IN the days when the world was supposed to have endured for only a few thousand years, it was supposed that the different species of plants and animals were fixed and final; they had all been created exactly as they … Read the rest
Category: A Short History of the World
A Short History of the World – III – The Beginnings of Life
AS everybody knows nowadays, the knowledge we possess of life before the beginnings of human memory and tradition is derived from the markings and fossils of living things in the stratified rocks. We find preserved in shale and slate, limestone, … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – II – The World in Time
IN the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – I – The World in Space
THE story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last three thousand years. What happened before that time was a … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – Read the rest of the book here
A Short History of the World – Chapter XVIII – Egypt, Babylon and Assyria
THE Egyptians had never submitted very willingly to the rule of their Semitic shepherd kings and about 1600 A.D. a vigorous patriotic movement expelled these foreigners. Followed a new phase or revival for Egypt, a period known to Egyptologists as … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – Chapter XVII – The First Seagoing Peoples
THE earliest boats and ships must have come into use some twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago. Man was probably paddling about on the water with a log of wood or an inflated skin to assist him, at latest in … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – Chapter XVI – Primitive Nomadic Peoples
IT was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in the centuries between 6000 and 8000 B.C. Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – Chapter XV – Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing
THE old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At … Read the rest
A Short History of the World – Chapter XIV – Primitive Neolithic Civilizations
ABOUT 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very similar in its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is probable that by that time the great barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar that had hitherto banked … Read the rest