Hammered History E-Book

Hassan Sørensen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 503

Beschreibung

The history of humanity, told in your local pub by a sufficiently drunk history geek, highly opinionated and zero f*cks given.

Das E-Book Hammered History wird angeboten von Books on Demand und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
Satire, Kultur, Humanity, history, Humor

Leseprobe

CONTENT

Prefix

LSD

The development of society

Wanderlust

The sweet spot

The Roman Empire

Abraham

Indus

China

Indochina

Pacific

Africa

Time to move out

Vikings

America

Sometimes independence sucks, you know?

Pirates

We want to be free! – the anatomy of a revolution

By all means, let the idiots decide

A Nation isn’t necessarily a Country

You can’t be forgiven without sin

Women of the world: Unite!

World Wars

“I have become death – the destroyer of worlds”

China vs. China

The Cold War.

The Wall.

Korea

Vietnam.

Cambodia Year Zero.

China 2.0

Sunni or Shia? – and everyone loses their minds!

The clash of civilisations

The mother of all wars.

Jihad and other reasons for terrorism

Putin vs. the Nazis?

Secret Service.

Disruption

International Organisations

“Racial Purity Is Our Security”.

Breaking the law

Slavery.

Prostitution

Cancel culture

Freakshow

Conspiracy

Bias

Denmark – a rather controversial archipelago

Individual individuality.

You vote with your feet

Rebel rebel

Young rebels

The eternal desperate number two

The World Religions

Rastaman

Cargo Cults

PARTYYYY

The Darwin Award

“Hvad siger du?”

The Industrial Revolutions

Farming 4.0

Getting from A to B

The history of communication

.

online {unite:none;}

Yes that’s what I’m wearing

A house for a tulip

The blessed fight against development.

Art

Our House

Global heat

E.T. phone where?

The world of food

Give us today our daily Bread

Coffee or tea, Dear?

Want a beer before we build a pyramid?

Doctor, can you cure this shit?

A good clean family virus you can trust

Okay, that’s insane!

Bloodline

Insane leaders

Famous people

World History V.I.P.s

Thomas Midgley Jr.

My horse for a kingdom.

Saatana perkele!

One world.

In the future

Privilege checklist

The World History Deconstructed.

“It’s a very weird world we live in.

But I think that’s good.

If it was an ordinary world it would be boring.”

–Simone Dupont, 7 years old.

PREFIX

It’s a fucking mess.

Not as much of a mess as it used to be, though.

More people have access to sufficient food, clean water, healthcare and education than ever before.

That in spite of the fact that there have never been so many people living on earth as now, and we have a greater life expectancy than ever.

Fewer wars and terror attacks than ever before, fewer refugees and fewer people dying of cancer, viruses and infections.

Hard to believe when you read the news or listen to politicians, but that’s the fact.

But it’s still a bloody mess.

When islands in the Pacific are flooded people can’t just move somewhere else.

“Oh no, you don’t have the right citizenship, you need a visa, and we need to know if you are refugees or working migrants; you have a weird religion and odd rites and ways, so you can’t settle among us, because we want a homogeneous society or we will get confused and scared.”

Somewhere along the way we came up with the concepts of the national state and borders.

Too many languages and currencies, way too much establishment, all making life difficult and overcomplicated.

So how the fuck did we end up in this mess?

I’ll try to give you some background.

With a bottle of rum to support me.

If you stumble upon inaccuracies in this book, and think “Nah, that wasn’t in 1302, it was actually in fact in 1289”, write it down on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and mail it to your dentist.

Because – honestly – I don’t give a shit.

Read the title on the book cover again.

And one more time, just to make sure.

This is history and sarcasm, and If you can’t perceive when I’m tongue-in-cheek you should read a more dusty history book.

If you are overly sensitive about your religious belief or national pride: Burn this book in public!

LSD

Let’s just skip the big bang.

You can’t visualise that shit anyway.

Single cell organisms, and for every one million of them one would be slightly different.

If it was practical it would thrive, if not it would die.

So all these oddities would drive the evolution to more and more weird and complicated species, over millions of years.

If you pay five dollars a year, that’s the time it would take to pay your student loans.

A seriously seriously long time.

