What happened after the first cities

The first civilizations and the cultures that grew from them are listed on their own pages. This page covers the same 5,000 years from a different angle. It follows the chains that run through every one of those civilizations and connect them to each other: what people believed, how they recorded value, how knowledge was stored and moved, who held power, who did the work, and what killed them. Those chains do not stop at the edge of one civilization. They run from the first written account to the printing press, and they explain why the next 500 years look the way they do.

3,500 BCE — Writing begins as accounting. The first written records in Sumer are not laws or stories. They record who owes what. Writing starts as a tool for tracking debt, and the people who can read it are a small trained class called scribes. For the next 4,500 years, the ability to read is held by a minority, and whoever holds it holds access to everything written down.
3,500 BCE — Belief and food supply are the same institution. The temple stores the grain and decides who receives it. That means religious authority and control of the food supply are not two powers, they are one power in one building. In Sumer the temple also lends out wealth held on behalf of others, which makes it the first institution doing what a bank does.
600 BCE — The first coins. Lydia, in what is now Turkey, strikes the first coins from a natural gold and silver alloy. A coin carries a stamp from an authority, which means the person accepting it does not need to weigh or test the metal. Trade between strangers gets faster, because trust moves from the person to the stamp.
800 to 200 BCE — The founders appear. Within a few centuries, a group of teachers appears in separate places with no contact between them. Confucius and Laozi in China, the Buddha and Mahavira in India, and the Hebrew prophets in the Levant. Their teachings share a shift from ritual performed for a god towards questions about how a person should live. The philosopher Karl Jaspers named this period the Axial Age in 1949 and argued it was one connected turning point in human thought. That claim is disputed. Critics point out that the dates for several of these figures are uncertain by a century or more, that Laozi may not have been one person, and that grouping them together imposes a pattern rather than finding one. The appearance of the founders is a fact. The idea that it was a single event is a theory.
About 370 BCE — The first complaint about new technology. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato tells a story about an Egyptian king who is offered the gift of writing and refuses it. The king argues that writing will produce forgetting rather than memory, because people will trust marks made outside themselves instead of what they hold inside. That objection is 2,400 years old and it is made about writing, not about any modern device. Every later argument that a new technology is weakening human memory repeats it.
About 30 CE — Christianity begins. It starts as a small movement inside Judaism in a Roman province. For its first three centuries it has no state power, and Roman authorities persecute it in waves.
105 CE — Paper in China. The court official Cai Lun is traditionally credited with the paper-making process in this year. Archaeologists have since found paper fragments in China from the second century BCE, so paper existed earlier and Cai Lun probably improved and standardised it. Paper is far cheaper than the alternatives, which are silk in China and papyrus and parchment elsewhere. Cheap material is what allows large numbers of copies.
313 and 380 CE — Rome adopts Christianity. In 313 the Edict of Milan makes Christianity legal across the Roman Empire. In 380 the Edict of Thessalonica makes it the official religion of the state. In 67 years a persecuted movement becomes the religion of the largest state in the western world. From this point, in Europe, religious authority and state authority are joined, and they stay joined for more than a thousand years.
610 CE — Islam begins. Muhammad receives the first revelation in Arabia, according to Islamic tradition, in this year. Within a century the territory under Muslim rule stretches from Spain to the edge of India. That territory connects the trade routes and the libraries of three continents under one written language.
790s to 900s — Paper reaches Baghdad and the translation movement begins. Paper-making spreads west from China into the Islamic world, and a paper mill operates in Baghdad by the end of the 700s. Scholars in Baghdad translate Greek, Persian, and Indian works into Arabic on a large scale. Much of Greek mathematics, medicine, and philosophy survives because of this work, and Europe later receives it back through Arabic copies. Knowledge does not move in one direction, and it does not always survive where it started.
1000s to 1100s — The first power that is not muscle. Water mills spread across Europe on a scale nobody had reached before. The Domesday survey of England in 1086 records more than 5,600 of them in one country. Windmills follow from the late 1100s. A mill grinds grain, saws wood, and hammers iron without a person or an animal supplying the force. This is the first time a society gets a large share of its work from something that is not a muscle, and it happens 600 years before the steam engine.
1054 CE — The Christian church splits. The eastern and western churches break apart over authority and doctrine. Europe now has two centres of religious power rather than one, in Rome and in Constantinople.
1095 CE — The Crusades begin. Pope Urban II calls for an armed expedition to the eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades run for roughly two centuries. Their military results were mixed and largely reversed. Their lasting effect was contact. European traders, soldiers, and scholars met a wealthier and better documented world, and they brought goods, texts, and methods back with them.
1088 to 1300s — Universities. Bologna, Paris, and Oxford grow out of church schools into permanent institutions that outlive any individual teacher. A university stores knowledge in an organisation rather than in a person, which means it survives the death of the people who built it. That is a change in how knowledge is held, not only in how much of it exists.
1100 to 1300 — Guilds and apprenticeship. Craft guilds control who may practise a trade in a town, how long training takes, and what quality the work must reach. Skill passes from master to apprentice by working beside them, because the knowledge involved cannot be written down. Guilds also restrict entry, which protects the members and keeps prices up.
1206 CE — The Mongols. Genghis Khan is proclaimed ruler of the united Mongol tribes. The empire that follows conquers by force and then protects the trade routes crossing it, because taxed trade is worth more than raided trade. Goods, people, and ideas move between China, Persia, and Europe faster than at any earlier date.
1215 CE — Magna Carta. English barons force King John to accept written limits on royal power. Most of its clauses concerned the barons rather than ordinary people, and the king repudiated it within months. What lasted is the principle written into it, that the ruler is subject to law rather than above it.
1234 to 1377 CE — Metal movable type in Korea. Korean printers under the Goryeo dynasty use movable metal type, and the oldest surviving book printed this way, the Jikji, dates to 1377, which is decades before Gutenberg. The Korean invention did not spread, partly because a writing system with thousands of characters gains less from movable type than an alphabet does. Gutenberg's press in Europe was developed independently. Both facts are true, and stating one without the other misleads.
1347 to 1351 CE — The Black Death. Plague kills a large share of the population of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Estimates of the European death toll range from a third to a half. The effect on work went in opposite directions in different places. In western Europe the survivors were scarce, so their labour was worth more, wages rose, and the bonds tying peasants to land weakened. In eastern Europe landlords responded by tightening those bonds instead, which historians call the second serfdom. The same disease produced freer labour in one half of Europe and less free labour in the other.
1300s to 1494 CE — Double-entry bookkeeping. Italian merchants develop a method of recording every transaction twice, once as a debit and once as a credit, so the books can be checked against themselves. Luca Pacioli published the first widely read description in 1494. This method lets a business be understood by someone who did not run it, which is what makes outside investment possible.
About 1440 CE — The printing press. Johannes Gutenberg combines movable metal type, an oil-based ink, and a screw press. The result is not that books become possible, because books already existed. The result is that copies become cheap. A text can now reach thousands of people who never met its author and who live under different rulers. The monopoly held by scribes and by the institutions that employed them breaks, and it breaks fast.
1492 CE — The Columbian exchange begins. Contact between the Americas and the rest of the world starts a two-way movement of crops, animals, people, and diseases. Potatoes and maize move east and later feed large populations in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Horses, cattle, and wheat move west. Diseases move west with catastrophic results, and that story belongs to the next page.