the new availability of inexpensive paper spurred an explosion of notebooks called zibaldoni, in which regular people wrote down excerpts of books they had read, things they had heard, or discoveries they had made themselves.
I like how regular people could participate in learning, not just elites.
Hongwu designated his chosen heir's first son, who was sixteen at the time. Four years later when the twenty-year old grandson inherited the throne, one of his uncles took it away from him.
Putting a teenager on the throne seems risky. Young emperors were easy targets for ambitious family members and officials.
The failure of these social systems in China is often interpreted as a loss by rulers of the Mandate of Heaven.
The Mandate of Heaven was how people explained why dynasties fell. When famine, plague, and chaos hit, it made sense to people that the Yuan rulers had lost divine approval. I think its cool to see their thought process when their was no probable explanation for them at the time.
A Jacquerie (peasant's revolt) in France was put down brutally in 1358. Heavily armored cavalry rode down crowds of farmers described by the authorities as a rebel army
shows how desperate peasants were. Even though they fought back, the revolt was crushed brutally. Authorities often used extreme violence to maintain control.
Caravans and official travelers could cover up to 200 miles per day, and for the first time
That’s insanely fast for the 14th century. People could travel huge distances and share stories about other cultures. It helped connect East and West much better
hina's Southern Song dynasty was becoming the wealthiest, most urbanized, and most populous region of the world. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries
China was the world leader in population and economy. 120 million people is huge! It’s crazy to think one country had 30% of the world’s population.
Saladin did not sack the city and gave its Christian inhabitants safe passage to return to their homelands.
This is really interesting as he was known for being merciful. Contrasts with the brutal Crusader capture in 1099. Shows how back then, leadership can include honor, and not to reckless violence
One of these travelers was Constantine the African (c. 1017–1098), an important figure in the transmission of medical knowledge from the Islamic world to medieval Europe
Constantine is a great example of someone moving between cultures. He helped bring knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe.
The Domesday Book (1086 CE), a comprehensive survey of England's lands and resources, was commissioned to aid taxation and administration and has become an invaluable source of insight into medieval life and the economy.
Basically, it was a giant census for money and control. tells us a lot about medieval England. Historians still use it today to understand economy and society.
The technique, which is now lost, originated in southern India in the sixth century BCE and continued until the eighteenth, with significant production during the Chola Empire.
It’s wild that we don’t know how to fully make it anymore. Even with modern technology, recreating it is difficult. goes to show how skilled ancient metalworkers were.
developed an alphabet for the Slavic language which ultimately became Cyrillic.
This is huge because Cyrillic is still used today. Language helped religion spread faster. It made the Slavs feel included instead of forced to use Greek or Latin.
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Elbe River and from the Pyrenees to the Danube
The boundaries help visualize how massive his empire was. how it wasn’t a small kingdom and it crossed many modern countries. Geography clearly mattered a lot for power.
first to Kufa and then to a new city they built beginning in 762 near the old Sasanian capital
It’s interesting that they didn’t settle right away and kept moving. Building a brand-new city shows confidence and ambition. They wanted a capital designed for their empire, not inherited.
Muhammad and the Muslims had lived by caravan trading, and they continued this during their exile in Medina, gaining converts throughout Arabia.
It’s interesting that trade stayed important even after they were forced to leave Mecca. Trading helped them survive in Medina and meet new people. This also made it easier for Islam to spread because merchants traveled a lot.
a hub of the caravan trade and a pilgrimage site.
Trade routes that were connected Mecca to Africa, Asia, and Europe. Pilgrimage brought diverse religious practices into the city. Really helps explain Muhammad’s strong opposition to idolatry.
the people Romans had described as "barbarians"
The term “barbarian” was definitely Roman bias. Many of these groups had long interacted with Rome through trade, military service, and settlement. This is more to the fact that they were outsiders completely opposed to Roman civilization.
In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and proved a sea route to India was possible.
This was huge, it proved a sea route to Asia was possible. Opened the way for global trade and later Portuguese dominance in the Indian Ocean. really cool!
but moved with his family when his father was banished to Iceland.
Being banished meant losing your home and status. It’s interesting how exile actually led to discovery.
The Huns' dislocation of the Alans and Goths resulted in the migration of the Visigoths from the Black Sea region, to ultimately seek refuge south of the Danube River.
it’s cool how one group’s push—like the Huns forcing the Alans and Goths—started this domino effect of migrations.
