States and Europe, falling prices and the gold standard, which tied currencies to gold, carried the slump around the world. By 1933 about a quarter of American workers had no job, and in Germany nearly six million people were unemployed in 1932. Farmers in colonies and poor countries lost their export markets. Governments tried public works and tariffs; in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt began the New Deal in 1933. In Germany the mass unemployment helped the Nazi Party win power the same year. Recovery was slow, and rearmament before the Second World War finished the job in many countries.
Gandhi walked 390 kilometres to the sea to make salt in defiance of British law.
British law taxed salt and made it a crime for Indians to make their own. On 12 March 1930 Gandhi and 78 followers left his ashram near Ahmedabad and walked about 390 kilometres to the coast at Dandi, collecting thousands of people on the way. On 6 April he picked up a lump of natural salt on the beach, and across India people made salt, which was against the law. About 60,000 people were arrested in the following months. In May, police beat unarmed marchers with steel-tipped clubs at the Dharasana salt works, which was reported around the world by the journalist Webb Miller. Gandhi was released in 1931 and met the viceroy, Lord Irwin. Britain did not give way on independence, which came in 1947.
Hitler turned Germany into a one-party dictatorship that started World War II and the Holocaust.
Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. After the Reichstag fire in February and the Enabling Act in March, the government could pass laws without parliament, and by 1934 the Nazi Party ruled alone and Hitler was Führer. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 took citizenship from Germany's Jews. Germany annexed Austria in 1938, took the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, which began World War II. The regime murdered about six million Jews and millions of other people, among them Roma, disabled people and Soviet prisoners of war. Hitler killed himself in Berlin on 30 April 1945, and Germany surrendered on 8 May. The Allies divided the country into four occupation zones.
The largest war in history killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people.
The war began on 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war two days later. By 1941 Germany and its allies held most of Europe, and in June it attacked the Soviet Union. Japan, at war with China since 1937, attacked Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in December 1941, which brought in the United States. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943 and the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944 turned the war in Europe. Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, and Japan signed its surrender on 2 September. An estimated 70 to 85 million people died, among them about six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Nazi Germany and its allies murdered about six million Jews, two thirds of Europe's Jews.
The Holocaust was the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies, two thirds of the Jews of Europe. Persecution had begun in 1933, but after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 mobile killing units shot Jews in the occupied east, and from late 1941 the Nazis built extermination camps. At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, officials planned the deportation of Europe's Jews to the camps. Jews were taken in trains from every occupied country to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Majdanek, and most were gassed on arrival. About 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone. Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and others were also killed. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945.
The world was divided between the United States and the Soviet Union until 1991. The colonial empires ended: India became independent in 1947, and most of Africa followed in the 1950s and 1960s. People walked on the Moon in 1969. Computers, satellites and the internet connected the world, and the World Wide Web went public in 1991. World population grew from about 2.5 billion in 1950 to more than 8 billion in 2022. People live much longer than in 1945, and extreme poverty has fallen. Climate change and the risk of nuclear war are among the main dangers. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 killed millions of people.
Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
East Asia and the Pacific
The United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in August 1945.
On 6 August 1945 a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on 9 August a second one fell on Nagasaki. They are the only nuclear weapons used in war. By the end of 1945 between 90,000 and 146,000 people had died in Hiroshima and between 39,000 and 80,000 in Nagasaki, most of them civilians, and others died later of burns and radiation. On 8 August the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan, and on 15 August Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender in a radio broadcast. Japan signed it on 2 September, which ended the Second World War. The bombs started the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
Sukarno proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, and the Dutch accepted it in 1949.
Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence in Jakarta on 17 August 1945, two days after Japan surrendered. The Netherlands tried to take its colony back and fought a war of about four years. It transferred sovereignty on 27 December 1949. Sukarno was president until 1967, when General Suharto took power after the killings of 1965 and 1966, in which an estimated 500,000 to one million people died. Suharto ruled until 1998, when protests during the Asian financial crisis forced him out, and free elections followed in 1999. Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands. It has about 280 million people and is the largest Muslim-majority country.
