Candide
ref 1
Lettres Philosophiques
ref 1
von Katte, Hans Hermann
ref 1
voting equality
ref 1
Walesa, Lech
ref 1
war
as driver of change
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
War of the Austrian Succession
ref 1
war elephants
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
War of the Spanish Succession
ref 1
‘war on terror’
ref 1
warrior class, emergence of
ref 1
Warsaw Pact
ref 1
Washington, George
ref 1
water management
Nazca
ref 1
,
ref 2
Sabaeans
ref 1
water shortages
ref 1
Waterloo, battle of
ref 1
Watson, Peter
ref 1
Watt, James
ref 1
Waugh, Evelyn
ref 1
Wedgwood, C.V.
ref 1
Wellington, Duke of
ref 1
Wells, H.G.
ref 1
Wendi, Emperor
ref 1
White, Matthew
ref 1
William III (William of Orange)
ref 1
Wilson, President Woodrow
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
,
ref 4
Wisselbank
ref 1
Wittenberg
ref 1
,
ref 2
Wodin (god)
ref 1
Woman Rebel, The
ref 1
women
and birth control
ref 1
Gaulish
ref 1
Roman
ref 1
and voting rights
ref 1
workhouses
ref 1
Wren, Christopher
ref 1
writing
evolvement of in Mesopotamia
ref 1
and Phoenician alphabet
ref 1
,
ref 2
Wu-Feng, Captain
ref 1
Wynants, Pieter
ref 1
Xanadu
see
Shangdu
Xenophon
ref 1
Xeres
ref 1
Xia dynasty
ref 1
,
ref 2
Xiongnu
ref 1
,
ref 2
Yahweh
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
,
ref 4
,
ref 5
Yeats, W.B.
ref 1
Yellow River
ref 1
,
ref 2
Yeltsin, Boris
ref 1
Yermak Timofeyevich
ref 1
Younger Dryas
ref 1
Yuan dynasty
ref 1
Yuan Shikai
ref 1
Yugoslavia
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
break-up of
ref 1
Yupanqui, Emperor
ref 1
Zaire
ref 1
Zaragoza, Treaty of
ref 1
Zheng, Emperor
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
,
ref 4
Zhou dynasty
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
Zhou Enlai
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
ziggurats
ref 1
Zimbabwe
ref 1
,
ref 2
Zimmermann, Arthur
ref 1
,
ref 2
,
ref 3
,
ref 4
,
ref 5
Zimmermann telegram
ref 1
Zoroastrianism
ref 1
Zozo
see
Voltaire
Section One
1
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
2
: © Ronald Sheridan / Ancient Art and Architecture Collection.
3
and
4
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
5
: © Nathan Benn / Alamy.
6
: © Jim Zuckerman / Alamy;
7
: © David Lyons / Alamy.
8
: © Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd / Alamy;
9
: © www.BibleLandPictures.com / Alamy;
10
: © The Art Archive / Alamy.
11
: © F. Jack Jackson / Alamy;
12
: © Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library;
13
: © Tao Images Ltd / Alamy.
14
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
15
: © Images & Stories / Alamy;
16
: © www.BibleLandPictures.com / Alamy.
17
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
18
: © Ivy Close Images / Alamy.
19
: © Interfoto / Alamy;
20
: © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge / The Bridgeman Art Library.
Section Two
21
: © Vito Arcomano / Alamy;
22
and
23
: © The Art Archive / Alamy.
24
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
25
: © National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan / The Bridgeman Art Library;
26
: © The Art Gallery Collection / Alamy.
27
: © The Art Gallery Collection / Alamy;
28
: © The Art Archive / Alamy;
29
: © Interfoto / Alamy.
30
: © Peter Horree / Alamy;
31
: © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy;
32
: © Alinari / The Bridgeman Art Library.
33
: © Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd / Alamy;
34
: © Masterpics / Alamy;
35
: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London / The Bridgeman Art Library.
36
: 1738, common domain, Wiki;
37
: © Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy.
38
: © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy;
39
: © Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales / The Bridgeman Art Library;
40
: © The Art Archive / Alamy.
41
: © Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy;
42
: © World History Archive / Alamy.
Section Three
43
: © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy;
44
: © Private Collection / Archives Charmet / The Bridgeman Art Library.
45
: © Niday Picture Library / Alamy;
46
: © David Cole / Alamy.
47
and
48
: © World History Archive / Alamy;
49
: © GL Archive / Alamy.
50
and
52
: © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy;
51
: © David Cole / Alamy.
53
: © Dinodia Photos / Alamy;
54
:© Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy.
55
: © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy;
56
: © Photos 12 / Alamy;
57
: © Marmaduke St. John / Alamy.
58
: © AFP / Getty Images;
59
: © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.
60
: © Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images;
61
: © AFP / Getty Images.
1. Sumerian fertility goddess: until the evolution of single-God monotheism among the Hebrews, families of gods, usually including a female fertility goddess, were near-universal.
