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13.5 — World History
Dates, dynasties, wars and treaties, in chronological order so the order itself does some of the remembering.
The ancient world
Where and when was writing invented? Sumer, around 3200 BCE, as cuneiform. The first texts are receipts and ration lists, not literature.
Which is the oldest surviving story? The Epic of Gilgamesh, from Mesopotamia. About a third of it is still missing and new fragments keep appearing.
Who wrote the earliest surviving near-complete law code? Hammurabi of Babylon, around 1754 BCE, in 282 laws on a basalt pillar. Ur-Nammu's is older but survives in fragments.
When was the Great Pyramid built, and how long was it the tallest structure? About 2560 BCE, and it held the record for roughly 3,800 years.
Who were the pharaohs to know? Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid; Hatshepsut, the most successful female pharaoh; Akhenaten, who tried to impose worship of one god; Tutankhamun, minor but famous because his tomb survived intact; Ramesses II, who ruled 66 years; Cleopatra VII, the last.
When did the Bronze Age collapse, and why? Around 1200 BCE, and nobody knows — drought, earthquake, invasion and the fragility of a long-distance tin trade all contributed.
What was the Axial Age? Roughly 800–200 BCE, when the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, the Upanishadic thinkers, the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers appeared in different places with no contact.
When did Athens adopt democracy? 508 BCE under Cleisthenes, restricted to free adult male citizens — perhaps a tenth to a fifth of residents.
Which three Greek philosophers taught each other in sequence? Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who tutored Alexander.
When was Socrates executed, and for what? 399 BCE, for impiety and corrupting the young. He wrote nothing; everything comes through others.
How far east did Alexander reach, and why did he stop? The Beas river in Punjab, in 326 BCE. His army refused to go further. He died at Babylon in 323, aged 32.
Who founded the Roman Republic, and when did it end? Traditionally 509 BCE with the expulsion of the last king; it ended in the civil wars after Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE.
Who was Rome's first emperor? Augustus, formerly Octavian, from 27 BCE. The month August is named after him.
Which wars were fought between Rome and Carthage? The three Punic Wars, 264–146 BCE. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants in the second; Carthage was destroyed in the third.
When did Vesuvius bury Pompeii? 79 CE. Pliny the Elder died in the rescue attempt; his nephew wrote the only eyewitness account.
When did Rome adopt Christianity? Legalised by the Edict of Milan in 313; made the state religion by Theodosius in 380.
When did the Western Roman Empire fall? 476, when Romulus Augustulus was deposed — a date chosen by later historians, since contemporaries noticed very little.
The medieval world
When did Islam begin, and what is the Hijra? The Hijra, Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, is year one of the Islamic calendar.
What was the House of Wisdom? A translation and research centre in Baghdad under the Abbasids, where Greek, Persian and Indian works were rendered into Arabic.
Who gave us the words algebra and algorithm? Al-Khwarizmi, around 820 CE — al-jabr from his book's title and algorithm from the Latin form of his name.
Which year saw the Church split and a supernova? 1054 — the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople, and the supernova that left the Crab Nebula, recorded in China and Japan.
When was the Battle of Hastings? 1066. William of Normandy's victory put a French-speaking ruling class over England, which is why English has beef and cow.
When was Magna Carta sealed, and did it work? 1215, and no — it was annulled within weeks. Its later career as a constitutional document is a creative misreading.
When were the Crusades? Roughly 1096 to 1291, in a numbered series. The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, a Christian city, in 1204.
When was the Black Death in Europe? 1347–1351, killing a third to half the population. Wages rose sharply afterwards because labour became scarce.
When did Constantinople fall, and to whom? 1453, to Mehmed II. Greek scholars fled west with manuscripts, feeding the Renaissance.
Who was Genghis Khan, and what did the Mongols create? Temüjin, who united the Mongol tribes from 1206. The empire became the largest contiguous land empire in history and produced the Pax Mongolica.
When did Zheng He sail, and why did China stop? Seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, then the fleet was abandoned by court decision — the clearest case of a technological lead given up deliberately.
When was printing with movable metal type developed in Europe? By Gutenberg around 1440–55. Korea printed with metal type in 1377 and China had movable clay type by about 1040.
Exploration and empire
When did Columbus reach the Americas, and what did he think he had found? 1492; he died insisting it was Asia. The flat-Earth story about his voyage is a nineteenth-century invention.
Who first reached India by sea from Europe? Vasco da Gama, at Calicut in 1498, guided across the Arabian Sea by a local pilot.
Who first circumnavigated the globe? Magellan's expedition, 1519–22, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano. Magellan was killed in the Philippines.
What was the Columbian Exchange? The two-way transfer of crops, animals and diseases after 1492. Chillies, tomatoes, potatoes and maize went east; wheat, horses and smallpox went west.
