Read A Short History of the World Online
Authors: H. G. Wells
7
The First Birds and the First Mammals
10
The Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man
13
The Beginnings of Cultivation
14
Primitive Neolithic Civilizations
15
Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing
20
The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius I
21
The Early History of the Jews
22
Priests and Prophets in Judea
24
The Wars of the Greeks and Persians
26
The Empire of Alexander the Great
27
The Museum and Library at Alexandria
33
The Growth of the Roman Empire
35
The Common Man's Life under the Early Roman Empire
36
Religious Developments under the Roman Empire
38
The Development of Doctrinal Christianity
39
The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and West
40
The Huns and the End of the Western Empire
41
The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires
42
The Dynasties of Suy and Tang in China
45
The Development of Latin Christendom
46
The Crusades and the Age of Papal Dominion
47
Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism
49
The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans
50
The Reformation of the Latin Church
52
The Age of Political Experiments; of Grand Monarchy and Parliaments and Republicanism in Europe
53
The New Empires of the Europeans in Asia and Overseas
54
The American War of Independence
55
The French Revolution and the Restoration of Monarchy in France
56
The Uneasy Peace in Europe that Followed the Fall of Napoleon
57
The Development of Material Knowledge
59
The Development of Modern Political and Social Ideas
60
The Expansion of the United States
61
The Rise of Germany to Predominance in Europe
62
The New Overseas Empires of Steamship and Railway
63
European Aggression in Asia, and the Rise of Japan
65
The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great War of 1914â18
66
The Revolution and Famine in Russia
A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the Relationship of Human Races
The Empire of Darius (Tribute-paying Countries) at its Greatest Extent
The Extent of the Roman Power and its Alliances about 150
BC
(
i
.
e
. on the Eve of the Third Punic War)
The Growth of the Moslem Power in 25 Years
Area More or Less under Frankish Dominion in the Time of Charles Martel
Europe at the Death of Charlemagne â 814
The Empire of Jengis Khan at His Death (1227)
The Ottoman Empire before 1453
The Ottoman Empire at the Death of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1566
AD
Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648
Britain, France and Spain in America, 1750
The United States, showing Extent of Settlement in 1790
This
Short History of the World
is meant to be read straight-forwardly almost as a novel is read. It gives in the most general way an account of our present knowledge of history, shorn of elaborations and complications. It has been amply illustrated, and everything has been done to make it vivid and clear. From it the reader should be able to get that general view of history which is so necessary a framework for the study of a particular period or the history of a particular country. It may be found useful as a preparatory excursion before the reading of the author's much fuller and more explicit
Outline of History
1
is undertaken. But its especial end is to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of that
Outline
in detail, who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind. It is not an abstract or condensation of that former work. Within its aim the
Outline
admits of no further condensation. This is a much more generalized History, planned and written afresh.
H. G. Wells
The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last 3,000 years. What had happened before that time was a matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004
BC
, though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise misconception was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But that the universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.
The Earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but before that time it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its axis (which is about twenty-four miles shorter than its equatorial diameter) every twenty-four hours,
and that this is the cause of the alternations of day and night, that it circles about the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a year. Its distance from the sun varies between ninety-one and a half million, at its nearest, and ninety-four and a half million miles.
About the Earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies to travel round the sun. There are also the planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of 36 and 67 millions of miles; and beyond the circle of the Earth and disregarding a belt of numerous smaller bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886, 1,782 and 2,793 millions of miles respectively.
1
These figures in millions of miles are very difficult for the mind to grasp. It may help the reader's imagination if we reduce the sun and planets to a more conceivable smaller scale.
If then we represent our Earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes' walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between Earth and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of 125 and 250 yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, 175 yards beyond the Earth, Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter, Saturn, a little smaller two miles off, Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off.
2
Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to Earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away.
These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.
For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our Earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach
more than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead.
The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far below that level.
3
In the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our Earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the Earth has had an independent existence as a spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a longer period than 2,000 million years. It may have been much longer than that.
1
This is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination.
Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and Earth and the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a great swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the spiral nebulae,
2
which appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone concentration into its present form. Through majestic aeons that concentration went on until in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given figures, the world and its moon were distinguishable. They were spinning then much faster than they are spinning now; they were at a lesser distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much faster, and they were probably incandescent or molten at
the surface. The sun itself was a much greater blaze in the heavens.
If we could go back
3
through that infinitude of time and see the Earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. No water would be visible because all the water there was would still be superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame.
Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead; great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and sink under it to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be already cooled far below incandescence, and would be alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series of eclipses and full moons.
And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time, the Earth would grow more and more like the Earth on which we live, until at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam would begin to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall hissing upon the first rocks below. For endless millennia the greater part of the Earth's water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere, but there would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing rocks below and pools and lakes into which these streams would be carrying detritus and depositing sediment.
At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a man might have stood upon Earth and looked about him and lived. If we could have visited the Earth at that time we should have stood on great lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living vegetation, under a storm-rent sky. Hot
and violent winds, exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain such as our milder, slower Earth today knows nothing of, might have assailed us. The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to Earth, would then have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so inexorably.
The Earth aged. One million years followed another, and the day lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon's pace in the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm diminished and the water in the first seas increased and ran together into the ocean garment our planet henceforth wore.
But there was no life as yet upon the Earth; the seas were lifeless, and the rocks were barren.