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WonderHistory

East Germany began building the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 to stop its people leaving for the West. It divided the city for 28 years, until the night of 9 November 1989, when the guards opened the crossings and crowds poured through.

Before the Wall, about 3.5 million East Germans, a fifth of the population, had left for the West, many simply by crossing from East to West Berlin. Overnight on 12–13 August 1961, soldiers and workers sealed the border with barbed wire; concrete followed. East Germany called it the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, while West Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt, called it the “Wall of Shame”. Its final version, begun in 1975, was made of 45,000 concrete slabs 3.6 metres high, with more than 100 watchtowers and a guarded strip of open ground behind it, the death strip. Even so, more than 5,000 people escaped, about 400 of them through tunnels dug underneath, and at least 140 people died at the Wall. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy told West Berliners “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”), and in 1987 Ronald Reagan urged the Soviet leader to “tear down this wall”.

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WonderHistory

Nelson Mandela was a leader of the struggle against apartheid, South Africa's system of racial segregation enforced by law, and spent 27 years in prison, from 1962 to 1990. In 1994, after the country's first election open to people of all races, he became the first president of a democratic South Africa.

Mandela, born in 1918, trained as a lawyer and became a leader of the African National Congress (ANC). When peaceful protest was met with bans and violence, he co-founded the ANC's armed wing in 1961, which carried out sabotage. He was arrested on 5 August 1962 and, at the Rivonia Trial, gave a three-hour speech from the dock known as “I Am Prepared to Die”. On 12 June 1964 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 18 years on Robben Island, off Cape Town, then was held at Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. President F. W. de Klerk freed him on 11 February 1990, and the two men negotiated the end of apartheid, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela served a single term as president and stepped down in 1999.

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WonderHistory

Human history is not a straight line of progress. Around 1200 BC the palace kingdoms of Bronze Age Greece collapsed, and writing disappeared there for some 400 years, until the Greeks adopted a new alphabet from the Phoenicians.

Historians call the habit of telling the past as a steady march towards the present “Whig history”, a label made famous by Herbert Butterfield's 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History. The Late Bronze Age collapse is one of the clearest counter-examples. In the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC, many cities of the eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia disappeared; Egypt and Assyria survived, weakened. Suggested causes include drought, attacks by seafaring raiders known today as the Sea Peoples, disease and the breakdown of long-distance trade, probably working together. In Greece, Linear B, the script palace officials used for their records, fell out of use. When writing returned around 800 BC, it came as an alphabet adapted from the Phoenician one, the first with letters for vowels. Through the Etruscans and Romans, it is the ancestor of the letters you are reading now.

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WonderHistory

Everyday objects hide the work of countless people. In 2009 the British designer Thomas Thwaites spent nine months trying to build a simple electric toaster from scratch, starting from raw materials he gathered himself. When he plugged it in, its heating element melted.

Thwaites made the attempt for his master's degree at London's Royal College of Art, prompted by a line in Douglas Adams's novel Mostly Harmless about a man who, left to himself, could not build a toaster. A cheap toaster has around 400 parts, so he cut the materials to five: steel, copper, nickel, plastic and mica, a heat-resistant mineral used for insulation. He told the story in The Toaster Project (2011), and his tools and toaster went on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. A famous forerunner is the 1958 essay “I, Pencil”, in which the American writer Leonard Read lets a pencil explain that no single person knows how to make it, since its cedar, graphite, lacquer and glue come from different trades around the world. Scholars call the objects a society makes and uses its material culture, and study them for what they reveal about people.

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WonderHistory

By around 2500 BC, and probably earlier, the ancient Egyptians kept a calendar of 365 days: twelve months of 30 days each, followed by five extra days.

The twelve months were grouped into three seasons named after the Nile's yearly cycle: Akhet, the flood; Peret, when the fields emerged from the water; and Shemu, the harvest and low water. Each month had three ten-day weeks. The five extra days, called epagomenal (“added on”) days, stood outside the months and were celebrated as the birthdays of the gods Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys. The true solar year is about a quarter of a day longer, and with no leap day the calendar slipped a day every four years, so its seasons slowly wandered through the real ones. In 238 BC King Ptolemy III ordered a sixth extra day every fourth year, but priests and people resisted. The fix came under the Roman emperor Augustus around 25 BC. That reformed version lives on as the Coptic calendar, still used by Egypt's Coptic Church and by many farmers.

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WonderHistory

Some of the world's earliest coins were made in Lydia, a kingdom in western Anatolia, around 600 BC. They were small lumps of electrum, a natural mix of gold and silver, stamped with a lion's head, the royal emblem, to guarantee their weight and value.