When did the Reformation begin? 1517, with Luther's 95 theses. It succeeded where earlier protests failed because of the printing press.
Which treaty divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal? Tordesillas, 1494, drawing a line down the Atlantic — which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese.
When was the Spanish Armada defeated? 1588, as much by weather and logistics as by English seamanship.
What was the Thirty Years' War, and how did it end? 1618–48, a devastating religious and political war in central Europe, ended by the Peace of Westphalia — usually cited as the origin of the modern sovereign state.
When was the Glorious Revolution? 1688, when James II was replaced by William and Mary, establishing parliamentary supremacy in England.
Revolutions
When was the American Declaration of Independence, and when did the war end? 4 July 1776; the war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
Which book appeared the same year as the Declaration? Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. The "invisible hand" appears once in over nine hundred pages.
When did the French Revolution begin, and what fell on 14 July 1789? The Bastille, where the crowd found seven prisoners. The Terror followed, then Napoleon.
Where do left and right come from in politics? From where radicals and conservatives sat in the French National Assembly.
When was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo, and where did he die? 1815; he died on Saint Helena in 1821.
When was the Industrial Revolution, and what triggered it? From roughly the 1760s in Britain, with Watt's separate condenser of 1769 making steam power economic away from coalfields.
When was slavery abolished in the British Empire and in the United States? The British slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833; the United States by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
What was the American Civil War, and when? 1861–65, over slavery and secession. Lincoln was assassinated days after it effectively ended.
When was Italy unified, and Germany? Italy substantially by 1861 with Rome added in 1870; Germany in 1871 under Bismarck, proclaimed at Versailles.
What was the Meiji Restoration? Japan's rapid modernisation from 1868, which took it from feudal isolation to an industrial power within a generation.
What was the Berlin Conference? 1884–85, where fourteen European powers agreed rules for dividing Africa, with no African present. It is why so many African borders are straight lines.
The twentieth century
When was the Russian Revolution? 1917, in two stages — February, which removed the Tsar, and October, which brought the Bolsheviks to power. Russia was still on the Julian calendar, so the October Revolution happened in November.
When was the First World War, and what sparked it? 1914–18, sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
Which treaty ended it, and what did Keynes say? Versailles, 1919. Keynes resigned from the British delegation and predicted the terms would wreck Europe and produce another war.
What was the League of Nations, and why did it fail? Founded 1920 to prevent war; it failed partly because the United States never joined and it had no means of enforcement.
When was the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression? October 1929, with the Depression running through the 1930s. The crash alone did not cause it; bank failures, monetary contraction and tariffs did.
When was the Second World War, and how did it start and end? 1939–45 in Europe, from the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, ending with German surrender on 8 May 1945 and Japanese surrender on 15 August after the atomic bombings.
What was D-Day? 6 June 1944, the Allied landings in Normandy — the largest seaborne invasion in history.
What was the Holocaust? The systematic murder of about six million Jews, along with Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners and others, by the Nazi state.
When were the atomic bombs dropped? Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
When was the United Nations founded, and where is it based? 24 October 1945, headquartered in New York. It replaced the League of Nations.
When did the Cold War run, and what ended it? Roughly 1947 to 1991. The Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved on 26 December 1991.
What was the Cuban Missile Crisis? Thirteen days in October 1962, the closest the two blocs came to nuclear war. A Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to authorise a nuclear torpedo.
When was the Korean War, and the Vietnam War? Korea 1950–53, ending in an armistice rather than a peace treaty; American involvement in Vietnam escalated through the 1960s and ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
When did apartheid end in South Africa? With the first fully democratic election in 1994, which made Nelson Mandela president after 27 years in prison.
What happened in Tiananmen Square, and when? June 1989, when protests in Beijing were suppressed by the military.
When did the European Union take its current form? The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 created the EU; the euro entered circulation in 2002.
Treaties and turning points, quick-fire
Treaty of Versailles, 1919? Ended the First World War and imposed reparations on Germany.
Treaty of Westphalia, 1648? Ended the Thirty Years' War and established state sovereignty.
Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494? Divided newly encountered lands between Spain and Portugal.
Treaty of Nanking, 1842? Ended the First Opium War and ceded Hong Kong to Britain.
Treaty of Paris, 1783? Recognised American independence.
Camp David Accords, 1978? Peace between Egypt and Israel.
Montreal Protocol, 1987? Phased out ozone-destroying chemicals, and is generally called the most successful environmental treaty ever signed.
Paris Agreement, 2015? Committed countries to limiting global warming, with nationally determined targets.
What comes next
The next page is world geography — the capitals, currencies, rivers and borders that carry more quiz weight per fact than anything else.