CHAPTER SIX
Twelve Vital Dates in World History
THE IDEA OF CREATING a list of twelve vital dates in history came to me at Manila as I was preparing to set sail across the Pacific to America. It came at an appropriate moment, for it found me struggling with the problem of dates in working on the first volume of The Story of Civilization.
It was already quite clear to me that the inclusion of dates in the text would make the story as accurate and dull as a good encyclopedia; that the transformation of dead data into living narrative would require some other disposition of dates than one that would infest with them every page of the tale. The arrangement arrived at, after much pseudopodial trial and error, was to confine all dates to the margin and the notes. Perhaps some such plan would alleviate the pain inflicted by some of the textbooks of history used in our colleges and schools.
I had occasion, some years back, to examine the texts employed in certain institutions of lower learning in my neighborhood. The geography, which might have been made one of the most fascinating studies of all, was especially abominable; a mere massing of dead information, much of it made false or worthless by the war,much of it restricted to the superficial features of a nation’s life, much of it made ridiculous by provincial prejudice against the Orient. But the textbook of history—Bear and Bagley’s History of the American People—was intelligently and intelligibly written, recording the progress of civilization, as well as the logic-chopping vicissitudes of politics, and presenting its sound scholarship with pleasing artistry. It is a splendid volume.
In many high schools I have found, as the standard historical text of world history, Breasted’s Ancient Times, which I regard as the finest schoolbook in America, and along with it, only slightly inferior to it, the books of Robinson and Beard on modern European history. In these volumes there is no excessive use of dates, and if we are to agree that dates have been overdone, we shall have to acknowledge, also, that some of our texts have avoided this fault, and many of them represent a great improvement on the class books of our younger days.
I should hardly be content to have my pupils know only twelve dates, and I presume that the choice of this baker’s number would not suggest an optimum, but rather a minimum—dates, let us say, that every baker should know. How many dates a man should carry with him will depend, of course, on his functions and purposes. A farmer might do his job very well, and bring up a fine family, with no other date in his head than that of the next state fair, but a man condemned to the intellectual life, precluded from the deepening contacts of experiment and action, ought to have sufficient knowledge of man’s chronology to give him, as some poor substitute for wide personal experience, that historical perspective which is one road to philosophy and understanding.
Such a man should be able to name the century (though not necessarily the precise dates) of world-transforming inventions and discoveries like gunpowder, printing, the steam engine, electricity, and the discovery of America. He should know the centuries of the world’s greatest statesmen—say Hammurabi, Moses, Darius I, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, Charles V, Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Disraeli, Gladstone, Bismarck, Cavour, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Lincoln; of the world’s greatest scientists and philosophers—say Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Darwin; of the world’s greatest saints—say lknaton, Lao-tzu, Isaiah, Buddha, Christ, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Luther, and Gandhi.
This man of intellectual interests should also know the centuries of the world’s greatest poets—say Homer, the Psalmist, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Lipo, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Pushkin, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Poe, Whitman, and Tagore; of the world’s greatest makers of music—say Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini, Brahms, Tschaikowsky,Verdi,Wagner, Paderewski, and Stravinsky; and of the world’s greatest artists or works of art—say Karnak and Luxor and the Pyramids, Pheidias and Praxiteles, Wu Tao-tzu and Sesshiu and Hiroshige, Chartres and the Taj Mahal, Giotto and Dürer, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Titian and Correggio, El Greco and Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Turner and Whistler, Millet and Cezanne.
I have left out the great prose writers, lest this chapter should read like a telephone directory, or a list of radical expor-tees, or a register of “dirty foreigners.” The reader can help me by making here his own pantheon. Let him then examine his friends and himself on the centuries and work of these men (perhaps we should also add a list of great women, from Queen Hatshepsut to Madame Curie), and so rate them and himself with a new Binet-Simon test.
If, however, one is condemned to live on a mental desert island, and can take only twelve dates with him, these dates should presumably be such as to carry in their implications the essential history of mankind. About them should cluster such associations that on their docket the greater achievements of the human mind would string themselves in a concatenation of development, in an order and perspective that would clarify old knowledge and facilitate the new. Since history is varied, and all aspects of human activity in any age are bound up with the rest, many such chains of pivotal events might be composed. What follows, then, are not the twelve world dates; they are merely twelve.
1. 4241 B.C.—THE INTRODUCTION OF THE EGYPTIAN CALENDAR This date alone, the earliest definite date in history, is sufficient to cause some disturbance to fiercely orthodox souls who believe, as did Bishop Ussher, that the world was created in 4004 B.C. To accept the testimony of Egyptologists that a calendar existed on the Lower Nile 237 years before the creation of the world might serve as a fertilizing shock to any virgin mind.
The implications of that calendar are endless. Consider the development of astronomy and mathematics that must have preceded its formulation. Consider how long even then a civilization must have endured to set aside from the economic life men with leisure enough to chart the stars and capture the course of the sun. It was a very sensible calendar compared with ours: it divided the year into twelve months of thirty days each, with five intercalary days at the end for roistering. And it stands in the memory for all Egypt, for three thousand years of recorded civilization, with orderly government, security of life and property, comforts for the body, delights for the senses, and instruction for the mind. It stands for Cheops, who built the greatest of the pyramids; and Thutmose III, who built Karnak; and Iknaton, who literally sold his kingdom for a song (arousing revolution by writing a monotheistic hymn); and Cleopatra, who led Antony to ruin by the nose—if one may speak so metonymically.
2. 543 B.C.—THE DEATH OF BUDDHA No other soul, I suppose, has ever been so influential. It is not so much that several hundred million men and women profess the Buddhist religion today; in truth, Buddhism does not follow Buddha, but is a mass of legends and superstitions that have no more right to use his name than the ferocious Christianity of Calvin or Torquemada or Tennessee has to use the name of Christ. But Buddha means India, for the spirit of India lies in religion rather than in science, in contemplation rather than in action, in a fraternal gentleness rather than in the application of mathematics to artillery, or of chemistry to bombs.
Life, said Buddha, is full of suffering; it can be made bearable only by doing no injury to any living thing, and speaking no evil of any man—or woman either. Let us hope that that simple religion is what lies behind the infinite superstitions of the Hindu mind today, and let us take the date of Buddha as the beginning of a civilization that has known every vicissitude, every injustice, every slavery, and yet in the midst of it has produced geniuses and saints from Buddha and Asoka to Gandhi and Tagore.