Before coins, people paid with goods or with pieces of metal that had to be weighed at every sale. The first Lydian coins probably date from the start of the reign of King Alyattes, who died around 560 BC, though experts' estimates range from 700 to 550 BC; key evidence comes from coins buried in the foundations of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The capital, Sardis, near today's Salihli in Manisa, was the busiest mint. Because natural electrum varied in its gold content, Alyattes's son Croesus (reigned c. 560–546 BC) issued coins of pure gold and pure silver, the world's first such system. Coins soon spread to the Greek cities and, after the Persian king Cyrus conquered Lydia in 546 BC, across the Persian Empire. China developed coins independently at about the same time. Croesus's wealth became a byword: English still says “as rich as Croesus”.

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WonderHistory

Democracy in ancient Athens was direct: male citizens voted on laws, war and peace themselves. But women, slaves and resident foreigners were excluded, so only about a tenth to a fifth of the people living there could vote.

The system took shape through reforms by Solon in 594 BC, Cleisthenes in 508–507 BC and Ephialtes in 462 BC. Any male citizen over 20 could speak and vote in the Assembly, which met on the Pnyx hill and decided on war, laws and grants of citizenship; some votes needed at least 6,000 people present. Many officials were chosen by lot rather than elected, and court cases were decided by paid juries of hundreds of citizens over 30. Once a year the Assembly could hold an ostracism, sending a citizen seen as a danger into exile for ten years; voters scratched his name on a piece of broken pottery, an ostrakon. In the 4th century BC, Attica, the territory of Athens, had perhaps 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants, of whom only about 30,000 were adult male citizens. The word democracy comes from the Greek dēmos, “people”, and kratos, “power”.

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WonderHistory

The Persian Royal Road ran about 2,700 km from Sardis in western Anatolia to Susa in today's Iran. Relays of mounted couriers, changing horses at 111 stations, could carry the king's messages its whole length in about nine days; on foot the journey took some ninety.

The road was organised and improved by Darius I, who ruled the Achaemenid Persian Empire from 522 to 486 BC. It linked Susa, one of the empire's capitals, with Sardis, the old capital of Lydia. Our main source is the 5th-century BC Greek historian Herodotus. He counted 111 staging posts and put the length at 450 parasangs; a parasang was a Persian measure of roughly an hour's walk, about 5 to 6 km. At each post a rested rider and horse stood ready, so a message passed on as in a relay race and never waited for a tired horse. Herodotus wrote that nothing in the world travelled faster than these couriers. A line adapted from his description, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”, is carved on New York's James A. Farley post office building.

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WonderHistory

In 221 BC the king of Qin conquered the last of his rivals, unified China and took the title of First Emperor. His Qin dynasty lasted only until 206 BC, yet it gave the whole country one script, one currency and one system of weights and measures.

The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was born Ying Zheng and became king of Qin, one of seven rival states, at the age of 13. The two and a half centuries before his victory are known as the Warring States period, when these kingdoms fought for control of China. Between 230 and 221 BC his armies conquered the other six. He then replaced local systems with single standards: one style of writing, the small seal script, so that officials everywhere wrote the same characters; round bronze banliang coins instead of the old spade- and knife-shaped money; common weights and measures; even one axle width for carts. The dynasty collapsed soon after his death in 210 BC, but the Han dynasty that followed kept most of his system, which lasted in some form until 1911. The name “China” is often traced back to Qin.

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WonderHistory

In 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an, in China, found the Terracotta Army: an estimated 8,000 life-size clay soldiers, with horses and chariots, buried around 210 BC to guard the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

The army stands in pits about 1.5 km east of the emperor's burial mound. Pit 1 holds the main body of infantry, Pit 2 cavalry and chariots, and Pit 3 what looks like a command post; Pit 4 is empty, perhaps never finished. Burnt roof beams and missing weapons suggest the pits were looted and set on fire soon after the dynasty fell, and the collapsing roofs smashed the figures, so those on display have been pieced together from fragments. Even so, more than 40,000 bronze weapons have been recovered, from swords to crossbow triggers. Other pits hold figures of officials and acrobats, bronze chariots and bronze water birds. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, said 700,000 labourers built the tomb and that it held rivers of mercury; high levels of mercury in the mound's soil support him. The tomb itself has never been opened.

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WonderHistory

Around 261 BC the Indian emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on India's east coast. The suffering it caused changed him: in inscriptions carved on rocks and pillars across his empire, he expressed remorse and called for rule by dhamma, meaning moral conduct, non-violence and tolerance.