Dinosaurs came along, and died out.

Usually people regard them as a mistake by nature, but they actually existed for way longer than we have, so far – including chimpanzees.

No, our story begins with some blokes that very seriously liked the Beatles.

Especially the song “Lucy’s in the Sky with Diamonds” (a way of singing about LSD without actually saying LSD – note the capital letters).

They found a girl in Africa and named her Lucy.

She didn’t mind.

Mainly because she was already dead, and had been for some while.

In fact she is – so far – the oldest human ever found.

She was quite young when she died, so I guess you understand that she’s been dead most of the time.

About three million years.

Most of these science geeks think that humans evolved in the Rift Valley, in present day Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania, and share ancestry with chimpanzees.

After a very long time doing nothing really interesting they started spreading out, walking in all directions.

This happened more or less simultaneously with the evolving frontal cortex, or the so-called “cognitive revolution”.

Cognitive abilities gives us two distinct features in the brain.

The ability to communicate with complex words and gestures, and the ability to think abstract.

If you can think abstract you can imagine a house.

If you can communicate in details you can make other people imagine the same house, in the same spot.

If you can imagine together you can actually collaborate and build the damn thing.

With the ability to communicate abstractions you can even share a common belief in invisible beings.

So now you can even waste your time building temples.

When people got as far as present day Egypt and Iraq – The Fertile Crescent – they started farming instead of being dependent on hunting and gathering.

The Fertile Crescent is made fertile by three massive rivers: Euphrates, Tigris and the Nile.

That was quite a complication!

You have to prepare the fields, plan ahead, store and treat the harvest, build some kind of permanent settlement, cooperate, and, well, create a society with trade and rules and shit.

To complicate things further they started making pottery, and tools, and, after dwelling on this for a few thousand years, even writing – and contracts: “I gave you a goat now you owe me two shitloads of grain.”

“For two shitloads of grain and a chicken I get to rape your daughter.”

And so on…

Archaeology geeks often make a huge fucking mistake when trying to interpret their findings.

It goes like this: “This bronze spearhead indicates that they were too evolved to hunt, ergo this must be a weapon for war.”

Yes, it might be.

Not unlikely.

But the history of human kind is not linear.

Today, in 2023, in places like southern Africa and central Australia, people live in very complex societies, with ATM, iPhone and Tesla, next door neighbours to hunter-gatherers.

Why is it so unlikely that the same thing could take place ten thousand years ago?

The hunter would trade a cadaver for a spearhead made by people who could manufacture bronze?

It’s not linear, and trying to make it so will give us rather fucked up perceptions of the people of the past.

Getting ahead of my self I will make a jump foreword in time in order to mention the super advanced and complex societies in central America who had no metals.

Okay, so they were – per say – living in the stone age.

But they had maths and philosophy that was way more complicated than some of the civilisations that were well into the iron age.

Sorry – I needed to get this of my chest.

History is not fucking linear.

That’s why it makes no sense trying to understand history while you are sober and trying to fit it into a template.

Göbekli Tepe in present day Turkey is a 12,000 year old temple, that contains megaliths and graphic decorations that – according to established history thinking – is impossible.

It’s way too complicated and sophisticated, too many straight lines and too much accuracy.

It is build 7,000 years before Stonehenge and 6,500 years before the Pyramids in Giza.

12,000 years ago they didn’t have the maths, the tools or the knowledge to create this.

Well, guess what: They did it anyway.

There were hunter-gatherers in the area only 8,000 years ago.

Well, yes.

There are hunter-gatherers in Namibia now, arse-holes.

That doesn’t mean your MasterCard will get rejected in Windhoek, does it?

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY

As the example with Göbekli Tepe shows, we have no bloody idea when what happened where, and how evolved societies were at what point, when we go back to prehistoric time.

“Prehistoric” means before we started making notes in real time.

But it’s safe to say that most people get it wrong when they imagine that people were less intelligent or less mature in prehistoric time.

Of course they didn’t know how to swipe left on Tinder, and they couldn’t calculate tax deductions, but it’s not like they hadn’t invented gossip, oral sex or figuring out the counterweight to lift a monolith.

They were not fucking stupid!