And by 250, a hierarchical structure had been built in the new church, with bishops in Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch and the removal of women from leadership roles that most historians agree they had occupied in the early years of the faith.
It’s interesting how quickly the leadership became more centralized and male-dominated. Did persecution push the church to become more organized, or was this part of a wider social trend?
Paul was constantly writing letters to far-flung christian communities throughout the Mediterranean world.
Those letters weren’t just personal notes, but powerful tools shaping belief. It’s amazing that we still read and study those epistles thousands of years later!
The three men who shared power were Octavian, Marc Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
It’s surprising how different they were in age and experience; Octavian only 19, Antony about 39, and Lepidus around 50. I'm assuming that age gap must have created tensions in how they ruled together.
Wu also promoted Confucianism as the state ideology and the basis of Civil Service.
Turning Confucianism into an official state doctrine might be one of his most lasting legacies. imagine if Legalism or another philosophy had remained dominant
Greek city-states took the opportunity of Philip's death to revolt, but Alexander crushed rebellions like that at Thebes, where he razed the city in 335 BCE. He then drafted an army from his Greek vassals to support a conquest of the Persian Empire.
I wonder if his way of fighting was a deliberate strategy to prevent further revolts or the pride of proving himself, maybe a mix of both.
Instead he took what we might call a more politically realistic approach to interpreting events, calling on human nature, fear, and self interest as the main motivations of conflict.
it sounds almost like political realism in international relations today. I wonder if his insights into human motivation influenced later political thinkers like Machiavelli or Hobbes.
n the first decade of this long war, a Spartan hoplite army invaded Attica but was held back by Athens' defenses, especially fortifications called the Long Walls that linked the city with its port, Piraeus.
It’s impressive how Athens relied on engineering more than direct combat to protect itself compared to the spartans. I wonder how effective those Long Walls were in maintaining supply lines during sieges.
Tyre's sister city, Sidon, became the center of an extremely lucrative trade in purple dye made from snail shells in a process the Phoenicians (whose name actually means purple people) kept a close secret to preserve their monopoly.
I think it’s cool that their identity was tied to a color! I know that purple was a color for royalty, so I wonder if it was associated with luxury because it was rare.
Although the society was still patriarchal, elite women managed households, estates, and even politics.
That’s quite impressive for the ancient world as it almost sounds like Spartan women had more influence than Athenian women. I assuming this made the Spartan society more stable while the men were away at war, which would make sense.
In order to keep control over the much more numerous native population, elite Spartan men devoted their entire existences to a military system that began at age seven with brutal communal training in the agoge.
It actually kind of scary to think about how young and early the men had to go into military training, but also interesting because their culture was so closely connected with their military and fighting.
The [Periplus of the Erythraean Sea](Periplus of the Erythraean Sea), a Greek sailing guide written around 60 CE describes the Aksum port of Adulis (in modern Eritrea) as a "Great Emporium" where Aksumite merchants traded with "barbarians" from the interior.
It's kind of funny how ancient Greeks called the inland folks “barbarians,” but Aksum was the middleman making those deals happen.
When Octavian invaded Egypt, Cleopatra killed herself to avoid being paraded in chains through the streets of Rome.
Cleopatra’s suicide, i think, was a final act to preserve her dignity and sovereignty.
Wild silkworms, which were abundant in the region, were fed on mulberry leaves and then their cocoons were harvested and boiled to extract silk threads.
I’m amazed at how labor-intensive silk production was. It must have taken serious knowledge and skill just to get usable threads.
The Minoan Civilization on the Mediterranean island of Crete began about 5,100 years ago when villages like Knossos, Phaistos, and Malia began expanding based on agricultural surpluses and maritime trade with the Greek mainland and islands, Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia. Minoans exported olive oil, wine, pottery, textiles, and saffron in exchange for copper, ivory, lapis lazuli, and Egyptian faience (glazed ceramics).
It’s really cool how trade and farming surpluses could make these small villages grow into complex societies. I wonder how connected these villages actually were—was it more like independent towns trading with each other, or more of a coordinated network?
Although much smaller than cities like Uruk, Byblos never lost its significance and has remained occupied from its initial settlement to the present (as Jubayl, Lebanon).
It makes me think about what factors allow a city to survive thousands of years while others disappear. Maybe its trade location, natural resources, and harbor all helped. Also, it’s kind of wild to imagine that the same place people lived in 8,000 years ago is still inhabited today.
Increased rainfall created a a landscape of savannas fed by lakes and rivers.
