The Life Millennium, part 2

Link to Part One

89. "Across the Sahara, 1324."
In 1324, Emperor Mansa Musa of Mali undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca that has since become the stuff of legend.

He departed from Mali with "60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves...80 camels, each loaded with 300 pounds of gold, which he gave away so freely in Cairo that it took years for the price of gold to recover."

Yes, he spent it all, but he returned with architects, engineers, philosophers, scribes, and poets. In this way, he put Mali and its capital, Timbuktu, on the map, for better and for worse. After he reinvented his kingdom, Europe set its eyes on Africa...but that is a story for another day.

88. "Modern Art, 1880."
Up until the end of the 19th Century, artists strove to put their subjects on canvas as realistically as possible. That changed when Paul Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire in 1880 (the first of over sixty different impressions). Instead of trying to capture every little detail--every house, every crevice in the limestone rock face--Cezanne reshaped the landscape into a whirling array of colors, shades, and contrasts. 

No longer was the canvas a representation of reality; in Cezanne's hands, the canvas became "a reality unto itself, one he saw as both classic and transcendent...As Pablo Picasso later observed, he was 'the father of us all.'"

87. "Japan Opens Its Doors, 1868."
In 1868, Emperor Mutsushito of Japan initiated the Meiji Restoration, effectively opening Japan's doors to Europe and the still relatively young United States. From then on, Japan waged imperial war with China (1894) and Russia (1905--a naval battle), annexed Korea (1910), and helped fight against Germany in World War I (1914).

After Japan's imperial might ceased in the aftermath of World War II, the nation still expanded; this time with business savvy and innumerable pop-culture exports, the biggest of which is Japanese animation, or anime.

86. "India's Independence, 1947."
The most important thing to remember about India is that Britain had considered it "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire since 1857. In that year, "Indian soldiers led an unsuccessful revolt against the British East India Company, which had effectively controlled the country."

Things remained more or less constant until Gandhi and thousands of his followers walked 200 miles to the sea and "made salt in defiance of British tax laws." Gandhi's movement gradually gained momentum, but it took World War II to finally do the British Empire in as a world power and as an idea. In 1947, Britain relinquished control of India; so followed Palestine in 1948; Ghana, in 1957; and Hong Kong in 1997.

85. "Saving Aristotle, 1169."
I'm surprised this one is placed so early on! One would think that

In the 12th Century, a man by the name of Ibn Rushd lived in Cordoba, Spain. He was very much the Leonardo daVinci of the Muslim world. Scholar, philosopher, translator, polymath, scientist; he preserved most of Aristotle's work by translating it from Greek into Arabic and retaining it in Cordoba's vast library, which "contained 400,000 works--more, it is said, than all the other libraries of Europe combined."

Eventually, Rushd's translations received a further translation, this time into Latin, and Europe's scholars and intellectuals were able to appraise Aristotle for themselves.

84. "Checking Accounts, 1407."

In the bleak, bleak days before the Fifteenth Century, merchants usually plied their trade at fairs with what were basically IOUs, and wealthy families owned private banks that offered loans to kings. (If kings didn't pay off their loans, those families would be destitute--it was, after all, their own money.)
In 1407, the Casa di San Giorgio--the world's first "public" bank--opened for business. 

San Giorgio closed down less than forty years later, but it served as a template for everything from personal savings and checking accounts to credit cards. Gone were the IOUs of old; with a more centralized bank, accounts could be more readily maintained.

83. "The First Novel, 1008."
In Part One, I declared that Don Quixote de la Mancha was "the first modern novel of the Western world." This entry is the payoff: A much earlier work, Lady Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji has the distinction of being the first novel, period. I myself had to read it for a research paper when I went to Moraine Valley, and while it wasn't the most gripping read, it was good to transcend my boundaries and read something from an entirely different culture and time period.

The story concerns a handsome young prince named, obviously, Prince Genji, and the people he encounters throughout. It's a Heian-era political drama as well as a romance novel, and I'd venture to say that Lady Murasaki accidentally created the structure of the modern soap opera with The Tale of Genji.
 
