A Short History of the World (4 page)

Beginning in 776 BC, the Greeks also came together every four years to compete at games in Olympia in south-west Greece, a time during which wars were halted.
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Athens grew to such an extent through trade and alliance that by 500 BC it had become the cultural, political and economic centre of Ancient Greece and was recognised as such by other city-states.
 

In around 500 BC the Ionian Greeks, located on the shores of present-day Turkey, rebelled against Persian attempts to govern them. Frustrated by Athenian support given to the Ionians, the Persians, under Darius, invaded, landing on the plains of Marathon, just north of Athens. The Athenians sent a runner to Sparta, a city-state renowned for the strength and valour of its soldiers, to request help.
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The Spartans agreed to help, but they arrived after the battle. Nevertheless, the Ionian Greeks still managed to defeat the invading and numerically superior Persian army in 490 BC, and Darius’ army was forced to return to Asia Minor.
 

Darius died before he could launch another invasion, but his defeat was not forgotten by the Persians. Ten years later his son, Xerxes, invaded Greece for the second time in an attempt to avenge the losses at Marathon. This time the Persians reached a narrow pass at the valley of Thermopylae on the eastern coast of Greece, where legend has it they were held off by three hundred Spartans under their king, Leonidas, and only managed to find a way through with the help of a Greek traitor.
 

Encouraged by their success, the Persians entered and destroyed Athens, whose population fled to the neighbouring island of Salamis. Despite possessing a vastly superior navy, the Persians were overcome at the sea battle of Salamis, which went down in history as the first great naval conflict, and they never threatened Greece again. Xerxes was eventually murdered, as was the last of the Persian Achaemenids, Darius III, in 330BC.
 

But the Greek victory was important for another reason: it meant that in the end it was Greek culture, not Persian, that was bequeathed to the wider world, with Greek, along with Latin, gradually becoming the language of the educated classes throughout the Mediterranean.

With the Persian threat out of the way, Greece entered its classical period and witnessed a blossoming of culture, architecture and philosophy, during which the Greeks questioned the world around them. This search for knowledge resulted in Ancient Greece becoming known as the birthplace of philosophy and democracy. Philosophy comes from the Greek words ‘philo’ and ‘sophia’, meaning ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’, and democracy comes from the words ‘demos’ and ‘kratia’, meaning ‘people’ and ‘rule’.

Some of the most famous philosophers in history lived at this time: Socrates, who was sentenced to death for disbelief in the state's gods and corrupting the youth; his most famous student, Plato, from whose writing we learn about Socrates and who started the first school of learning which he named the Academy; and Aristotle, the Academy’s most famous student. Aristotle’s father was the personal physician to Philip of Macedonia, and Aristotle himself was, for a time at least, the personal tutor of Alexander the Great, lecturing him on astronomy, physics, logic, politics, ethics, music, drama, poetry, and a range of other subjects.
 

Keen to avenge themselves and prevent further Persian incursions onto Greek territory, the Athenians persuaded a number of other Greek city-states to form a Naval League. The Greeks, however, were unable to stop their infighting, and the League crumbled during wars between the states that lasted over 20 years. While these wars predominantly took place between the Spartans and the Athenians, they nevertheless took their toll on the entire area, including Persia, which had aided the Spartans.
 

The king of neighbouring Macedon, Philip II, who had wisely decided to stay out of the war, recognised an opportunity when he saw one. While the Greek states were quarrelling, he transformed Macedon into a state so strong that not only was it able to crush an alliance of Greek states, but it was also soon confident enough to declare war on Persia. Philip was assassinated before he was able to see his plans fulfilled, but his son, Alexander, ensured that they saw the light of day, amassing the largest army ever to leave Greek soil.

Alexander the Great (356–323 BC)

Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, united quarrelling Greek city states, conquered Egypt, defeated the Persians and joined vast regions of Europe and Asia into the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and all before the age of 33. By doing so he became one of the most admired leaders in antiquity. Alexander’s armies never lost a battle and because of this, Alexander was recognised as a military genius.
 

In his desire to join the East and the West in one vast empire, Alexander adopted Persian dress, gave orders for Persians to be enlisted in his army, and encouraged his soldiers to marry Persian women. He also allowed conquered people to run their country as long as they remained loyal to him. However, his continual warmongering eventually took its toll. When his army reached India in 326 BC, his troops, exhausted by years of battle, refused to go any further and Alexander was forced to head back home, only to die in Babylon three years later.

The Indian Mauryan Empire (321–185 BC)

When Alexander returned from India, he left a power vacuum into which stepped Chandragupta, the first emperor of the Indian Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta became the undisputed ruler of northern India and, for the first time in Indian history, gave the area a degree of political unity.
 

After ruling for some 25 years, Chandragupta Maurya, according to various sources, became a monk and starved himself to death. His son, Bindusara, extended his empire, but it was Bindusara’s son Ashoka who, after waging a brutal war of expansion against his enemies, gained remarkable fame in India through his conversion to Buddhism – a way of life that had gained many adherents since its introduction in the 6th century BC. Shocked by the aftermath of a major battle, Ashoka renounced all violence and preached Buddhism and peace throughout his kingdom and abroad. Upon his death in 232 BC his family managed to hold on to power for another half a century or so before the last Mauryan emperor was murdered and India became divided once again. Periodically invaded, northern India would only become prosperous and stable again under the Gupta Empire in the 4th century AD.

Buddhism

Buddhism is a philosophy
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or way of life – although some people call it a religion – that originated in the 5th or 6th century BC (there is still disagreement about exactly when the Buddha lived). It is currently followed by over 300 million people on Earth.
 

