The Whole Course in One Chain

The idea

Six periods, one chain, every link taught in the seventeen units before this one. Civilization began between two rivers about three thousand B.C.E., when cities, writing, kings and law appeared together, and Egypt showed how a predictable river makes a stable kingdom; the Bronze Age system rose and collapsed, iron and the alphabet came out of the wreck, Assyria built the first empire that held, Persia learned to rule by leniency, and the Hebrews arrived at one God. The Greeks inherited all of it and added the polis, where citizens voted and fought as equals; they beat Persia, built Athens on an empire, invented drama, history and philosophy, lost the polis to Macedon, and sent Greek culture east without Greek politics. Rome inherited Greece and added law, roads and citizenship, ran a Republic for five centuries until land, loyalty and murder ended it, built a Principate that kept the forms, held the Mediterranean for two hundred years, was rebuilt by Diocletian and converted by Constantine, and lost its West to Germanic kings in four seventy-six while its Church stood. The East went on as Byzantium and kept the state; the Arabs took the South and kept the learning; the Franks and the Church rebuilt the West on feudalism and sacraments, and Charlemagne wore a crown in eight hundred. After one thousand Europe grew: plow, coin, town, school, cathedral, university, crusade; the Church reached its height and its humiliation; plague, war and schism broke the fourteenth century and left stronger kings and richer Italian cities. Italy turned money into the Renaissance, print carried it, kings turned guns into taxes and taxes into states, and Luther split the Church in fifteen seventeen while Spain and Portugal crossed the oceans. From fifteen sixty to sixteen forty-eight Europe fought over religion until Westphalia made states sovereign, while Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon began to read the world by method instead of authority. That is the exam, and the next question on it is one link of this chain.