Part 8 (2/2)

14.

depth, in feet, of the wall at the top 1,000,000.

number of Chinese peasants said to have died building the wall

22.

area, in square miles, of Qin s.h.i.+ Huang's tomb

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE ROME (EXCEPT CHINA, PERSIA, INDIA, MEXICO, AND PERU) (EXCEPT CHINA, PERSIA, INDIA, MEXICO, AND PERU)

(1 CE500 CE)

IN A NUTSh.e.l.l.

Human sacrifice. Socially sanctioned infanticide. The invention of algebra.

This was mankind at his most cla.s.sical.

Or at least, it was the last five hundred years of a period often considered the Cla.s.sical Age.

For the first time, most people were the subjects, citizens, or slaves of large governmental ent.i.ties. In fact, about half of the world's estimated population of 250 million lived under the auspices of just three empires: Rome, Parthian/Sa.s.sanid Persia, and Han China.

These empires were put together and defended by ma.s.sive armies. They were organized and operated by ma.s.sive bureaucracies, paid for by ma.s.sive tax systems and fed by ma.s.sive groups of forced laborers.

In addition to the Big Three, other empires and city-states grew, flourished, and, in most cases, collapsed. By the middle of this period, Berber traders were using camels to establish trade routes across North Africa.

One of the largest cities in the world was at Teotihuacan, in what is now Mexico. On the nearby Yucatan Peninsula, Mayans were becoming the first fully literate culture in the Americas. Several city-states developed distinctive cultures in what is now Peru.

The period also saw the birth and growth of Christianity. It was just one of scores of novel belief systems and curious religions that sprang up and faded out of fas.h.i.+on-only, this one hung on, and profoundly changed not only the way hundreds of millions of people wors.h.i.+pped, but how entire nations were governed.

There were individual and group achievements that would be enviable in any era. In China, they came up with paper. The Romans' use of the arch, borrowed from the earlier Etruscan culture, enabled engineers to construct huge buildings and other structures. In medicine, physicians in several countries increasingly began looking inside the human body for links among various organs, common maladies, and possible cures. And in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a Greek named Diophantus was writing thirteen books on variable equations that became key to the development of modern algebra.

Of course there were also other myriad examples of human behavior at its weirdest and most wicked (beyond ”solving for x.”) In Rome, as in other cultures, it was routine to kill infants born with defects. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns, led by Attila, so devastated the Balkan city of Naissus that the stench from the carnage was said to have made the area uninhabitable for several years after the battle.

But, the biggest development of the period was the contemporaneous growth of large-scale cultures. As nation-states strove to push outward, they brought with them their customs and beliefs. War was a common result when two or more of these states pushed up against one another. But exchanges of ideas-and new religious beliefs-also resulted, aided greatly by the widespread use of two languages: Greek and Latin.

There were more commercial benefits as well. The development of the Silk Road, a network of routes between China and the Mediterranean, and the use of Monsoon winds on the Indian Ocean, which switched direction with the seasons, greatly increased trade between East and West. Silk, spices, and bronze moved from China, while coins, ivory, gems, and gla.s.sware made their way east.

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WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

14.

Caesar Augustus, Rome's first true emperor, dies at the end of a forty-one-year reign.

~30.

Jesus of Nazareth is crucified by Roman soldiers at Jerusalem.

70.

Roman soldiers burn the Temple at Jerusalem and largely destroy the city, after a nine-month siege.

79.

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