Born into a royal family, Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama, realised that material wealth did not guarantee happiness and left the comforts of his home at the age of 29 in order to understand the meaning of the suffering around him. After six years of study, meditation and self-denial, he is said to have awakened from the sleep of ignorance and become the Buddha, or ‘the Enlightened One’.
 

For the following 45 years he taught the principles of Buddhism throughout northern India; if one lived a moral life, was mindful of one’s actions, and developed wisdom, he taught, it was possible to dispel ignorance, rid oneself of desire and reach Nirvana, or a state without suffering.
 

His attempts at explaining injustices and inequality, and his teachings on how to avoid suffering, were met with a ready audience and spread rapidly around the world. Adopted by Ashoka in India in the 3rd century BC, Buddhism spread along the great trade routes from India into central and southeast Asia where it generally prospered, though it gradually became less popular in India itself.
 

Alexander’s Successor Kingdoms

Alexander had not nominated an heir or successor, and although one person claimed the empire he left, it was rapidly sliced up by his key generals. The outcome was a number of separate kingdoms that more often than not waged war upon each other. Of the two largest to remain, one was the Seleucid Kingdom, founded by one of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus, which included most of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Persia. The other was the Ptolemaic Kingdom, founded by his general Ptolemy, which consisted of Egypt. With the exception of much of Persia, most of these lands and successor kingdoms were later swallowed by the Roman Republic.
 

In Egypt, Ptolemy established the last dynasty that would rule the country with the title of Pharaoh. For the following two and a half centuries the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Greeks would successfully rule Egypt, mingling Greek traditions with the legacy of the Pharaohs. Ptolemy and his descendants adopted Egyptian royal trappings and added Egypt's religion to their own, worshipping the gods and building temples in their honour, some even going to the extent of being mummified after death. Of all Alexander’s successor kingdoms, Egypt was to last the longest, and was only finally added to the Roman Empire in 30 BC following the suicide of Cleopatra – the last Ptolemaic queen.
 

One of the many legacies of Alexander’s reign, born of a desire to dominate Egypt, was the city of Alexandria, which was founded on the northern coast of the country in the 4th century BC. With Athens declining and Rome not yet developed, Alexandria occupied the key junction between the western and eastern worlds. It became one of the greatest cities in antiquity, the busiest port in the world, and a cultural melting pot of Greek, Roman and Egyptian thought and trade.
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The city would not be eclipsed in its importance within Egypt until Cairo was established in the 10th century.
 

The Unification of China (221 BC)

Over in the east, by 400 BC, the multitude of separate states in present-day China had been consolidated into thirteen, and for the next 175 years they fell into a protracted struggle referred to as ‘the Warring States Period’. The state that emerged as the strongest, partially thanks to its use of iron over the bronze weapons of its neighbours, was the western Chou state of Qin (pronounced Ch’in) from which, some have suggested, we get the name China.
 

The leader who brought all these states together, and in effect became the first emperor of China in 221 BC, was named Shi Huang-Ti. Emperor Shi Huang-Ti gained a terrible reputation, ruthlessly crushing any resistance to his rule. He also instigated the building of the Great Wall of China
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– the largest man-made structure in the world at over 6,000 km long – in order to protect his empire from the Huns, the same people that would attack the West several hundred years later. Obsessed with immortality and fearing retribution by the spirits of all those he had killed, Shi Huang-Ti ensured that he was buried with over 6,000 terracotta warriors to protect him in the afterlife.

As a result of his cruelty, the Qin Dynasty was rapidly overthrown after his death and the Han Dynasty ruled China for the following 400 years.
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This was a time of peace that witnessed Confucianism – a way of life expounded by Confucius and his followers since the 6th century BC – adopted as the state philosophy. It was during the Han Dynasty that the great trade route of the Silk Road was established, a route that saw Asia trading silk and other luxuries with Persia and India, and with a new empire that was gaining ground in the west – an empire which would grow by conquest and assimilation to rule the western world: Rome.

The Roman Republic (509–27 BC)

Rome started as a small town on the banks of the river Tiber in the 8th century BC. Legend has it that the city was founded in 753BC by the twins, Romulus (hence Rome) and Remus, who were both saved from death by a wolf who suckled them. The area was ruled by Etruscan kings until 509 BC, when a more representative form of government was established under the Republic of Rome. The Republic proceeded to grow rapidly, wisely incorporating the people it conquered as ‘citizens’ as opposed to ‘subjects’, a strategy which effectively reduced chances of rebellion.

Rome was not without competition, however; the dominant power in the Mediterranean at the time was a Phoenician trading colony founded in the 9th century BC on the north coast of Africa in modern-day Tunisia: Carthage. Carthage had become independent after the Persians had conquered the Phoenicians in the 6th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, the Carthaginian Empire had grown to become the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, stretching from northern Africa and Sicily to the southern Iberian peninsula in present-day Spain.

Looking to expand its power base beyond the Italian mainland, Rome interfered in the Carthaginian sphere of influence. Over the course of 118 years, from 264 to 146 BC, the Roman and Carthaginian empires waged a titanic struggle against each other for control of the western Mediterranean on both land and sea. Named the Punic Wars from the word Peoni, the Latin word for Phoenicians, they drained both sides of money and manpower. While there were three major Punic Wars in total, the most famous of these was undoubtedly the second, as it involved a full-scale invasion of Roman territory, an invasion in which the Romans suffered a number of severe losses and from which they only just managed to snatch victory.