Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

3 Bathe the body in spices and palm wine. Cover it with natron salts, a sodium paste found in drying lakebeds, to retard spoilage and dry the skin.

4 When the body is good and dry, stuff rolled-up linen cloths inside, kind of like stuffing a turkey. Try to restore the person’s shape to something resembling lifelike.

5 Wrap more linen, cut into neat strips, around the outside of the body to create that creepy, bandaged look that will scare the pants off moviegoers a few millennia later.

6 Put the body in a coffin, preferably a double coffin (one inside another). If you’re working on a pharaoh, put the coffin inside a stone sarcophagus inside a hidden tomb.

Perhaps nobody devoted quite so much thought and energy to death and the afterlife as the ancient Egyptians. After burying their dead with great care and ceremony since perhaps 4000 BC ( Chapter 4has more on ancient Egypt), the Egyptians began artfully mummifying their pharaohs sometime before the 24th century BC.

By 2300 BC, the practice had spread beyond royalty. Any Egyptian who could afford it was dried and fortified for the trip into the afterlife. The mummy was buried with possessions and even servants for use in the next world.

Egyptian mummies differ from many others in that researchers can figure out exactly who some of these people were in life. King Tutankhamen’s identity is intact thanks to ancient Egyptian pictorial writings called hieroglyphics. Again, writing gives us actual history. British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered fabulously preserved artifacts in Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. The discovery made Tutankhamen the most famous pharaoh in our time, although he may not have been that in his own time. Tut took the throne in 1361 BC at about age 9 and reigned for only 9 years.

Carter first gazed by candlelight into the wonders of that tomb, unseen for more than 3,300 years. That moment has been held up ever since as the ideal archaeological breakthrough — completely unlike most great discoveries, which are scratched out of the ancient dust and painstakingly pieced together.

Carter said that he stood in front of the tomb for a long time, allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom. His patron and partner, George Herbert, Earl of Carnarvon, stood behind him in the dark, unable to stand the suspense. “Do you see anything?” asked Carnarvon breathlessly. “Yes,” replied Carter in a hushed tone. “Wonderful things.”

The discovery made all the papers, and so did Carnarvon’s untimely death. The earl died of an infected mosquito bite a few months after he helped Carter find the tomb. Naturally, some people blamed his death on an ancient curse against anyone who disturbed the boy king’s eternal rest. (Grave robbers had been the scourge of Egyptian royalty.)

The notion of Tutankhamen’s curse may have disappeared if it weren’t for a 1932 horror movie called The Mummy, which is wrong on every point of archaeology and Egyptian religion but features a compellingly compelling performance by Boris Karloff in the title role. The Mummy was successful enough that many remakes and variations followed.

About 4000 BC:Egyptians begin burying their dead with ritual care.

About 3300 BC:A well-equipped male traveler in the Italian Alps succumbs to an arrow wound and falls face-down into the snow.

About 1600 BC:The volcano on the island of Santorini erupts, destroying the island, wiping out villages, and probably ending a civilization.

1352 BC:Tutankhamen, young king of Egypt, dies and is mummified.

About 1250 BC:A confederation of Greek kings and warriors attacks the city of Troy, in today’s Turkey.

Ninth century BC:The bard Homer sings about the Trojan War.

Early fourth century BC:In Athens, the philosopher Plato writes about Atlantis, a land lost under the sea.

1870s:Heinrich Schliemann, a German commodities broker and amateur archaeologist, finds Homer’s Troy.

1922:British archaeologist Howard Carter opens Tutankhamen’s perfectly preserved tomb.

1991:Hikers in the Italian Alps discover the 5,300-year-old mummy of a well-outfitted traveler. Researchers nickname him Ötzi.

Chapter 3

IN THIS CHAPTER

Seeing through the long lens of humanity’s time on Earth

Figuring out BC and AD

Accepting the relativity of the names of eras

Embracing contradictory characters

In several places in this book, I refer to the year 1492, when the explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing under a Spanish flag, landed for the first time on an island in the Bahamas, east of Florida. That year is a big dividing point in history, in that it marks the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. The Western Hemisphere changed in ways that were devastatingly tragic for the people who had been living there. Diseases from Europe killed them by the millions. The rest of the world, meanwhile, saw changes that ranged from new crops (corn, potatoes, tobacco, peppers, coffee) to population migrations, to new, lucrative markets for slave trading (the most pernicious kind of population migration). A global economy took root once European navigators realized they could sail to new worlds, and soon around the world, in their little wooden ships.

Yet according to The New York Times, a survey conducted back in 2008 showed that fewer than half of teenagers in the United States could correctly pick the date of Columbus’s discovery from a multiple-choice list. If today’s teenagers, or adults, were given the same test, how many would choose the right answer? Many people have trouble putting history and its events into perspective. The history of the world is such a huge topic, covering so many eras, cultures, events, conflicts, ideas, and beliefs, that it’s easy to get mixed up. Three common problems that you may have are:

Sorting out such terms as ancient, recent, and modern when they’re used by historians and other scholars and connecting them with the stretches of time that people have lived on the planet.

Getting comfortable with labels such as classical and Victorian that historians use to refer to eras and periods. Often, these labels can seem more cryptic than helpful.

Understanding the often-contradictory reasons why certain exceptional people are judged to be worthy of historical study.

In all three cases, I suggest that you relax. The terminology is less important than you may think.

In this chapter, you get a chance to ponder what it means to be human before you plunge into the cavalcade of civilizations that follows in Part 2. If you can work up a healthy sense of awe about our remarkable species and its beginnings, you’ll be better able to appreciate the broad sweep of time that people have been around. And you can see that historical language — including relative terms such as ancient and labels for eras such as Classical Greece — is somewhat flexible and may be used differently by different historians. As with any subject matter, there are different ways of looking at history and even different ways of evaluating people in history. Sometimes perspectives conflict, but they can also complement one another.