"The novel's complex plot, its sympathy with the plight of women at court, its subtlety of language and its penetrating psychological insights--all were unprecedented...Any serious discussion of the structures, forms, and intentions of the novel--the most significant new literary genre of the millennium--must take into account Murasaki's stunning achievement."

82. "Selling the World a Coke, 1886."
In 1886, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a tonic that would eventually be known as Coca-Cola, but the stuff itself is not as important as its impact on advertising and marketing. See, he advertised his alcohol-free drink as "The Great National Temperance Drink," and most people found that they liked how it tasted. 
Then, a little bit later, a man named Asa Candler bought Pemberton's company and focused much of its revenue on marketing and advertising. Later on, in 1926, Robert Woodruff took over and set up a foreign branch. During World War II, "the U.S. military footed much of the bill for the company's bottling plants at the front lines," and this is how Coke became an international entity.

Just think of how many signifiers Coke carries: There's the famous "contour bottle," the unique "Coca-Cola" logo, the "polar bears," the modern depiction of Santa Claus in a red suit, the song "I'd Like To Buy the World a Coke" (a refit of "I'd Like to Teach the World To Sing"), slogans such as "It's the Real Thing"...I could go on for hours, and that's a testament to Coke's influence.

81. "Silver Fever, 1545."  
A bit more than three hundred years before the Gold Rush sent hundreds packing to California and Alaska, someone discovered silver in the Andes Mountains. Almost immediately, Spanish entrepreneurs with dreams of vast wealth flocked to Peru and conscripted [read: enslaved] the natives to mine this valuable metal so that they could sell it to China for a huge profit.

Of course, the price of silver in China fell in the 1600s; as that fell, so too did the Ming dynasty and the Spanish Empire (the defeat of the Spanish Armada certainly didn't help).

80. "The Suez Canal, 1869."
Upon its completion, the Suez Canal allowed ships to go directly from England to India without having to sail around Africa. It shaved 6,000 miles--12,000 round-trip--from the average journey, and in the days before modern commerce, every mile counted. 

This architectural marvel required ten years and over one million workers to complete, and it was called "The Eighth Wonder of the World" when it finally opened. ========================================================================
SOURCE: Time, Inc. The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important People and Events of the Last 1,000 Years. New York: 1998, Time, Inc., Book.

The Life Millennium, part 1

Go back to the previous entry

Good afternoon, fellow readers, and welcome to the first entry in The Life Millennium series. For this series, I'm going to stick pretty close to the information in the book

Starting with...

100. "Fixing the Calendar, 1582."

In the beginning, most of the world's peoples, such as the Mayans and the Egyptians, had their own particular methods of calculating days (Earth's rotation), months (lunar cycles), and years (Earth completes one trip around the Sun). For the most part, it worked well enough, but every calendar was different, and a more uniform calendar would soon be needed.

Enter Roman emperor Julius Caesar. In 46 BCE, he took inspiration from Egyptian and Jewish calendars to create a standardized Roman calendar not unlike the one that we're familiar with. It had twelve months of thirty days, a leap year every four years, and five leftover days that he didn't know quite what to do with. 

His calendar matched up to a solar year pretty well give or take eleven minutes, and it stayed in use for centuries. Come the 16th Century, however, that eleven minutes had turned the five leftover days into ten leftover days! 

Pope Gregory XIII overhauled the calendar once more in 1582. Where the new year was once celebrated in March, he declared January 1st the beginning of the new year. Years that marked the beginning of a new century did not get a leap year unless that year divided by 400; for example, 1900 did not get a leap year, but 2000 did. He also did away with those ten leftover days, and the end result was a much more precise version of the original Julian calendar.

99. "Rocking the World, 1954."

This one's about Elvis Presley, whose 1954 debut opened the door for Bill Haley and the Comets; Buddy Holly and the Crickets; Chuck Berry; Little Richard; Jackie Wilson; the Beatles; the Rolling Stones...he opened the floodgates, and rock'n'roll found a foothold.

98. "The Rosetta Stone, 1799."