Fifty countries signed the UN Charter in San Francisco, and it took effect in October.
The United Nations began on 24 October 1945, when its charter came into force after China, France, the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and most of the other signers had ratified it. Fifty countries had signed the charter in San Francisco on 26 June, and Poland signed soon after. The five great powers became permanent members of a Security Council with a veto, while every member had one vote in the General Assembly, which first met in London in January 1946. The headquarters in New York was finished in 1952. Membership grew from 51 states to 193 as colonies became independent. The General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
The United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence without fighting each other directly.
After 1945 the two strongest powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, became rivals with opposing systems: capitalism and democracy against one-party communism. They never fought each other directly, but each armed itself with thousands of nuclear weapons and backed opposing sides in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Germany was split, and Berlin was divided by a wall from 1961. The two came close to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. They also raced into space, from Sputnik in 1957 to the Moon landing in 1969. The Soviet bloc began to fall apart in 1989, when the Berlin Wall opened, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.
India became independent in 1947 and is now the world's most populous democracy.
India became independent on 15 August 1947, when British rule ended and the subcontinent was divided into India and Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister. The constitution, drafted by a committee chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, took effect on 26 January 1950 and made India a republic with votes for all adults. More than 500 princely states joined the union in the first years, and the first general election was held in 1951 and 1952. India opened its economy to foreign trade in 1991. In 2023 the UN estimated that India had passed China as the most populous country, with about 1.4 billion people. The dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir has not been settled.
Japan became a democracy under a new constitution that renounced war.
After the surrender in 1945, Allied forces under the American general Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan until April 1952. A new constitution took effect on 3 May 1947. It made the emperor a symbol with no political power, gave the vote to women and, in Article 9, renounced war. Land reform and the breaking up of the large business groups followed. The economy grew fast from the 1950s, helped by orders during the Korean War, and the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the Shinkansen showed the recovery. Japan was the second-largest economy from 1968 until China passed it in 2010. The population peaked at about 128 million in 2008 and has fallen since.
Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of British India.
Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 as a state for the Muslims of British India. The Muslim League and its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became the first governor-general, had demanded it. It had two parts, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, about 1,600 kilometres apart. The country became an Islamic republic in 1956 and the army ruled for long periods, from 1958, 1977 and 1999. East Pakistan broke away after a war in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, soon after India. It has about 240 million people, which makes it the fifth most populous country.
British India was divided into India and Pakistan, and millions of people crossed the new border.
In June 1947 the British announced that British India would be divided into India and Pakistan, and the line was drawn by a commission led by Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before. Punjab and Bengal were cut in two. Pakistan became independent on 14 August and India on 15 August. About 10 to 20 million people moved, Hindus and Sikhs towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan. Violence between the communities killed between 200,000 and 2 million people, a range that reflects how poorly the deaths were counted. Many women were abducted. The two states fought their first war over Kashmir in 1947 and 1948, and the Partition left a border that has stayed closed to most people ever since.
South Africa's white-minority government ranked people by race and kept them apart by law.
Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for apartness, was the system of racial segregation that the National Party government built after it won the 1948 election in South Africa. The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted every person into a racial group, and other laws decided where each group could live, work and go to school. Millions of black South Africans were forced from their homes. Police killed 69 protesters at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960, and the government banned the African National Congress and jailed Nelson Mandela in 1962. Students rose in Soweto in June 1976, and sanctions and protests grew in the 1980s. Mandela was freed on 11 February 1990, the main apartheid laws were repealed by 1991, and the first election open to all adults was held in April 1994.
David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, and neighbouring armies attacked.
Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, the day before the British Mandate in Palestine ended, in a statement read by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv. The UN General Assembly had voted in November 1947 to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, and Arab leaders rejected the plan. Armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon entered the next day. In the war about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, and the armistice agreements of 1949 left Israel with more land than the UN plan had given it. Many Jews left or were driven out of Arab countries in the following years. Israel took the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967. The conflict with the Palestinians is unresolved.
