History of the world

A documentary in seven layers

History of
the world

From first steps to the stars. Three hundred thousand years of our road, read one layer at a time.

Begin the journey Read a chapter

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The long line

Seven epochs, end to end

Open any layer. Each one holds a short account, the dates that shaped it, and a plate for its illustration.

2.6 Mya – 3000 BCE Prehistory +

The longest chapter of human history: from the first split stone to the first metal. Four stages, in the order the ground holds them.

Palaeolithic 2.6 Mya – 10 000 BCE Read Mesolithic 10 000 – 6000 BCE Read Neolithic 6000 – 4500 BCE Read Eneolithic 4500 – 3000 BCE Soon
ILLUSTRATION — CAVE INTERIOR AT DUSK
3000 BCE First civilisations +

Grain can be stored, and stored grain has to be counted, guarded and taxed. Within a few centuries the same answer appears along four river systems: walls, a temple, a granary, and someone keeping the record.

  • ~3200 BCECuneiform is invented at Uruk — to count sheep and debts, not to tell stories.
  • ~2560 BCEThe Great Pyramid is completed at Giza.
  • ~1750 BCEHammurabi's laws are cut into basalt and set up in public.
ILLUSTRATION — RIVER CITY AND ZIGGURAT
800 BCE Classical antiquity +

Greece, Rome, Persia, India and China all reach a point where people start writing down arguments about how a society should be run — and disagreeing in public, at length, in ways still quoted today.

  • ~508 BCECleisthenes remakes Athens so ordinary citizens vote directly on policy.
  • 221 BCEQin Shi Huang unifies China and standardises script, weights and axle widths.
  • 476 CEThe last Western Roman emperor is deposed; the east continues for a thousand years.
ILLUSTRATION — COLONNADE AT MIDDAY
500 CE The middle centuries +

Not a pause and not a dark age. Baghdad, Chang'an, Cairo and Constantinople are the largest cities on earth, while Europe rebuilds slowly around monasteries, ploughs and river valleys.

  • ~800Charlemagne crowned in Rome; a clear reformed script spreads through scriptoria.
  • 1347–51Plague travels the trade routes through Asia, North Africa and Europe.
  • ~1450Gutenberg's press with movable metal type begins work in Mainz.
ILLUSTRATION — RIVER VALLEY IN EARLY SPRING
1500 Ships and empires +

Ocean voyages connect landmasses that had been separate for ten thousand years. Crops, diseases, wealth and people move — almost none of it on equal terms, and the consequences are still being settled.

  • 1519–22Magellan's expedition completes the first circumnavigation; few of the crew return.
  • 1687Newton publishes the Principia, giving one set of laws for falling apples and orbits.
  • 1884–85European powers meet in Berlin to partition Africa, with no African representation.
ILLUSTRATION — PORT AT THE HEIGHT OF TRADE
1760 The industrial turn +

For the first time, muscle stops being the limit. Coal, steam and then electricity multiply what a person can move, make and travel — and rearrange where everyone lives within three generations.

  • ~1769Watt's separate condenser makes the steam engine efficient enough to leave the coal mine.
  • 1825The Stockton and Darlington opens — steam locomotives on a public line.
  • 1879Practical incandescent lighting; within decades the working day is uncoupled from daylight.
ILLUSTRATION — MILL TOWN UNDER SMOKE
1914 – now The modern century +

Two world wars, antibiotics, the atom, the transistor and the network — compressed into a single human lifetime. More change than the previous forty generations saw between them, and no manual for any of it.

  • 1928Fleming notices a mould killing bacteria on a contaminated plate.
  • 1945Nuclear weapons are used; the postwar order forms around the fact they exist.
  • 1969Apollo 11 lands, watched live by a large share of everyone then alive.
ILLUSTRATION — CITY IN CROSS-SECTION AT NIGHT

Parallel worlds

The great civilisations

Six societies that solved the same problems — food, water, order, memory — in six different ways, mostly without knowing the others existed.

3500 – 539 BCE

Mesopotamia

Between two rivers, the first cities and the first written sign. Everything about administration starts here.

3100 – 30 BCE

Egypt

Three thousand years of continuity along one river, and stone architecture precise enough to still stand.

2600 – 1900 BCE

Indus valley

Planned streets, standard bricks and covered drains — in cities whose script nobody has yet read.

1600 BCE – 220 CE

Ancient China

Bronze ritual, a unified script, and a bureaucracy that outlived every dynasty that built it.

800 – 146 BCE

Greece

Small quarrelsome cities that invented the habit of arguing about first principles in public.

753 BCE – 476 CE

Rome

Engineering, law and roads — an empire that ran on paperwork as much as on legions.

Turning points

Eight things that changed everything

Not the most complex inventions — the ones after which the world could not go back.

~1 000 000 BCE

Fire

Warmth, safety and cooking. Cooked food releases far more energy — and freed time that was once spent chewing.

~3500 BCE

The wheel

Invented for pottery before transport. Its real power is rotation itself — every machine since depends on it.

~3200 BCE

Writing

Memory outside the head. Knowledge stops dying with the person who holds it.

~1450

The printing press

Copying stops being handwork. Within fifty years, more books exist in Europe than in the previous thousand years.

1769

The steam engine

Power that does not tire and does not need feeding. Muscle stops setting the limit on what can be built.

1879

Electric light

The working day comes unstuck from the sun. Cities, factories and reading habits all reorganise around it.

1928

Antibiotics

A cut stops being a plausible cause of death. Life expectancy moves more in fifty years than in the previous five hundred.

1947

The transistor

A switch with no moving parts, small enough to make billions of. Every screen you have ever looked at runs on them.

Today and tomorrow

We are the first generation to see the whole thing at once

Eight billion people share one atmosphere, one network and one set of consequences. We can read a genome, land a probe on a comet and watch an ice sheet thin in real time — and we are still arguing about how to live together, which is the oldest argument there is.

Nothing about the technology settles that question. It only raises the stakes of getting it wrong, and shortens the time available to answer.

8bnpeople alive now
~300kyears as a species
1planet, so far
We are made of star-stuff.
CARL SAGAN
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