At the end of the 18th Century, a group of Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt when they found a large stone slab, upon which was inscribed a wall of text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, "demotic" script (a kind of Egyptian cursive), and Greek. The book says: "It wasn't until 1822 that Jean-Francois Champollion discovered that hieroglyphics mixed phonetic and symbolic meanings; that some texts should be read right to left, others left to right or top to bottom; and that some symbols had two different meanings." 

The takeaway here is that scholars of the time found within some of the phonetic syllables a degree of overlap among the three different languages--in short, even if the language is different, it'll say the same thing. That's a fairly glib summary of it, but remember: Everything we know about Egyptian culture--hieroglyphics and all--owes a significant debt to the Rosetta stone. It opened the doors to the Egyptology movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries; without it, King Tutankhamen's tomb would likely have gone undiscovered.

97. "The Olympic Flame, 1896."

The original Olympic Games began around 776 BCE, but Emperor Theodosius I banned them in 393 CE, by which point they "had devolved into a crude carnival rife with pro athletes, betting, bribery, and all manner of cheating." (More cynical readers might think to themselves, "Not unlike the Olympic Games of today.")

The games all but faded into relative obscurity until 1896, when French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin revived them as a way of connecting the many nations of the world for a while. To this day, the Games are still held every four years.

96. "Man of la Mancha, 1605."

In 1605, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of a novel called Don Quixote de la Mancha. Not only is it the first modern novel of the Western world*, it's likely also the first modern parody: Its hero, Don Quixote, is a middle-aged nobleman whose obsession with romantic stories about knights and chivalry has unhinged him somewhat. Having consumed so many books and stories, he decides one day that chivalry is dead, and that it's his mission to restore it.

The gag, of course, lies in the collision between his fantasy and the real world around him. He's a knight on a horse, but his armor is dented and rusting in places, and his horse is a tired old thing. What's more, everyone around him calls him crazy; even his own family members regard his antics with growing unease. None of this deters him, however, and he still carries on fighting his good fight regardless.

That the story has been adapted countless times, most notably as the musical Man of la Mancha, is proof of its unending appeal and universality from generation to generation.

(*This lofty status will be important much later on. Stay tuned...)

95. "The First Museum, 1683."

This paragraph's title refers to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

"...The museum as we know it got its start in England in 1659, when John Tradescant, a gardener to royalty, deeded his family's treasures--fish, weapons, birds, even a stuffed dodo--to fellow collector Elias Ashmole." When Ashmole donated the collection to Oxford University, he stipulated that a separate building be constructed for it."

Apparently, before the Ashmolean, collectors of artifacts would usually display their collections in a largish room or a cabinet of some kind. It was perfectly valid in its time, but today it has an uncomfortably tawdry, carnival-sideshow sensibility. It's kind of like that song by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer--"Karn Evil 9 (2nd Impression)": "There behind a glass is a real blade of grass/Be careful as you pass/Move along, move along1."

Ashmole's request ushered in a new era for historical collections: Devoting an entire building to them not only requires a better system of organization, but also lends them a scholarly aura that they would otherwise lack in a "cabinet of wonders."

94. "Sinking the Armada, 1588."

In 1588, a massive fleet of ships called the Spanish Armada sailed into the English Channel at the behest of King Philip II. These were big ships, too, and it looked like a team of gigantic football players going up against a seemingly smaller and weaker team.

But...The battle wasn't as one-sided as King Philip II had expected. The British Navy had ships that looked puny compared to the Armada, but this was by design: A smaller, lighter ship can move through the water more swiftly than a heavier ship can. Also, the British had an unexpected trick up their sleeves: naval strategy.

Normally, the accepted tactic was to board the enemy's ships and duke it out (as do Pirates of the Caribbean and a lot of other movies). This time, the battle was fought at long range, and the Armada's big, heavy ships couldn't dodge British cannon fire. Defeated, the Spanish invaders returned home.

The victory had a profound impact on Britain's naval supremacy and its history. I like to think that it led to the Pilgrims (and, later, the Puritans) setting out for a new land to call their own...but that's for another day.

93. "Painless Surgery, 1846."

