The Penguin History of the World

Two great forces came together to create China. The first of these was a continuing diffusion of culture outwards from the Yellow River basin. To begin with, Chinese civilization was a matter of tiny islands in a sea of barbarism. Yet by 500 BC it was the common possession of scores, perhaps hundreds, of what have been termed ‘states’ scattered across the north, the Yangzi region and eastern Sichuan. It also gradually spread to the south-central regions, where Hunan, northern Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces are now. In this latter region one of the great countries of the Warring States era, the Chu, gradually expanded. Although owing much to the Zhou, it had many distinctive linguistic, calligraphic, artistic and religious traits of its own. By the end of the period of Warring States we have reached the point at which the stage of Chinese history is about to be much enlarged.

The second of these fundamental and continuing processes under both the Shang and Zhou dynasties was the establishment of landmarks in institutions which were to survive until modern times. Among them was a fundamental division of Chinese society into a landowning élite and the common people. Although the form of the state was about to change profoundly with the emergence of the first Chinese empires, these distinctions remained, with set patterns of great families not dissimilar from what would later be found in the Roman empire and in medieval Europe. There was also an ideology of rectitude and correctness in form that was to transcend the big political divide in Chinese history of the second century BC, when the Qin empire was created. By then, ideology, social organization and culture had come together to create China, a people and a territory with a sense of unity in the eyes of all beholders.

7 The Other Worlds of the Ancient Past

So far in this account huge areas of the world have still hardly been mentioned. Though Africa has priority in the story of the evolution and spread of humanity, and though the entry of men to Australasia and the Americas calls for remark, once those remote events have been touched upon, the beginnings of history focus attention elsewhere. The homes of the creative cultures which have dominated the story of civilization were the Middle East and Aegean, India and China. In all these areas some meaningful break in rhythm can be seen somewhere in the first millennium BC; there are no neat divisions, but there is a certain rough synchrony which makes it reasonable to divide their histories in this era. But for the great areas of which nothing has so far been said, such a chronology would be wholly unrevealing.

This is, in the main, because none of them had achieved levels of civilization comparable to those already reached in the Mediterranean and Asia by 1000 BC. Remarkable things had been done by then in western Europe and the Americas, but when they are given due weight there still remains a qualitative gap between the complexity and resources of the societies which produced them and those of the ancient civilizations which were to found durable traditions. The interest in the ancient history of these areas lies rather in the way they illustrate that varied roads might lead towards civilization and that different responses might be demanded by different environmental challenges than in what they left as their heritage. In one or two instances they may allow us to reopen arguments about what constitutes ‘civilization’, but for the period of which we have so far spoken the story of Africa or Central Eurasia, of the Pacific peoples, of the Americas and western Europe is not history but still prehistory. There is little or no correspondence between its rhythms and what was going on in the Middle East or coastal Asia, even when there were (as in the case of Africa and Europe though not of the Americas) contacts with them.

Africa is a good place to start, because that is where the human story first began. In several waves, cultures that had developed in Africa gave rise to new cultures in other parts of the world. This human dispersal was a very lengthy process, and there is reason to believe that groups that migrated out of Africa on several occasions supplied new technologies and new ideas to others, as man moved into Europe and the further reaches of coastal Asia around 50,000 years ago. Then, though, in the Upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic the focus moves elsewhere. Much was still to happen in Africa but the period of its greatest influence on the rest of the world was long over.