The UN General Assembly adopted a list of 30 rights that belong to every person.
On 10 December 1948 the UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 48 votes to none. Eight states abstained: six communist-led states, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. A committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt drafted it, with members such as Peng Chun Chang of China, Charles Malik of Lebanon and René Cassin of France. Its 30 articles say that all people are born free and equal and have the right to life, to a fair trial and to freedom from slavery and torture. The declaration is not a treaty and cannot be enforced in court, but later treaties, among them the two covenants of 1966, were built on it. It has been translated into more than 500 languages.
The Communist army took mainland China, and Chiang Kai-shek's government fled to Taiwan.
The civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists began again after Japan's surrender in 1945. In three campaigns from September 1948 to January 1949 the People's Liberation Army destroyed the best Nationalist armies in Manchuria and northern China, and it entered Beijing without a fight in January 1949. Nanjing fell in April and Shanghai in May. Chiang withdrew with his government and army to Taiwan in December 1949, and the Nationalists have governed it since. The Communists declared the People's Republic on 1 October. Neither side signed a peace treaty, and the status of Taiwan is still disputed.
Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic in Beijing on 1 October 1949.
Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing on 1 October 1949, after the Communists had won the civil war. The state was ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which redistributed land from landlords in the early 1950s. The Great Leap Forward of 1958 led to a famine, and the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. After Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping brought in market reforms from 1978, and China became the world's second-largest economy in 2010. Hong Kong was returned by Britain in 1997. The one-child policy ran from 1980 to 2015. The 2020 census counted 1.41 billion people.
North Korea invaded South Korea, and the war ended in a ceasefire without a peace treaty.
North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950, and within weeks it held almost the whole peninsula. A UN force led by the United States landed at Inchon on 15 September and pushed north almost to the Chinese border. China entered the war on 19 October, and the front settled near the 38th parallel in 1951. Armistice talks lasted two years, and the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on 27 July 1953. It set up a demilitarised zone four kilometres wide. Wikipedia counts around a million soldiers and between 1.5 and 3 million civilians among the dead. No peace treaty has been signed, so the two states are still formally at war.
African countries won independence from Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal, most of them by 1966.
In 1945 only a few African states, among them Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and South Africa, were independent. Libya became independent in 1951 and Ghana in 1957, and in 1960 alone seventeen countries did, among them Nigeria, the Belgian Congo and most of French West Africa. Africans led the movements: Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika. Some independence came by talks and some by war, as in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The Organisation of African Unity was founded in 1963. The end of Portugal's dictatorship in 1974 freed Angola and Mozambique in 1975. Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa were still ruled by white minorities.
Watson and Crick in Cambridge proposed that DNA is a double helix.
On 25 April 1953 the journal Nature printed a short paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, proposed that DNA is a double helix: two strands wound round each other, held together by paired bases. Their model drew on X-ray images made at King's College London by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling, among them Photo 51, which Watson saw without Franklin's knowledge, and on work by Maurice Wilkins. Franklin's own paper was printed in the same issue. She died in 1958, and Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962. The structure showed how genes could be copied. A first draft of the human genome was published in 2001.
Black Americans and their allies campaigned to end legal segregation in the United States.
The civil rights movement is dated here from the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education on 17 May 1954, which struck down segregated public schools, to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. After the arrest of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, Black residents boycotted the city's buses for over a year, led by Martin Luther King Jr. Sit-ins, Freedom Rides and marches followed. About 250,000 people joined the March on Washington on 28 August 1963. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. King was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968.
North Vietnam and the Viet Cong fought South Vietnam and the United States, and won.
The war was fought between communist North Vietnam, with the Viet Cong guerrillas in the south, and South Vietnam, supported by the United States. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 the United States sent combat troops, and their number peaked at about 543,000 in 1969. The war spread to Laos and Cambodia, and American aircraft dropped large amounts of bombs. The United States withdrew its troops under the Paris agreement of January 1973, and 58,281 Americans had died. North Vietnamese tanks took Saigon on 30 April 1975, and Vietnam was united in 1976. Wikipedia gives total deaths of between 1.3 million and 3.4 million, most of them Vietnamese.