In 1846, a dentist named William Morton removed a tumor from a young man's jaw. Before making the first incision, however, he rendered his patient unconscious with a dose of ether. It must be said that he wasn't the first to use the stuff--it was widely used since the 1600s--but he was the first to publish his findings, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. From then on, physicians and surgeons everywhere could reliably use it and other anesthetics.

92. "The Ottoman Empire, 1453."

I'll probably cover the rise of the Ottoman Empire when we get to that Millennium book I mentioned last week or so, but the most important thing to know is that this empire lasted for centuries.

In 1453, Mehmed II Khan Gazi defeated an army of Christians at Constantinople, and under his reign, the city "transformed...from a decrepit city into a whirling hub of trade and creativity. It became a magnet for Islam's most ambitious and talented scholars, poets, artists, and architects, who wrote some of the era's finest literature and built spectacular mosques."

From Constantinople, the empire spread into Morocco, Hungary, Damascus, and several other countries. "The empire eventually collapsed after World War I, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic of Turkey and renamed the old imperial capital Istanbul." 

...Which reminds me of a good old jazz standard, "Istanbul--Not Constantinople2." 

91. "Haiti's Freedom, 1804."

If whatever I write for this entry is to make any sense, remember these facts: France owned Haiti in the 1700s; cane sugar 1) could make you very rich very quickly and 2) was readily available in Haiti; and, most importantly, France imported slaves from Africa to harvest the sugar.

This status quo remained in place until the first Haitian Revolution of 1791. France regained some control, but in 1802 a former slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture got an army together and resisted any attempts to regain further control. L'Ouverture eventually surrendered, but not before inflicting heavy damage against Napoleon's army. The damage was so bad that Napoleon had to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States in exchange for some badly-needed cash...and yes, that's the Louisiana Purchase!

Finally, on January 1st, 1804, Haiti was declared a "free black republic," the first of its kind in the world.

90. "As if on Cue: Plastic, 1907."

Ivory was one of the most widely-used natural materials at the end of the 19th Century. It's fairly easy to see why: The stuff is hard and durable enough to withstand many years of regular use, yet soft enough to be readily carved and sculpted.

The only downside was its most common source--an elephant's tusks. Once an elephant is killed for its tusks, it's gone for good, and if too many are killed for their ivory, there's no way to replenish the supply. 

In fact, there was an ivory shortage in the 1880s, right at a sudden uptick in the popularity of billiards; billiard-balls were once made of ivory. A company called Phelan and Collender, which was then the largest billiards supply company, recognized that they would need something new.

In 1907, they got their wish: Belgian inventor Leo Baekeland, who had recently made his name with "quick-action photographic paper," created a substance that he called "Bakelite." It was the world's first wholly synthetic material, and Phelan and Collender soon switched to the Bakelite standard.

(The downside to Bakelite, which later plastics don't have, is that it gradually turns chocolate brown with time and exposure to light no matter what color it comes in.)

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 1. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. "Karn Evil 9 (2nd Impression)." Brain Salad Surgery, 1973, LP.

SOURCE: Time, Inc. The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important People and Events of the Last 1,000 Years. New York: 1998, Time, Inc., Book.

"The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important Events & People of the Past 1,000 Years"

Hello, and welcome back to the Millennium Museum!

I've stayed away from blogging for some time, and reading Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, by Felipe Fernadez-Armesto. It's a big book, and a heady read. My overall impression of it is that it gives a good idea of how civilizations rise and fall, only for another to take its place. That will be coming up in a few months' time, as will my episode-by-episode breakdown of Millennium. (I think I've got a good idea for that one--commentary and thoughts interspersed with bits of pulp-fiction narration.)

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I've got a book to review!

This volume was published in 1998 by Time, Inc. (Side note: I did have, at one point, both Time and Newsweek's final issues of the century. I wish I had kept them in good condition...)

The interesting thing about this volume is that it orders its historical events by how much impact each one had, whereas other books would have gone in chronological order.

...With that in mind, I'd say that it deserves more than my usual "one article per item" treatment, and I haven't been writing because it's so hard to encompass some of the denser items into one blog post. I will therefore make a series of this book, going ten by ten.