2. Inscription from Ugarit, in today’s Syria. Modern alphabetic writing – what you are reading now – developed among the trading and sea-going people of Canaan, called Phoenicians by the Greeks.
3. Shang axe-head: the Shang were China’s first historically certain dynasty, a chariot-riding and warrior culture accused by later Chinese of incest, cannibalism and a liking for pornographic songs.
4. In the hero Gilgamesh, we have the first named character in world literature.
5. Hugging couple found at Catalhoyuk, in Turkey: this was among the first towns in the world, where people lived in a state of relative equality for thousands of years.
6. The Minoan civilization of Crete practiced bull-jumping and made beautiful art but was much bloodier and more violent than its first archaeologists thought.
7. Around 3000
BC
, Orkney was one of the most advanced societies in Britain: the uncovered stone homes at Skara Brae are clean, cosy and seem ready to move back into today.
8. A gold drinking cup from Troy: this was not really owned by Homer’s King Priam but Troy was a real city, and the Trojan war was almost certainly an historical event.
9. A head-dress from Ur, 2600
BC
: the Mesopotamian cultures produced famous cities, empires and religions; but too much of their art has disappeared.
10. Dice from Mohenjo-Daro in today’s Pakistan: an ancient river civilization on the Indus which may be the origin of much of today’s Indian culture.
11. Painting from the workers’ village near Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Craftsmen as well as Pharaohs had their own decorated tombs; and we know their gossip too.
12. Siddhartha, who renamed himself the Buddha, was among the most radical thinkers in history; the product of India going through a time of tumultuous change.
13. Erlitou wine cup: the earliest Chinese objects already look like nothing that could have been made in the West.
14. Babylon, with its glorious enameled buildings and hanging gardens, must have awed as well as terrified the Hebrews taken there in captivity.
15. A gold necklace belonging to King Croesus from Lydia: his royal mint produced reliable, pure coinage that spread across Asia, which is why we say ‘rich as Croesus’ today.
16. The Cyrus cylinder: not quite the first international declaration of human rights, but Cyrus the Great was an empire builder of a new kind.
17. Socrates died by drinking poison – a martyr to free speech but also a genuine threat to Athenian democracy. We still have not untangled the challenge he laid down to open societies.
18. Confucius, or Kongzi, was the most influential conservative thinker in world history: his influence on Chinese political culture is as great as that of Ancient Greece on the West’s.
19. The Assyrian capital Persepolis was decorated with vast stone murals, some recording ordinary life, others disgustingly sadistic.
20. A gold coin of Alexander III, ‘Alexander the Great’, who turned himself into a bloody cultural whisk, whirling together Greeks and Asians.
21. By taking the Christian message to non-Jews, including in Rome itself, Paul was the real founder of Christianity as a global religion.
22. The Nazca people of southern Peru were brilliant artists and excellent engineers. But they made one mistake, which proved fatal.
23. The Byzantine emperor Justinian: he could fight the barbarians but he could not fight famine and plague, nor rebuild the glory that was Rome.
24. An Emir of Cordoba consults with his advisers: Muslim al-Andalus was a centre of learning and urban sophistication, which put Christendom to shame.
25. The Mongol leader Genghis Khan has a good claim to be the single most influential figure in world history; but history would have been happier had he never been born.
26. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, as a European-style monarch on his throne: in fact he was rather grander than that.
27. Ivan the Terrible – whose name also translates as Ivan the Great – was the ruler who spread Russia deep into Siberia but also gave her the tradition of ruthless, centralist autocracy she still suffers from today.
28. Hideyoshi was the great founder of Tokugawa Japan, who ruled at the same time as England’s Queen Elizabeth I and is in many ways comparable.
29. The Inca emperor Atahualpa, murdered by the Spanish: but his gold then helped ruin Spain’s economy.
30. The Dutch tulip mania was a financial bubble which made all Europe laugh. The Dutch learned and prospered again, however – unlike some of their critics.
31. The arrival of tobacco from the New World and the smoking craze of the 1600s horrified rulers from London to Japan.
32. ‘Yet it moves.’ Rough and garrulous Galileo of Pisa, born at the right time to understand the solar system; born in the wrong place to explain how it works.
33. Timur hands his crown to Babur, 1630: Babur was the real founder of the Mughal empire, which produced radical thinking and glorious buildings, but was eventually brought down by the cost of war driven by religious intolerance.
34. Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, was the model of the absolutist ruler – a dull theory decorated with fine palaces and flamboyant individuals.
35. William and Mary, the Dutch king and his wife who turned themselves into British monarchs after invading in 1688 – but only after accepting the supremacy of Parliament.
36. The Enlightenment was dominated by the French and British: Voltaire and his mistress are bathed in the light of Isaac Newton’s Reason.
37. Jethro Tull’s seed drill was one of the gadgets that turned the British into the world’s most successful farmers, and so prepared the soil for the industrial revolution.
38. But what did they drink? Rebel Bostonians, emptying taxed tea into the sea, drank herbal teas and smuggled tea during their protest against the British empire.