The Gold Coast became Ghana on 6 March 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence.
The Gold Coast, a British colony, became independent as Ghana on 6 March 1957. Kwame Nkrumah, whose Convention People's Party had won elections since 1951, declared independence at midnight in Accra before a large crowd. The name came from the medieval Ghana Empire, which lay far to the north-west. Ghana was the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from European rule, and its flag of red, gold and green was copied by other new states. Nkrumah made the country a republic in 1960 and promoted African unity, but he ruled as a one-party leader until the army overthrew him in February 1966. He died in exile in 1972.
The United States and the Soviet Union competed to reach space and then the Moon.
The Space Race was the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union over who could do more in space. It began with Sputnik in October 1957. The Soviet Union put the first animal, the first person and the first woman into orbit, and in May 1961 President Kennedy asked the United States to land a person on the Moon before the decade was out. Apollo 11 did it in July 1969. The Soviet N1 moon rocket failed in four test launches, and its crewed Moon programme was cancelled in the 1970s. The race is usually said to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz mission of July 1975, when an American and a Soviet spacecraft docked in orbit.
The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite from Baikonur on 4 October 1957.
On 4 October 1957 a Soviet R-7 rocket carried Sputnik 1 into orbit from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. It was a polished metal sphere 58 centimetres wide, weighed 83.6 kilograms and had four antennas that sent a steady beeping signal, which radio amateurs around the world picked up. It circled the Earth every 96 minutes until it burned up in January 1958. The chief designer was Sergei Korolev. The launch alarmed the United States, which feared that the rocket could also carry a warhead. Congress passed the law that founded NASA in 1958, and the Space Race began.
A famine in China killed an estimated 15 to 46 million people.
A famine killed tens of millions of people in China in the years 1959 to 1961. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, from 1958, put farmers into large communes and made many of them produce iron and steel instead of food. Officials reported harvests far above the real ones, and the state took grain for the cities and for export on the basis of those figures. Bad weather made the shortage worse. Estimates of the excess deaths run from 15 to 46 million, and recent studies cluster at 30 million or more. The government did not admit the scale of it. At a party meeting in early 1962 Liu Shaoqi said that the disaster was mostly man-made, and Mao lost influence for a time. He launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Soviet irrigation took the water of two rivers, and the Aral Sea shrank to a tenth.
In 1960 the Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the fourth-largest lake in the world, with about 68,000 square kilometres of water. From the 1960s Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the two rivers that fed it, to irrigate cotton and rice fields. The lake shrank and split in two in 1987, and by 2007 it held about a tenth of its original area. Fishing towns such as Moynaq were left far from the shore, the fishing industry collapsed, and salty dust blew over the fields. A dam finished in 2005 let the northern part in Kazakhstan recover in part. The eastern basin of the southern part dried up in 2014.
Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once in Vostok 1, launched from Baikonur on 12 April 1961.
On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air force pilot, lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in the capsule Vostok 1. He circled the Earth once, in 108 minutes, at a height of up to about 327 kilometres. The capsule was controlled from the ground. Gagarin ejected at about seven kilometres and landed by parachute in a field near Engels, in the Saratov region of Russia. He became famous across the world. Alan Shepard became the first American in space on 5 May, in a flight that did not reach orbit. Gagarin died in 1968 in the crash of a training jet.
The United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war over missiles in Cuba.
On 16 October 1962 President Kennedy was shown photographs, taken by a U-2 spy plane, of Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba. On 22 October he announced a naval quarantine of the island and demanded that the missiles be removed. For six days the two sides stood on the edge of war, and on 27 October an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba. On 28 October Soviet leader Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles. The United States promised not to invade Cuba, and in secret it agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey. The crisis led to a direct telephone line between Washington and Moscow in 1963.
Apollo 11's crew landed on the Moon, and two of them walked on it.
