Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

Alexander’s clout didn’t die with him. Legend says that his body was preserved in honey while his followers spent more than two years building an ornate funeral wagon. When the wagon was ready, mourners loaded the imperial casket onto it and began a ponderous, 1,500-mile funeral procession to Macedon for burial. They never got there. Alexander’s General Ptolemy, appointed governor of Egypt, diverted the procession to Alexandria, one of the cities the conqueror had named for himself. There, the possession of Alexander’s corpse gave Ptolemy the status to become ruler in his own right. He founded Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, which continued until his descendant Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC.

One of Alexander’s enduring achievements is that he spread the infectious Greek way of questioning and thinking about the world. He and his largely-Greek forces disseminated Greek attitudes. Alexandria, Egypt, became a center of Hellenistic culture, meaning that Greek-influenced ideas and language networked beyond the widespread Greek city-states and lasted into much later eras.

Rationality, democracy, individualism, citizenship, free debate, and the inquiry born of Greek-style philosophy percolated through other cultures. Some anthropologists, and some historians too, like to call this “cultural diffusion” or “trans-cultural diffusion.” Those terms just mean that ideas — including philosophy, but including technology, cuisine, and fashion — migrate to new places as diverse groups of people come into contact with each other. After Alexander, philosophy became a cornerstone of science, and the scientific approach became a primary tool for interpreting reality. In that way, the Classical Greeks still exert a powerful influence.

Over the thousands of years since the first cities and civilizations rose and spread in the Middle East and Asia, many other cultures in the following areas took significant strides. Here are just a few examples:

Africa: In what’s now northern Nigeria, the Nok people cleared tropical rainforest for farmland, using iron-bladed axes and hoes, around 600 BC. The Nok were also sculptors, making realistic figurines of terra cotta.

Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, France, and Spain: Hundreds of years before the first pyramids in Egypt, people in Western Europe built communal graves out of stone and earth. Surviving examples date back to 3500 BC; some particularly good ones remain in Orkney, a group of islands off the coast of Scotland, and at Newgrange, Ireland. Europeans of the late Stone Age also left entire villages built of stone. More spectacular yet are the huge stone circles called megaliths (or “big rocks”) that these people erected. Stonehenge, the most famous, was raised in southern England between 3000 and 2000 BC.

Japan: People lived in small villages on the mountainous islands that would become Japan as early as 9000 BC, mostly near the ocean and along rivers. They transitioned from a hunter–gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, first growing vegetables and millet. These people were potters, too, and their cord-pattern pots give the period its name, Jomon. By the end of the Jomon era, around 300 BC, Japanese potters showed a broader view of the world as they borrowed Chinese-style decorations. Another Chinese innovation, rice growing, also spread to Japan.

9000 BC:People live in a walled community at Jericho, a crossroads town at a spring-fed oasis near the Jordan River. It would grow into a city.

About 5000 BC:Barley and flax farmers dig networks of irrigation canals and build villages along those canals between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what would become Iraq.

About 3100 BC:King Menes unites Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt into one kingdom with its capital at Memphis.

2000 BC:Egypt conquers the neighboring Kush culture to the south.

About 1700 BC:Earthquakes and sudden mass flooding may be responsible for ending the sophisticated Indus River Valley civilization.

512 BC:Cyrus, a young Persian king, leads troops against his grandfather, king of the Medes.

404 BC:Sparta defeats Athens in the 27-year Peloponnesian War.

323 BC:While staying in Babylon, Alexander the Great comes down with a sudden fever and dies.

Chapter 5

IN THIS CHAPTER

Tracing the life cycle of the Roman Empire(s)

Bringing states together in a united Indian empire

Uniting and organizing China

Establishing the Maya and other empires in the Americas

The Roman city-state’s origins are obscure and lost to history, if not to legend. But the history of Rome as it grew into one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen is anything but obscure. Even in 20 books this size, I probably wouldn’t be able to fit in everything that’s known about the Roman Empire and its people — let alone its pervasive legacy.

In this chapter, you’ll follow the way Rome grew from a city-state ruled by a king to a republic to a vast empire and how that empire eventually deteriorated into a divided, crumbling political ruin. And you can find out about how Rome left such a history and a lasting mark on the world that sometimes, it almost seems that the Roman Empire was the only great empire of the final century BC and the early centuries AD. But you’ll also encounter other powerful empires that rose and fell in the Middle East, Asia, and in the Americas, far away and isolated from the Roman sphere. Imperial expansion dominated much of the world.

From its legendary beginnings to its fractured demise, the Roman civilization had a certain pizzazz that has captured the imagination of not just historians, but also everybody who’s fascinated by human achievement, military adventure, political intrigue, and tragedy. Shakespeare was among those who have been drawn to its stories (see more in the later section “ Crossing the Rubicon”), and so am I.

What’s the attraction? You can look at Rome’s long rise and descent from any number of angles and marvel at the complexity and sophistication, not to mention the cruelty and corruption of this long-lived culture. In the brief glimpses that follow, you can find clues to what fascinates so many of us with the Roman civilization.

Roman legend says that the half-god, half-mortal Romulus, a son of the Greek war god Mars, built the city of Rome on the Tiber River in 753 BC and ruled as its first king. The legend also says that a female wolf suckled baby Romulus and his twin brother Remus, whom Romulus later murdered. Historians tend to disagree, especially about the wolf, and put the founding of Rome a bit later, around 645 BC. (For more about Romulus and Remus, see Chapter 19.)