Pinning it to a specific year may be impossible and “circa 2000 BC” may be more common, but I guess the non-specificity of “circa 2000 BC” would disqualify it for this thread.
Anyway there was huge upheaval in the Eastern Mediterranean region at that time. The Hittite Empire suddenly collapsed, halting the easy transport of tin from the East (and thus speeding the use of iron as a substitute for bronze!) The glorious Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations also collapsed. There was a cascading series of migrations (“the Sea People”) to fill the power vacuums. (I think the cause/effect relationship between Hittite collapse and Sea People power is uncertain.) The Phoenicians and perhaps Etruscans are among the Sea Peoples.
One book cites the exact 1177 BC date, basing this on the historic date that the Sea People attacked Egypt. Egypt prevailed but were much weakened – this led to the decline of the Egyptian Empire.
Thanks. That also makes sense in context of the Biblical myth. If it was a time of great chaos and mass population transfer, the kernel of truth in the Exodus story could be “The Jews arrived in Israel about this time, and suffered harrowing adventures along the way”.
BTW, the Biblical chronology is pretty clear that the Exodus would have occurred in the 13-14th century BCE, a little earlier than 1177 (and of course it makes sense that a people’s creation myth might imply that their history went back further than it actually did). Definitely not as early as 2000 BCE, though
I think of years when most people, who adopt some awareness of their world, have to take one side or another, after things have gone too far to just shrug.
1938: the Spanish Civil War and Kristallnacht made it impossible to believe that Fascism/Nazism was just Europe getting its post-war house back in order.
1955: Emmett Till’s murder was so unjustifiable that racial separatism was unacceptable.
This is really tough! I’ll zoom back a bit and try to think in terms of the major historical developments that these dates are supposed to symbolize.
I can think of six that I think HAVE to be there, which I have marked with asterixes.
*Buddha; origin of most of Asian civilization.
*Christianity’s split from Judaism and subsequent emergence as the dominant religion of Europe.
*1492
*The American Revolution
*WW2 and the subsequent end of colonialism (could easily split that into two, but we’re pressed for space)
*The Internet.
For all of those except one, there’s no obvious one year you could pick as “when it happened”; for example, “Christianity” could reasonably be represented by the birth of Christ, his crucifixion, the writing of the Gospels, the fall of the Temple, or Constantine’s conversion. Likewise, “The American Revolution” could be marked by the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, Cornwallis’ surrender, or the ratification of the Constitution.
OK, I think the seventh should be “The Renaissance”, which encompasses the invention of the printing press, the emergence of modern science, and the rise of Protestantism. Hard to pin that down to a year, though.
For the eighth, I’ll pick 1991, which featured both the fall of the USSR, and al-Qaeda’s first attempt to blow up the WTC, representing the rise of jihadism.
Others deserving of mention:
The Roman Empire. Arguably its rise and fall could both be counted as epoch-making events.
Rise of Islam.
US Civil War, marking the end of the chattel slavery regimes in the Western Hemisphere that began in 1492. Too US-centric?
The British Empire and colonialism in general.
1968: Rise of feminism and the end of “traditional values” in general, widespread political upheaval (race riots in the US, anti-Soviet uprising in Czechoslovakia, Cultural Revolution in China).
Russian Revolution
Of that list, I think the last three have an advantage in that they affected the lives of almost literally everyone in the world in major ways.
Makes a good book title, but not really a year of destiny on its own. From Amazon:
(As a result, the title is a little misleading, as 1177 BC ends up being of relatively little relevance, since the author concludes that the collapse took place over a longer period, and readily admits that the selection of that year for the end of an era is more or less symbolic, like the dates some use to declare the end of the Roman Empire.)
I’d substitute 1433 CE. That was the date of the last major Chinese maritime expedition, the last of seven lead by Admiral Zheng He, who also happened to die during the voyage. They would have stopped anyway, but without such a leader few would have dared it. China’s gigantic fleet of gigantic ships would not be equaled by any western power for centuries. Their absence left an open ocean for the tiny vessels of the Europeans. In those few centuries they managed to make colonies of most of South Asia, transforming that part of the world in enormous ways that we are still dealing with.
1840 and 1882: the first commercially successful telegraph and electric power systems. The telegraph banished time and space in a way that seemed magical. People were able to communicate across hundreds of miles essentially instantly. The telephone would prove to be more important, and so would the radio, but that magic of folding together here and there started with the telegraph. Edison’s electric power system started the electricity revolution. Every place in the world with minor exceptions runs on it. It’s as important as the invention of printing.
Good point. I think electricity, and its cousin steam power, are essential additions to the list.
And it ties directly into colonialism, as it was the technological revolution that allowed Europe to conquer the rest of the world. But it probably deserves its own entry, since its effects have survived colonialism.
I think I’ll replace the American Revolution with the Industrial Revolution. If you stretch you can view the American and French Revolutions as the culmination of the Renaissance/Enlightenment era, but now we’re talking about a span of three centuries, so that doesn’t really work.
1776: Not only the American Revolution, but also the first commercially profitable use of a steam engine, marking the beginning of the Industrial Revolution!
And I suppose 1969 would be better than 1968; we lose the anti-Soviet angle, but we get the moon landing and the release of the first Led Zeppelin album.
c 600 BCE – Buddhism
c 50 CE – writings of St. Paul. This seems like the best date for the rise of Christianity.
1440 – printing press
1492
1776
1901 – death of Queen Victoria, British Empire and European colonialism at its height
1945 – end of WW2, first use of atomic bomb
1947 – independence of India/Pakistan marks the beginning of decolonization.
1969
1991
If we don’t want to do “circas”, we can use 312 for Christianity, and add 1848 for the beginnings of Socialist thought.
So 1492 has to be at the top of near the top. There are debates a plenty about this in other threads. But IMO it has to be one the most important dates in human history it directly affected massively a huge swath of the globe and indirectly almost the entire globe. Plus it has an actual precise date where the process began unlike most other revolutionary changes in human history. To be clear it was absolutely a bad thing (even if some of the indirect effects were not necessarily bad, I’m quite comfortable calling it a “bad thing”), more like the Nazi occupation of Europe than the discovery of penicillin. That doesn’t make it any less important.
Talking of which I think the discovery of penicillin counts. It utterly revolutionized human life like almost nothing else, and (unlike most other discoveries which are the product of decades or centuries of iteration) it can be traced directly to Alexander Flemings petri dishes in 1928 even if it took many years for it to change anyone’s life
OK, 1991 is a very heavy hitter. In addition to the fall of the USSR and the first major al-Qaeda action, it also had the Gulf War, the end of apartheid, AND the opening of the World Wide Web to the public, marking the beginning of the Information Age.
The year I find overlooked in this thread is 1848. Unlike 1776 or 1789, the revolutions, uprisings, and constitutional reforms of 1848 were far more widespread - from Eastern Europe to South America; Romania, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Colombia, Brazil, Chile. The US conquered and annexed northern Mexico and discovered gold in California, resulting in a mass migration of Americans from the East. Marx and Engels wrote the The Communist Manifesto. Lord Kelvin postulated absolute zero, and a guy named Yale invented the modern padlock.
I think the thread title implies that we’re not going before recorded history, meaning the last 2000-odd years. Otherwise, we’d have to count things like the invention of writing and agriculture.