History: quotes, facts and reflections

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The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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Oxford was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted almost a thousand years longer, until the Ottomans took the city in 1453.

Romulus Augustulus was a boy, put on the throne by his father, the general Orestes, and he reigned for only ten months. Odoacer did not name a new emperor. He made himself king of Italy and sent the symbols of the western emperor's office to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, as if to say that one emperor, in the East, was now enough. The eastern empire kept Roman law and government, and its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi) to the end; the name “Byzantine Empire” came into wide use only after it had fallen. Its neighbours saw it the same way. Arabs and Turks called its people Rum, “Romans”, and the Ottoman name for the Balkans, Rumeli, “land of the Romans”, comes from the same word. The army of Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

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Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

The rivalry peaked in 1274 BC at the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in today's Syria, where neither side won outright. About fifteen years later came the treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Kadesh, although it never mentions the battle. Both kings promised not to attack each other, to help each other against outside enemies and rebels, and to hand back each other's political refugees. The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, was found in 1906 at Hattusa, the Hittite capital, near today's Boğazkale in Çorum province. Two of its tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried Pompeii, a Roman town of about 11,000 people near Naples, under several metres of ash and pumice. Because the town was sealed so quickly, its streets, houses, shops and wall paintings still show everyday Roman life in remarkable detail.

The eruption lasted about two days. For some 18 hours pumice rained down on Pompeii, and most of its people seem to have escaped; about 1,150 victims have been found. Early the next morning, pyroclastic surges, fast clouds of scorching gas and ash, swept through the town. The only surviving eyewitness account comes from Pliny the Younger, who watched from across the Bay of Naples and later described the eruption in two letters to the historian Tacitus; his uncle, Pliny the Elder, died trying to rescue people. Excavation began in 1748. In 1863 Giuseppe Fiorelli poured plaster into the hollows the victims' bodies had left in the ash, creating the famous casts. The date is debated: most medieval copies of Pliny's letter give 24 August, but a charcoal inscription found in 2018, dated 17 October, points to autumn.

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The ancient Olympic Games, held every four years at Olympia in honour of Zeus, ran for more than 1,100 years: from 776 BC, the traditional date of the first Games, to AD 393, the last on record.

The Games went on for centuries after Greece came under Roman rule in the second century BC, and Greek historians dated events by Olympiads, the four-year periods between Games. Emperors took part too. In AD 67 Nero had the Games postponed so that he could compete; he was thrown from his chariot but still declared the winner, and after his death the judges struck that festival from the record. A bronze plaque found in 1994 lists champions from as late as 385. The last Games on record were held in 393, under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, who had banned pagan sacrifices, but some contests probably went on into the fifth century. Olympia was later buried under metres of sediment and rediscovered in 1766, and Pierre de Coubertin revived the Games in Athens in 1896.

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In the 13th century the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire in history, brought much of Eurasia under one rule and made the trade routes between China and the Black Sea safer. About a century later, the Black Death probably travelled west along some of the same routes.

Historians call this period the Pax Mongolica, the “Mongol peace”. The conquests themselves were brutal, but afterwards a single power policed the roads from China to the Black Sea. From 1234 the Mongols also built the Yam, a chain of relay stations about a day's ride apart that gave messengers and officials fresh horses and fodder. Merchants and envoys could now cross Asia more safely, and Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in the 1270s. Silk, spices, ideas and skills moved in both directions. But the same links helped disease to travel. By the 1340s plague was spreading west from Central Asia along the trade routes, and once it reached the Black Sea, merchant ships carried it into the Mediterranean. The epidemic also helped to bring the Mongol peace to an end.

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After the Black Death of 1346–1353 killed an estimated 30 to 60 per cent of Europe's people, there were too few hands to work the land. Surviving labourers could ask for more, and in England farm wages roughly doubled between 1350 and 1450, despite laws meant to hold them down.

In England, Edward III issued the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, and Parliament followed with the Statute of Labourers in 1351: wages were capped at their 1346 level, and anyone able-bodied had to accept work when it was offered. The laws were resented and poorly enforced, and they were among the grievances behind the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Over the longer run, rents fell, land became easier to get, and serfdom, the system that tied peasants to a lord's land, faded away in western Europe. The gains were neither immediate nor universal. In the first decades after the plague, rising prices ate into the real income of many workers who lived on money wages alone, and in eastern Europe landlords later bound peasants to the land more tightly than before.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

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Greek scholars from Byzantium were teaching in Italy long before the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The conquest sped up a movement of teachers, manuscripts and ideas that had begun more than half a century earlier.

In 1396 Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He arrived in 1397 and taught there until 1400. One of his pupils, the historian Leonardo Bruni, remembered it as a rare chance: no one in northern Italy, he wrote, had studied Greek for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras's Erotemata (Questions) became the first Greek grammar widely used in western Europe. In 1438–1439 the Council of Florence, called to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, brought more Byzantine thinkers west. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato, and Bessarion of Trebizond, today's Trabzon, stayed on in Italy as a cardinal. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library, with 482 Greek manuscripts, to Venice, where it became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana.

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In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses were where men read the newspapers, swapped news, made deals and argued about politics. They were nicknamed “penny universities”: a penny bought entry and a dish of coffee, and with it the papers and the talk.

