The Centuries

Iron is replacing bronze along the eastern Mediterranean. Phoenicians push out trading colonies; in the Levant, David consolidates the twelve tribes and his son Solomon builds the First Temple in Jerusalem. The Zhou dynasty rules a still-feudal China. The century writes the prologue of monotheism — a theology that will outlast every empire on this list.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire industrializes warfare. Iron weapons, professional siege engineers, organized cavalry, and a brutal policy of mass deportation create the first state designed for permanent expansion. Homer's epics may take their final shape in this century, on the other side of the Aegean. Two opposite cultural projects sit side by side: the empire by force, and the empire by story.

Across the Greek peninsula, the polis emerges — small self-governing cities whose argument with themselves will eventually produce philosophy, democracy, and theatre. The Greek alphabet, borrowed from Phoenicia, gives literacy a portable substrate. Rome is founded (753 BCE, by tradition). In Israel, the prophetic tradition begins to speak truth to imperial power. The DNA of two civilizations — Greek and Roman — is laid down in one century.

Assyria reaches its peak — and the seeds of its collapse. Babylon's revival absorbs Assyrian power. In Lydia, the first metal coins are struck — a quiet technological revolution that will make commerce and taxation legible. Athens drafts Draco's laws — harsh, but the principle that law should be written endures. Zoroaster, somewhere in Iran, conceives ethical dualism.

The Axial Age. Within a single century, four civilizations independently discover ethics as a project of the individual conscience. In India, the Buddha teaches the four noble truths. In China, Confucius and Laozi compose the moral grammar of East Asia. In Greece, Thales asks what the world is made of. In Persia, Cyrus the Great founds the first multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant empire — the largest the world has yet seen.

A few thousand citizens on a rocky peninsula invent democracy, tragedy, history, medicine, and the rational dialogue. Pericles funds the Parthenon. Sophocles writes Oedipus. Herodotus invents history. Hippocrates separates medicine from magic. Socrates begins to teach. The century also contains the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War — the world-historical event of a free society defeating an empire, then destroying itself.

A young Macedonian king, taught by Aristotle, marches from Greece to the Indus in eleven years and dies at thirty-two. His empire fragments, but the cultures he fused — Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Indian — produce the Hellenistic world: a single trade and intellectual space stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. Plato founds the Academy. Aristotle systematizes nature. In India, Chandragupta Maurya creates the subcontinent's first empire.

Qin Shi Huang unifies the warring states of China in 221 BCE — standardizing script, weights, and the axle width of carts. The administrative apparatus he builds will, with revisions, outlast every dynasty for two thousand years. In the Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage fight three Punic Wars; Rome wins the first two this century. In India, Ashoka inherits the Mauryan Empire and turns to nonviolent Buddhism after a brutal war.

Rome destroys Carthage (146 BCE) and conquers Greece in the same year. The Mediterranean becomes a single political space. In China, Emperor Wu of Han opens the Silk Road, linking the Mediterranean to the Pacific by camel and caravan. Two unrelated empires — Rome and Han — now indirectly trade silk for glass. A century earlier this was impossible; a century later it will be routine.

The Roman Republic collapses under its own success. Caesar crosses the Rubicon, is assassinated, and his adopted heir Octavian — soon Augustus — ends a century of civil war and inaugurates the Empire. Cleopatra ends with him. Virgil writes the Aeneid. Cicero perfects Latin prose. The Pax Romana that follows is one of the longest peaces in recorded history; the cost is that no one votes meaningfully again for fourteen hundred years.

A Galilean carpenter is crucified by a Roman governor; his followers, against every reasonable prediction, take over the empire within three centuries. The Pax Romana makes their roads. Paul of Tarsus universalizes the Jewish message for gentiles. In China, the Han dynasty's iron furnaces and paper drafts push it ahead of Rome in some technologies, behind in others. The Buddha's teachings reach the Han court.

The Roman Empire reaches its largest extent under Trajan; Hadrian builds a wall in northern Britain. Marcus Aurelius writes the Meditations on campaign. The Han dynasty produces seismographs, the magnetic compass, and the world's largest library. The two empires — neither aware of the other except by rumor — together hold a quarter of humanity. Then, at century's end, the Antonine Plague kills perhaps ten million.

In fifty years Rome has more than fifty emperors, most assassinated. The currency debases; the borders leak; the Sasanian Persians capture a Roman emperor alive. In China the Han collapses into the Three Kingdoms — the period later mythologized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Diocletian arrives at century's end to reorganize Rome, dividing it east and west. The crisis is survived; the unity is not.

Constantine wins at the Milvian Bridge under a Christian sign and, with the Edict of Milan, legalizes a once-persecuted sect. He founds Constantinople — a new Rome that will outlast the old one by a thousand years. The Council of Nicaea hammers Christianity into a creed. In India, the Gupta dynasty inaugurates a classical age of mathematics (zero, decimal place value) and science. The medieval shape of the world is forming.

Goths sack Rome (410). Vandals sack Rome (455). Attila threatens both halves of the empire. In 476 the last Western Roman emperor is deposed; no one at the time treats it as the end of an era — it was a slow fade, not a thunderclap. Augustine writes the City of God to explain why a Christian Rome could fall. In China, the period of disunity continues. Buddhism spreads. The world without Rome begins.

Justinian briefly reconquers Italy and North Africa, codifies Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis, and builds Hagia Sophia — for nearly a thousand years the largest cathedral in the world. Then the Plague of Justinian arrives, killing perhaps a quarter of the Mediterranean basin. In China, the Sui dynasty briefly reunifies the country and digs the Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in history.

