Introduction
Hyperhistory covers the major epochs of world history during the last 3000 years.
(Before 1000 BC see here)
The date of 1000 BC has been chosen as the beginning of the main part of Hyperhistory
because at around that time four very distinctive civilized traditions began to take
shape in Greece,
the Middle East, India and China.
Those four major civilizations were set apart by different cultural traditions, and by distinctive religious and philosophical world views, all of which found their initial
expressions before the end of the sixth century BC.
The sixth century was indeed important in the history of humanity.
It was an age when
Buddha was
searching for a path to enlightenment in India,
Confucius was
teaching new rules for society in China,
Ionian
philosophers were initiating a tradition of scientific thinking in Greece,
and when the exiled
Jews in
Babylon were collecting the warnings and messages of their prophets in a holy scripture. On the other
flank of Mesopotamia another religious movement was initiated by an Iranian prophet,
Zoroaster,
who preached his message of cosmic strife between the God of Light and the principle of evil.
The relationship between the four major civilizations may be thought of as an equilibrium. Any
serious disorder might influence other parts of the system, but not until AD 1500 did any one
civilization gain such superiority as to upset the fourfold balance of the whole. This balance did, however, encounter a number of jolts:
- First,
Alexander the
Great pushed Greek civilization far beyond its original borders.
- Then,
Indian Buddhism
advanced along the silk road into the heart of China.
But the Hellenization of the Middle East, like the Indianization of China did not last
and was soon either repudiated or absorbed into native concepts.
- Next came the explosive conquest of
Islam, first
across the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, and then into India, eastern Europe and central Asia.
The final collapse of the cultural balance of the Old World happened after AD 1500
when
Europeans first
opened the Americas, and then explored the rest of the
earth's habitable coastlines, using the oceans as highways for their commerce and
conquests.
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