England's first coffeehouse is usually said to have opened in Oxford around 1650, at the Angel inn, run by a Jewish man named Jacob. London's first followed in 1652. Its owner, Pasqua Rosée, came from the Greek community of Ragusa, on today's Croatian coast, and had made coffee for an English merchant in Smyrna, today's İzmir. Coffeehouses multiplied, and some became institutions. Merchants and ship captains gathered at Edward Lloyd's, which grew into the insurance market Lloyd's of London, and stockbrokers traded at Jonathan's and Garraway's. Puritans liked coffeehouses because they served no alcohol, while royalists distrusted them as nests of political gossip. They were not open to everyone: women were generally not welcome as customers, and some houses later charged more than a penny to keep their clientele select.

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The Industrial Revolution put the clock in charge of the working day. Before factories, most people worked by daylight, the seasons and the task in hand; from the 1770s, mills such as Richard Arkwright's at Cromford in Derbyshire ran day and night in twelve-hour shifts.

The historian E. P. Thompson traced this change in a famous essay of 1967, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”. Farm and craft work, he argued, had been measured by tasks: milking, harvesting, finishing a piece. Factory work was measured in hours. Cromford Mill, opened in 1771, was the world's first water-powered cotton-spinning mill. It started with about 200 workers, most of them women and children, the youngest only seven. Bells rang at 5 in the morning and 5 in the evening, the gates were shut at exactly 6, and anyone late lost that day's pay and was fined another. In industrial towns, where alarm clocks were not yet cheap or reliable, “knocker-ups” were paid a few pence a week to tap on upstairs windows with long poles.

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Less than 66 years, well within a single lifetime, separate the first powered aeroplane flight from the first Moon landing. Orville Wright flew for 12 seconds and 37 metres on 17 December 1903; Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969.

The Wright brothers, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, flew near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and that first hop was shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. What followed came fast. In 1919 John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew non-stop across the Atlantic; in 1927 Charles Lindbergh did it alone, from New York to Paris; and in 1947 Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound. Orville Wright died in 1948, nine years before the Soviet satellite Sputnik opened the space age. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961, and in July 1969 Neil Armstrong took a scrap of the 1903 Flyer's wood and fabric with him to the Moon.

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The United Nations was founded in 1945, as the Second World War was ending, to keep international peace and security. Delegates of 50 countries signed its Charter in San Francisco on 26 June, and the UN came into being on 24 October.

The San Francisco Conference ran from 25 April to 26 June 1945 and brought together about 850 delegates. They reworked a draft agreed the year before at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China. Poland missed the conference because its post-war government had not yet been formed; it signed in October and counts as the 51st founding member. Turkey was among the 50 countries that signed in June. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945, once those four powers, France and a majority of the other signatories had ratified it, and that date is now marked every year as United Nations Day. The name had been suggested by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and first appeared in the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942. Today the UN has 193 member states.

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The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (1947–1991) was fought mostly without direct battles between the two. They competed instead through weapons, science, sport, films, propaganda and the race into space.

George Orwell used the phrase “cold war” in 1945, and the American journalist Walter Lippmann made it popular in 1947. Because nuclear weapons made open war between the superpowers too dangerous, the rivalry spread into other arenas. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958 to fund science, maths and language teaching. In 1959, at an American exhibition in Moscow, Vice-President Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev argued about capitalism and communism in a model kitchen, an exchange remembered as the Kitchen Debate. In 1972 in Reykjavík, the American Bobby Fischer beat the Soviet champion Boris Spassky for the world chess title. The Olympics were boycotted in turn: the United States and many allies stayed away from Moscow in 1980, and most of the Soviet bloc from Los Angeles in 1984.

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The Apollo Guidance Computer, which helped steer astronauts to the Moon, was one of the first computers built from integrated circuits: small silicon chips that each carry several electronic components. Until 1965, Apollo was the biggest user of these new chips.

The computer was designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory from 1962 and built by Raytheon, and one flew in every Apollo command module and lunar module. The chip was still a new invention: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce had made the first ones in 1958 and 1959. MIT used almost a single type throughout, a simple logic circuit designed by Fairchild Semiconductor, repeated thousands of times. According to the Computer History Museum, Apollo bought some 200,000 of them at 20 to 30 dollars each, and by 1965 the Minuteman missile programme had become the bigger buyer. Orders like these kept the young industry going until prices fell: the average chip cost 50 dollars in 1962 and 2.33 dollars in 1968. The Space Race is often credited with GPS too, but GPS was a separate US Department of Defense project, begun in 1973.

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On 12 April 1961 the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, aged 27, became the first human in space. His Vostok 1 spacecraft circled the Earth once, and the flight lasted 108 minutes from launch to landing.

Gagarin, who had trained as a foundry worker before becoming an air force pilot, was launched from Baikonur, in today's Kazakhstan. As the rocket lifted off he called out “Poyekhali!” (“Let's go!”). His orbit took him as high as 327 kilometres. On the way back he ejected from the capsule about 7 kilometres above the ground and came down by his own parachute near Engels, in the Saratov region, where a farm worker and her granddaughter were the first to meet him. Because the record rules of the day required pilots to land inside their craft, the Soviet Union claimed he had, and admitted the truth only in 1971. Gagarin became famous around the world. He died in a training-jet crash in 1968, aged 34. Since 2011 the United Nations has marked 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight.

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When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

Eagle was the lunar module that carried Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface. Light, and so radio, travels at almost 300,000 km per second. At the Moon's average distance of about 384,400 km, a signal takes roughly 1.28 seconds each way, so every exchange with Mission Control in Houston had a built-in pause of about 2.6 seconds before an answer could arrive. Large dish antennas at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia picked up the signals; the clearest pictures of the first steps came through Australia and were watched live by an estimated 600 million people. Before leaving, the crew set up a panel of reflectors on the surface. Scientists still fire lasers at it and time the light's return, which is how we know the Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 cm a year.

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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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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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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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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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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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