Ashoka ruled the Maurya Empire, which covered most of the Indian subcontinent, from about 268 to 232 BC. Kalinga lay in today's state of Odisha. In Major Rock Edict XIII he writes that 150,000 people were carried away, 100,000 killed and many more died, and that he now feels deep sorrow; the best conquest, he says, is conquest by dhamma. The word (dharma in Sanskrit) here means moral duty: respect for parents and teachers, kindness to servants and animals, generosity, and tolerance of every faith. More than thirty inscriptions survive in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, most of them in Prakrit, the everyday languages of the time, and some near Kandahar in Greek and Aramaic. Their main script, Brahmi, could not be read again until James Prinsep deciphered it in the 1830s. The four lions that topped one of his pillars, at Sarnath, are now India's national emblem.

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WonderReligion & Belief

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran from 1947 onwards, are Jewish manuscripts copied between about the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. Among them is the Great Isaiah Scroll, from around 125 BC: all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah on one scroll more than seven metres long.

The first seven scrolls were found in 1946–47 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave about 1.5 km from the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 eleven caves around Qumran had yielded pieces of 981 different manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. Many scholars link them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish group of the time, though others think they came from Jerusalem priests or other groups. Most survive only as fragments of parchment and papyrus. Copies or pieces of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified. The Isaiah scroll, 17 sheets of parchment sewn together, is the only Qumran scroll preserved almost whole, and it is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known before the discovery. It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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WonderHistory

Latin did not die with the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Scholars across Europe wrote in it for well over a thousand years, while the everyday Latin of ordinary people slowly turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

Linguists call the spoken, everyday form “Vulgar Latin”, from vulgus, the common people; Cicero called it “the speech of the masses”. Between the 6th and 9th centuries it drifted apart region by region into the Romance languages, which hundreds of millions of people speak today. Written Latin, meanwhile, stayed Europe's shared language of learning into the early 19th century. Schools taught largely in Latin until around 1700, and Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and gravity in Latin, in the Principia of 1687. Scientific names still follow the Latin system of Carl Linnaeus, which gives every species a two-part name such as Homo sapiens, “wise human”. Latin is also the official language of the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church, and law and medicine are full of Latin terms, from habeas corpus, the right of a detained person to be brought before a judge, to vertebra.

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WonderHistory

Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

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WonderHistory

From the late 8th century, Abbasid Baghdad became a great centre of translation, where scholars turned Greek, Persian and Indian works of science, medicine and philosophy into Arabic. The Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom, was one part of this wider effort, not its only home.

Baghdad was founded in 762 by the caliph al-Mansur as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty. Caliphs, courtiers and wealthy families paid for translations, often by Syriac-speaking Christian scholars who knew Greek. The best known, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), is said to have translated more than a hundred works, including much of the Greek physician Galen. Papermaking, learned according to tradition from Chinese prisoners in 751, made books cheaper. The House of Wisdom began as a palace library under al-Mansur or Harun al-Rashid and flourished under al-Ma'mun (reigned 813–833). The mathematician al-Khwarizmi worked in Baghdad in this period: the word “algorithm” comes from his name, and “algebra” from the title of his book. Some historians now argue that its image as a university-like academy was largely created by scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was destroyed when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258.

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WonderHistory

Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, completed his Canon of Medicine in 1025: a five-book encyclopaedia of the medical knowledge of his time. Translated into Latin in the 12th century, it became a standard textbook in European universities for centuries.

Ibn Sina (c. 980–1037) was born near Bukhara, in today's Uzbekistan, into a Persian family, and served as a physician at several courts in Iran. The Canon's five books cover the basic principles of medicine and anatomy; simple remedies, listed alphabetically; diseases of each part of the body; conditions affecting the whole body, such as fevers; and compound medicines. It combined the Greek medicine of Hippocrates and Galen with Aristotle's philosophy and knowledge from Persian and Indian medicine. Ibn Sina stressed testing remedies by experience and warned that a mixture can act more strongly than its ingredients suggest. The Latin version, Canon medicinae, entered university courses from the 14th century, was first printed in 1472 and was still being taught at Padua in 1715. It remains a key text of Unani (“Greek”) medicine, a traditional system practised in India.

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WonderHistory

Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara in today's Mali, grew rich on the trade in gold and salt, and by the 15th and 16th centuries it was a great centre of Islamic learning and of the book trade. Its families kept hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts, many still held in private libraries.

The manuscripts date from the late 13th to the early 20th century. Most are in Arabic, but some are in West African languages such as Songhay, Fula and Tamasheq written in Arabic script. They cover law, medicine, astronomy, poetry, history and religion, and include copies of works by Plato, Hippocrates and Avicenna; the chronicler Mahmud Kati even recorded a meteor shower in August 1583. Teaching centred on three great mosques, Djinguereber, Sidi Yahya and Sankore. The city declined after a Moroccan army defeated the Songhai Empire in 1591. In 2012–2013, when armed Islamist groups occupied Timbuktu, 4,203 manuscripts were burned or stolen, but librarians led by Abdel Kader Haidara, helped by local families, moved some 350,000 to safety in the capital, Bamako. UNESCO added parts of the city's historic centre to its World Heritage List in 1988.