In one century, an Arabian merchant becomes a prophet, then a political leader, then dies — and his followers, in less than a hundred years, conquer Persia, Egypt, and march to Tours. The Sasanian Empire vanishes. Byzantium loses most of its territory. Half the Christian world becomes Muslim. Meanwhile in China, the Tang dynasty inaugurates East Asia's most cosmopolitan era — Persian poets at Chang'an, monks copying Indian sutras.

Charlemagne is crowned by the Pope on Christmas Day 800 — the symbolic restart of a Western emperor. The Abbasids found Baghdad, which by century's end is the largest city in the world. Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge is translated there into Arabic; algebra is born; the zero, borrowed from India, enters the world's accounting. In China, the An Lushan rebellion devastates the Tang and ends an era of cosmopolitan glory.

Vikings raid, then trade, then settle — from Ireland to the Volga to Constantinople. They found the state that becomes Russia. In Baghdad, the House of Wisdom translates Aristotle, Galen, and Indian astronomy into Arabic. Cyril and Methodius design the Glagolitic script for the Slavs. In China, the Tang fades; gunpowder is mentioned in alchemical texts for the first time.

Otto I revives the Western imperial title — the Holy Roman Empire that will lurch on for 800 years. In China, the Song dynasty inaugurates a commercial and technological golden age: printed books, paper money, the magnetic compass, and government civil-service exams that select bureaucrats by literacy not lineage. The Fatimids found Cairo. Iceland adopts Christianity by vote in 1000. The High Middle Ages are beginning.

In 1054 the Catholic West and Orthodox East formally split — a schism that has not yet healed. In 1066 William of Normandy invades England; for two and a half centuries the Anglo-Saxon language vanishes from court and law. Avicenna in Persia writes the Canon of Medicine — Europe's medical textbook until the 17th century. In China, Bi Sheng invents movable-type printing, four centuries before Gutenberg. The Crusades approach.

The Crusades wash over the Levant for two centuries. Aristotle returns to the Latin West via Arabic translations through Toledo. Gothic cathedrals begin to rise. Paris and Bologna become true universities. Eleanor of Aquitaine rules half of France and most of England. Heloise and Abelard write their love letters. In Japan, the samurai class consolidates. In China, neo-Confucianism takes shape under Zhu Xi.

Genghis Khan and his successors conquer from the Pacific to the Black Sea. Pax Mongolica makes overland Eurasia safe enough for Marco Polo to travel home with stories. Magna Carta is signed (1215). Aquinas synthesizes Aristotle and Christianity. Hangzhou under the Song is, on Marco Polo's report, the largest and most prosperous city on Earth. Then the Mongol storm hits the Song.

The plague kills perhaps a third of Europe in five years. Wages rise; serfdom cracks; the Renaissance gets its labor market. The Hundred Years' War begins. Dante completes the Divine Comedy. In Mali, Mansa Musa is, by some calculations, the richest person who has ever lived. In China, the Ming overthrow the Mongols and turn inward. The medieval world will not recover its old shape.

Gutenberg prints with movable metal type around 1450 — the European information explosion begins. Constantinople falls (1453); Greek scholars flee to Italy. Florence funds Brunelleschi's dome and Botticelli's paintings. Zheng He sails the Ming treasure fleet to East Africa, then Ming China abruptly retreats from the sea. Columbus reaches the Caribbean (1492). The same year, the Reconquista ends and the Jews are expelled from Spain. The early modern world is born.

Luther nails 95 theses to a church door (1517) and shatters Latin Christendom. Copernicus moves the Earth. Suleiman the Magnificent makes the Ottomans a Mediterranean superpower. Spanish silver from Potosí floods the world and reaches Ming China, where it stabilizes the currency. Shakespeare writes Hamlet. Akbar rules Mughal India with religious tolerance. The first global economy is functioning.

Galileo points a telescope at the sky and never recants in his heart. Descartes doubts. Newton, in 18 months of plague isolation at Woolsthorpe, invents calculus and gravity. The Dutch East India Company becomes the first joint-stock multinational, with a stock-market valuation that, adjusted, may exceed every modern company combined. The Thirty Years' War kills perhaps a third of the German population. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) defines the sovereign state.

Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant put reason in the dock against king and church. The American Revolution (1776) writes natural rights into a constitution. The French Revolution (1789) tries to refound society on paper and ends in terror, then Napoleon. Britain invents the modern factory. Qianlong rules a peaceful, populous, and confident China that will soon be overtaken. Adam Smith publishes the Wealth of Nations the same year America is declared.

In a single century the human energy budget multiplies by orders of magnitude. Coal becomes steam, steam becomes rail, rail becomes empire. The British Empire reaches a quarter of the planet. Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. Marx publishes Capital. America fights its civil war over slavery and wins itself back. Japan reinvents itself in the Meiji Restoration. Qing China is shattered by the Opium Wars. The world's fastest civilization shift in history.

Two world wars kill perhaps 100 million people and remake the map. The atom is split (1945). Humans walk on the Moon (1969). DNA is decoded (1953). The Soviet Union rises and falls. China returns from its 'century of humiliation' to become a manufacturing superpower. The internet is born. By century's end, more people are alive than have ever previously died.

A quarter into the century, most adults carry a supercomputer in their pocket and outsource cognition to large language models. China's GDP is approaching the U.S.'s. CRISPR edits genes for sickle cell. Photovoltaic and battery costs fall by 99%. A coronavirus kills millions. Atmospheric CO₂ passes 420 ppm. Generative AI arrives. The defining theme is not yet decided — that is what the people alive today are choosing.