Makes sense that hunter-gatherers and herders did well there. I wonder how many people lived in that area compared to along the Nile.
Because the Nile flood was considered a heavenly gift, a priestly elite and chieftains were seen as divine intermediaries, setting the stage for the semi-divine Pharaohs of the Dynastic period that began 5,150 years ago.
I wonder how much everyday Egyptians participated in these religious interpretations versus just following orders.
Personally, I suspect that the extreme complexity of modern Chinese may have hampered our ability to discern simpler steps in the course of its evolution.
This makes me think about whether archaeologists might be missing transitional stages because they’re filtered through modern understanding...
However, this development follows a very long period of what Chinese scholars call "proto-writing" that includes several incomplete collections of symbols and pictograms that have been found on pottery, tortoise shells, and jade tokens dating back as far as 8,600 years.
Wow—8,600 years is incredibly early! I’m curious how proto-writing functioned in practice. Were these symbols mostly mnemonic, or did they encode abstract ideas?
The Minoans also used a hieroglyphic for seals and inscriptions that dates back at least a century before Linear A.
I wonder what daily or ceremonial uses Linear A had, and how the Mycenaeans adapted it for their own language.
reserved for elite training that also included instruction in carving stone.
So was it literally illegal for lower class citizens to learn it? Was it something the elite taught their kids and made it hard for the lower class to learn? I'm having sort of a hard time conceptualizing how it all happened.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 symbols seem to represent words and syllables in a language that gave way to Elamite about five hundred years later.
The number of symbols is crazy to think about, it must have required extensive training to use. I wonder how scribes learned such a complex system and whether literacy was limited to an elite class. Also, why did the language and script eventually give way to Elamite...was it political, social, or linguistic pressures maybe?
A much later Egyptian script called Demotic (Greek: "for the people") was developed beginning about 2,600 years ago, allowing for much broader use of writing in commerce, law, and personal life.
I’m curious about the transition, how did ordinary Egyptians learn it? Did this script coexist with hieratic and hieroglyphs for centuries?
The shift to representing sounds was important because it allowed cuneiform to represent abstract concepts and to be used by speakers of different languages.
Cool that this made cuneiform versatile, kind of like an early universal communication tool.
Domesticating cows, which people managed slightly later than goats and sheep, must have been a bit more difficult and scary.
I was surprised to realize that this process wasn’t just about having food nearby—it also required observation, patience, and experimenting with how animals could live alongside humans safely. It makes me wonder how long it took for people to figure out which animals could be tamed and used for work, like pulling plows.
Many historians have suggested (often on shaky evidence and wishful thinking) that before the age of patriarchal civilizations, there was an earlier culture that was at least more equal, if not entirely women-led. The natural differences in abilities and interests between the sexes suggest divisions of labor that could have consequences for social power; but it's difficult to do more than speculate.
I was really interested to read about how women in these societies held social power because they controlled food distribution—it surprised me, since I usually think of ancient cultures as male-dominated. It makes me wonder how common matrilineal or more egalitarian systems were in other parts of the world, especially in early farming communities. Could some of these arrangements have influenced the development of later social hierarchies, or were they mostly lost as agriculture and patriarchy expanded? I wish the textbook gave more examples of specific ancient societies outside North America that might have had similar gender dynamics.
The gods decide this act must be punished and Enkidu dies -- not of battle but from a divinely-inflicted disease
Death as a divine punishment shows Mesopotamian views on fate and justice. I wonder if Enkidu’s death also serves a purpose for Gilgamesh’s development...
Some scholars have suggested that the same influences and people may have spread in both directions, from an origin around the fertile crescent, ancient Persia (modern-day Iran), or the Middle East. And there does seem to be evidence that wheat was adopted in India beginning about 9,000 years ago and that by about 8,500 years ago, wheat cultivation had reached central India and the Ganges River valley.
It surprised me to realize that some ideas about the Aryan arrival were influenced more by European assumptions than by actual evidence. I really want to know how much of cultural and technological development in other parts of the world was similarly influenced by both local experimentation and indirect contact with other regions, because I know it must be common.
Although Early European Farmers descended from the Anatolians had been in the region for centuries by Ötzi’s time, it’s possible there was still some hostility between these people and the earlier European hunter gatherers.
I wonder what daily life was like for someone like Ötzi, living in the Alps at that time. How often did conflicts between farmers and hunter-gatherers happen, and did people like Ötzi see themselves as part of one group or the other?