On 20 July 1969 the lunar module Eagle of the American Apollo 11 mission landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface about six and a half hours later and was followed by Buzz Aldrin, while Michael Collins stayed in orbit in the command module. They collected 21.5 kilograms of rock, set up instruments, and spent about two and a half hours outside. An estimated 600 million people watched on television. Five more Apollo missions landed between 1969 and 1972, and twelve people have walked on the Moon, the last in December 1972. No one has walked on it since.
Under Deng Xiaoping the party turned from class struggle to growth and let farmers sell crops.
At a party meeting in December 1978, the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, the leadership under Deng Xiaoping moved the party's focus from class struggle to economic growth. Under the household responsibility system, farm families farmed their own plots and sold what they grew beyond a state quota, and the system spread across the country in the early 1980s. In 1980 Shenzhen and three other coastal cities became special economic zones open to foreign investors. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and passed Japan as the second-largest economy in 2010. Hundreds of millions of people have left extreme poverty since 1978, by the World Bank's count.
Mass protests ended the shah's rule, and Ayatollah Khomeini founded an Islamic republic.
Protests against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi began in 1977 and grew in 1978 into strikes and marches in every large city. The shah left Iran on 16 January 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a cleric who had spent years in exile, flew back to Tehran on 1 February, and the last government of the monarchy fell on 11 February. A referendum at the end of March approved an Islamic Republic, with a reported 98 percent in favour, and Khomeini became its Supreme Leader. In November 1979 students seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans for 444 days. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.
Soviet troops fought Afghan rebels for nine years and withdrew in February 1989.
Soviet troops entered Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 to support its communist government, which was losing control to rebels. The rebels, called mujahideen, fought from villages and mountains and were supplied by Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia and China. Soviet forces held the cities but never controlled the countryside. Between 14,000 and 26,000 Soviet soldiers died, and estimates of Afghan deaths run from about one to three million. About five million Afghans fled abroad, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. The last Soviet column left on 15 February 1989. The communist government in Kabul fell in 1992, and civil war followed until the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.
The World Health Organization declared smallpox gone, the only human disease eradicated so far.
On 8 May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. The disease had killed about 300 million people in the twentieth century. Edward Jenner had shown in 1796 that cowpox gave protection, and the World Health Organization started an intensified campaign in 1967, with teams that traced each case and vaccinated everyone around it. The last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, in October 1977. A laboratory accident in Birmingham killed one more person, Janet Parker, in 1978. Smallpox is the only human disease to have been eradicated. Stocks of the virus are kept in two laboratories, in the United States and in Russia.
East Germany opened its border on 9 November 1989, and crowds crossed the Berlin Wall.
East Germany built the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 to stop its people leaving for the West, and at least 140 people died trying to cross it. In 1989 protests grew across the Eastern bloc, and in September Hungary let East Germans cross its border into Austria. On the evening of 9 November a party spokesman, Günter Schabowski, said at a press conference that East Germans could cross the border freely and, asked when, answered that it applied immediately. Thousands gathered at the checkpoints, and the guards opened the gates. Crowds climbed on the wall and chipped pieces from it. Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan left the Soviet Union in 1991.
The five Soviet republics of Central Asia became independent between August and December 1991: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on 31 August, Tajikistan on 9 September, Turkmenistan on 27 October and Kazakhstan on 16 December. They did not lead the break-up. In the Soviet referendum of March 1991 all five had voted to keep the union. Their leaders were Communist Party chiefs, and several stayed in power for decades: Islam Karimov ruled Uzbekistan until his death in 2016, and Nursultan Nazarbayev ruled Kazakhstan until 2019. Tajikistan fell into a civil war from 1992 to 1997. The five states have about 80 million people.
Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the fifteen Soviet republics became independent.
On 8 December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared in the Belovezha Accords that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president on 25 December, and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin that evening. The next day the upper house of the Supreme Soviet voted the union out of existence. Its fifteen republics became independent states, and Russia took the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council. A coup attempt by hardliners in August had failed and left Gorbachev without power. Wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan and Chechnya followed in the new states.