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WonderHistory

The Inca road network, the Qhapaq Ñan, ran for some 30,000 km across what are now six South American countries, over mountains, deserts and valleys. The Andes had no wheeled vehicles or horses, so it was built for people on foot and caravans of llamas.

Qhapaq Ñan means “royal road” in Quechua, the Inca language. Two main routes ran north to south, one along the coast and one high in the mountains, with many branches; parts were older, built by earlier cultures such as the Wari and Tiwanaku. Relay runners called chasquis carried messages and small valuables from post to post, often as quipus, knotted cords that recorded numbers. About a day's walk apart stood tambos, way stations with food and shelter. Stone stairways climbed the slopes, and bridges of rope woven from plant fibres crossed the gorges. These had to be rebuilt about every two years; the one over the Apurímac River spanned 45 metres. Estimates of the network's total length range from 23,000 to 60,000 km. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 2014, shared by Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

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WonderHistory

The Maya of southern Mexico and Central America were writing by the 3rd century BC, using a script that mixed word signs with syllable signs. They also kept interlocking calendars: a 260-day ritual count and a 365-day year, which came back into step every 52 years.

Maya writing is the only script of ancient Mesoamerica, roughly today's Mexico and Central America, that scholars can now largely read. Scribes painted it on pottery and in folding books of bark paper, called codices, and carved it in stone. In the 16th century the Spanish churchman Diego de Landa had many Maya books destroyed, and only a handful survive. In 1952 the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov showed that many signs stood for syllables, and by 2008 about 80 per cent of the script could be sounded out. Besides the 260-day Tzolk'in and the 365-day Haab', the Maya used the Long Count, which counted days from a mythical creation date in 3114 BC. The belief that the world would end on 21 December 2012 came from misreading it: that day simply began a new b'ak'tun, a period of 144,000 days. The Dresden Codex holds tables predicting the movements of Venus.

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WonderHistory

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

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WonderHistory

The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

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WonderHistory

The potato was first farmed in the Andes of South America and reached Europe in the late 1500s. A field of potatoes feeds more people than a field of grain, and one study credits the potato with about a quarter of the population growth in Europe, Asia and Africa between 1700 and 1900.

Spanish ships had brought the potato from South America to the Canary Islands by the 1560s, and from there it spread across Europe. Many people distrusted it at first, but after 1750 officials and landowners in France and Germany pushed farmers to grow it, and famines in the early 1770s helped it catch on. In 2011 the economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian estimated that it accounts for about a quarter of the growth in population and city life in Europe, Asia and Africa between 1700 and 1900. But depending on one crop had a price. In Ireland, more than three million people lived almost entirely on potatoes. When late blight, a disease caused by a mould-like organism, ruined the harvests from 1845, about a million people died and more than a million emigrated. Poverty, the land system and government policy in London made the famine far worse.

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WonderHistory

From the 1500s, huge sugar cane plantations in Brazil, and later in the Caribbean, fed Europe's growing appetite for sugar. The work was done by enslaved Africans, and sugar became one of the most valuable goods in Atlantic trade, making fortunes for planters, merchants and European states.

Sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea and was grown for centuries in Asia and around the Mediterranean, but sugar stayed expensive, treated almost as a spice. The Portuguese brought cane to Madeira in 1425 and later to Brazil. After 1625 the Dutch carried it to the Caribbean, where islands such as Barbados and Jamaica were given over almost entirely to sugar. Cutting and boiling cane was exhausting and dangerous work, disease was rife, and the plantations depended on a constant supply of newly enslaved Africans. In the late 18th century about four-fifths of the sugar traded in Europe came from British and French colonies in the Caribbean, and in Britain sweetened tea had become an everyday drink for working people. From the 1790s, many British households stopped buying slave-grown sugar in protest.

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WonderHistory

Between the early 1500s and the 1860s, about 12.5 million captive Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the crossing; some 1.8 million people died on the way.

SlaveVoyages is a free online database compiled by historians over several decades. It gathers the records of some 35,000 slaving voyages made between the early 1500s and the 1860s and uses them to estimate the size of the whole trade. The crossing from Africa to the Americas is known as the Middle Passage, because it was the middle leg of a triangular trade: ships sailed from Europe to Africa with goods, carried captives across the Atlantic, and returned with sugar, tobacco and cotton. Brazil received the largest share, about 40 per cent of all captives. Ships under the Portuguese or Brazilian flag carried the most people, about 5.8 million, followed by British ships with about 3.3 million and French ships with about 1.4 million.

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