Continuation From this Post: Some Other “these Events Happened At About The Same Time Or Close Together

Continuation from this post: some other “these events happened at about the same time or close together in history” things:

- The French Revolution happened shortly after the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution happened shortly after the French Revolution, and the big wave of revolution that freed Latin America from Spanish control happened shortly after the Haitian Revolution. I think this wasn’t a coincidence: these revolutions were connected!

- The first civilizations arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the end of the great drying of the Sahara and Arabia. Again, I think this wasn’t a coincidence! The drying climate meant people had to rely more on big labor-intensive irrigation works, which meant that cooperation and coordination on a large scale became more important. The great drying probably drove refugees into the Nile valley and the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing the population density of those regions. This would have meant even more reliance on labor-intensive large-scale irrigation, and also those extra people would have helped staff the work-gangs, work-shops, and armies of the new kings. The influx of refugees probably also meant a mixing of cultures, which probably stimulated technological, cultural, and institutional innovation.

- The peopling of the Americas and the first experiments with grain farming in the Middle East might have been happening at about the same time.

- The Norman conquest of England was within living memory at the time of the First Crusade.

- The Classical Maya period was 250-900 CE, roughly coinciding with the late Roman Empire and the Dark Ages in Europe. The collapse of the Classical Maya centers was during the 900s, about a century or two after Charlemagne’s time (IIRC the 900s CE is around the end of the Danelaw period in England).

- The moai (the big heads) of Easter Island aren’t ancient; they were built during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

- New Zealand was peopled during the Middle Ages, IIRC some centuries after the peopling of Iceland. New Zealand was one of the last lands on Earth to be peopled.

- Lady Murasaki lived in the late 900s and early 1000s CE; a little before the Norman conquest of England. To me Heian-period and pre-Heian Japan feels like the Bronze Age, but it’s from a completely different period of history; it existed in the same world as Vikings and Charlemagne and the Tang Dynasty; I think that’s interesting. Speaking of Japanese history, the Japanese warring states period and the height of classic samurai feudalism was the 1400s and 1500s.

- Australia was peopled at least 30,000 years before the Americas, and Homo sapiens expansion into northern Eurasia seems to have taken much longer than Homo sapiens peopling of Australia. There’s a lesson in this: cold seems to have been a more daunting barrier than ocean. That makes sense in a way: the Homo sapiens out-of-Africa migrants were likely tropical/subtropical coast-dwellers, and they could have just followed the tropical/subtropical southern coast of Asia all the way to Java (which you could have walked to from Asia back then because sea levels were lower), never leaving warm coastal regions. After that they would have needed just one big innovation to reach Australia: sea-worthy boats. Adapting to the cold northern regions of ice age Eurasia would have required more radical changes to their tool-kit and lifestyle. I think something similar happened in the Americas: there are surprisingly old signs of human presence in South America, and I suspect what happened is the first Americans were fisher-whaler-beachcomber people who lived on a stretch of ice-free coast between the Pacific and the ice age North American glaciers, and as they expanded they mostly just followed the coast south, and they kept doing that until some of them reached Tierra del Fuego within maybe a few centuries. If an alien visited Earth around 13,500 BCE I think they might have found a few tens of thousands of people living along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and the rest of the Americas still almost uninhabited (maybe there’d be a few thousand people living in the inland hills of California and the inland jungles of Central America, but that’d be about it). Only the most adventurous early Americans moved inland, where they’d have to survive without the resources of the sea and the beach, and became the Clovis People and other inland early American hunter-gatherer cultures. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were humans living along the shores of the Straight of Magellan before there were humans living in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

A somewhat different but related thing: communicating the sheer length of ancient Egyptian history:

- Sargon the Great gets called the first empire-builder, but I think that title really should belong to Narmer, or whoever the first Pharaoh of a unified Egypt was. We often don’t think of Narmer as an empire-builder for the same reason we often don’t think of Qin Shi Huangdi’s great empire as an empire: the empire was so successful and enduring that it eventually started to look like a natural fact of human cultural geography. You know your empire has really succeeded when most people don’t think of it as an empire! Sargon the Great lived about 800 years after Narmer, so the difference in time between them is similar to the difference in time between Julius Caesar and Charlemagne.

- The Great Pyramids were built in the 2500s and early 2400s BCE, about 500 years after Narmer’s reign. This was early in Egyptian history! I think it’s interesting that the Egyptians did this huge construction project early in their history and never did anything like that again. I really wonder what happened there. Did building the Great Pyramids ruin the economy? Did the mobilization of the huge workforce needed to build the Great Pyramids stir up the disease pool and cause plagues (did something similar happen when Amarna was built and populated and did that contribute to the failure of the Atenist reformation?)? Anyway, like I said, the Great Pyramids were built relatively early in Egyptian history … though the time difference between Narmer and the builders of the great pyramid was comparable to the difference in time between us and Columbus and Henry VIII!

- There were three most ancient centers of civilization that emerged at about the same time: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed around 2000 BCE and we don’t know much about it; we can’t read their writing. I think it’d be fascinating if we could learn more about the Indus Valley Civilization! Were they politically fragmented, like Mesopotamia, or were they a single state, like Egypt? There’s some evidence that might suggest the latter, but it’s impossible to know! So many unanswered questions!

- The Thera eruption that might have contributed to the decline of Minoan civilization happened around 1600 BCE. This was around the same time as the Hyksos rule in northern Egypt; if I’m reading my Wikipedia skimming right there’s a record of the Thera eruption recorded on a stelae set up by the Pharaoh who reconquered northern Egypt from the Hyksos!

- Tutankhamun lived in the mid-1300s BCE. Tutankhamun lived more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramids were built! The builders of the Great Pyramids were as distant from Tutankhamun as the Vikings are from us!

- And Cleopatra (the famous one, Cleopatra VII) lived about 1300 years after Tutankhamun! Tutankhamun was as distant from Cleopatra as Charlemagne is from us! And the Great Pyramids were about 2500 years old in Cleopatra’s time; their construction was about as distant from her as Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates are from us! As that meme says: Cleopatra lived closer to the construction of the moon rockets than the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Remember when I said Pharaonic Egypt and the US kind of remind me of each other? Well, the US is less than 250 years from its founding. 250 years from the founding of the unified Egyptian state they’d just recently stopped doing human sacrifice (the earliest Pharaohs were buried with human retainer sacrifices, about a century or so into the Pharaonic period they stopped doing that and switched to burying the Pharaohs with little dolls that were supposed to substitute for the servants) and they were just building the Step Pyramid of Djoser, just beginning the pyramid-building tradition that would culminate in the Great Pyramids centuries later.

Alternately, the other culture that really reminds me of Pharaonic Egypt is China, and its Narmer-equivalent lived after Alexander the Great. The Chinese still have about 800 years to go before they can say their civilization-state is as enduring as Pharaonic Egypt!

I really wonder if the Pharaonic Egyptian religion would still be going strong if Christianity and Islam hadn’t come along. It survived for so long!