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN made the Web available to the public in August 1991.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN near Geneva, proposed a system of linked pages in March 1989 so that researchers could share documents between computers. He wrote the first web browser and server in 1990. On 6 August 1991 he posted a summary of the project to a public newsgroup, and anyone with an internet connection could use it. In April 1993 CERN made the software free for all to use. The Mosaic browser, released that year, brought images to the Web and the number of sites grew quickly. The Web is one service that runs on the internet, which is older. More than five billion people were online in 2024.
European states joined in one union with shared laws, a single market and a common currency.
The European Union was created by the Maastricht Treaty, signed on 7 February 1992 and in force from 1 November 1993. It built on the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 and the European Economic Community set up by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and it added a common foreign policy, shared citizenship and a plan for a single currency. The euro came into use in banks in 1999 and as coins and notes in 2002. Membership grew from 12 states to 28 by 2013. The United Kingdom, the first member to leave, did so on 31 January 2020 after a referendum in 2016, which left 27 states.
After South Africa's first all-race election, Parliament chose Nelson Mandela as president on 9 May 1994.
South Africa held its first election open to adults of every race on 27 April 1994, and the African National Congress won 62.65 percent of the vote. Parliament elected Nelson Mandela president on 9 May, and he took the oath on 10 May at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Mandela had spent 27 years in prison, from 1962 to 1990. His government included the ANC, the National Party under F. W. de Klerk, who became a deputy president, and the Inkatha Freedom Party. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its hearings in 1996. Mandela served one term and left office in 1999. He died in 2013.
Hutu extremists killed about 500,000 or more Tutsi in Rwanda in about 100 days.
The genocide began on 7 April 1994, the day after a plane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down near Kigali. Who shot it down is disputed. Hutu extremists in the army, militias and government then set out to kill the Tutsi minority and Hutu who opposed them, and many neighbours took part, using machetes and guns. Wikipedia gives a total of 520,000 to 702,000 dead, most of them Tutsi, in about 100 days; Rwanda's constitution says more than a million. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped. UN peacekeepers were not given the power to stop it. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, took Kigali on 4 July and ended the killing on 19 July.
Al-Qaeda hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,977 people.
On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen members of al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners in the United States. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which collapsed, and one into the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought the hijackers. The attacks killed 2,977 people, not counting the hijackers. The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October to remove the Taliban government, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, and invaded Iraq in 2003. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, was killed by American troops in Pakistan in 2011. The last American troops left Afghanistan in August 2021.
Protests began in Tunisia and brought down rulers in four Arab countries.
On 17 December 2010 a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, after officials seized his cart, and protests spread across the country. President Ben Ali fled on 14 January 2011. Demonstrations followed in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak resigned on 11 February, and in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. In Libya a NATO-backed uprising ended with the death of Muammar Gaddafi in October. The protests in Syria turned into a civil war that lasted until Bashar al-Assad fell in December 2024. Bahrain's government put down its protests, and in Egypt the army removed an elected president in 2013. Tunisia's democracy lasted until 2021.
A new coronavirus spread worldwide, and more than 7 million deaths were reported.
A new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and spread to most of the world within weeks. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Governments closed borders and schools and told people to stay at home, and many economies shrank sharply that year. More than 7 million deaths were reported to the WHO, and its estimate of excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 is about 15 million. The first vaccines were approved in December 2020, and billions of doses followed. The WHO ended the global health emergency on 5 May 2023. Where the virus first came from is still debated.
Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, after eight years of war in the east.
Russia had annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed a war in eastern Ukraine since then. On 24 February 2022 its army invaded Ukraine from the north, east and south. It failed to take Kyiv and withdrew from the north in March and April, and in September and November Ukrainian forces retook land near Kharkiv and the city of Kherson. In September 2022 Russia declared that it was annexing four Ukrainian regions, which most UN members refused to recognise. Wikipedia puts the number of refugees abroad at 6 to 7 million and of people displaced inside Ukraine at about 8 million, and it counts hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded. Russia holds about a fifth of Ukraine, and the war is ongoing.