If I leave a modern and smart person like you on an island with no tools, what are you going to do?

Now imagine I wipe your memory of modern tools, so you have never seen a hammer or a microwave oven, you’ll have to imagine those things, what they can do for you, and figure out how you are going to make them.

Trust me, it will not happen in a day, but it doesn’t mean that you are stupid.

You’re still pretty smart, and so were your ancestors 15,000 years ago.

They came up with the idea of using a rock to kill an animal or an enemy.

They figured out how to hit a rock with another rock to make it break and become sharp.

Now they could cut shit.

They figured out how a tie a rock to a stick to make a spear or an axe.

They somehow figured our how to control fire.

They started to barbecue meat before eating it, and obviously they would sit around the camp-fire and exchange words.

Factual information like “one of these guys is your father” and “at sunrise there will be more animals by the stream to hunt”.

Also they would obviously share some bullshit like “I killed the large animal with my bare hands” and “If you ask the tree it will help you get the girl”.

They understood what we are about to rediscover: Everything in nature is a symbiosis, and if one species disappears the symbiosis will have to reconfigure.

Mushrooms in the forest floor have a huge underground network that can transfer energy from one tree to another.

They knew that, we forgot it, and are just starting to grasp it now.

They presumably even thought that trees and animals had human thoughts.

That’s funny, but compared to religious people today, not exactly “inferior” or “primitive”.

In modern times, in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, there was a Pope who told people not to use condoms – because it’s a sin.

If you think our ancestors were idiots, you are right.

If you think we have become smarter since then, you are wrong.

At some point they found a river.

By the river every life form thrives in abundance – plants, animals, fish, fruit, nuts etc.

All the stuff we eat to survive.

So they settled and found time to develop skills and tools.

With time they started to domesticate animals and plants.

Why hunt when you can keep your prey fenced?

Why search for plants when you can plant them where you want to pick them up?

They traded freedom for accessibility.

It didn’t necessarily make life easier or more safe.

If something happened to the fields – like fire or a hailstorm – it would have been a huge waste of time, and presumably panic.

But some thought it was worth it.

Mind you – it wasn’t everybody, since some are still hunter-gatherers to this day.

But there were villages, that became towns, that – in time – became cities and even small kingdoms.

We are talking thousands of years from the first villages to the first kingdom.

But it was the same thing that happened in the fertile crescent (present day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt…), the Indus Valley (Present day India and Pakistan), the large rivers in China, and so on.

Not simultaneously, but same development with some delays.

It wasn’t developed in one place and know-how-exported from there.

Pottery, bow and arrow, the blowpipe, and writing is invented several times in several places, totally unconnected.

That’s pretty mind blowing, considering that every major invention will presently be patented world wide.

It wasn’t everybody who became farmers.

Some stayed hunter-gatherers, some would semi-domesticate a heard of animals that they would follow, as nomads, and some would put all their energy into developing boats and navigation skills.

While some bloke in Egypt was planting wheat another bloke was on his way to an extremely remote island in the Pacific.

But let’s back up a bit.

The first people to venture out of Africa were the Neanderthals.

That’s about 300,000 years ago.

The last “pure” Neanderthal found to this day is 130,000 years old.

That means they existed for a minimum of 170,000 years, and our species have existed for about 130,000 years.

We’ll just have to wait 40,000 years before we can claim to be more suited for survival than the Neanderthals.

But that’s just one misconception – that we are better suited than them.

Another misconception is that our ancestors out-manoeuvred the Neanderthals.

No doubt many of them – maybe even the majority – died out when clashing with “modern man”.

But in many cases she was actually cute, we could co-exist, and even fornicate.

Present day humans have somewhere between 1 and 8 per cent Neanderthal DNA.

So I guess it was like “If you can’t fuck them, kill them” – or vice versa…

Like everything else in human history it’s not a simple story.

Some did this, others did that.

It’s really not as simple as “First Neanderthals – then us”.

In fact the native population in southern Africa and in Australia has no Neanderthal DNA what-soever.

None.

But other extinct (or inbred) human races have been found in other places, and more will presumably be discovered in the future.

In Indonesia scientists have found remains of very small humans, nicknamed “Hobbits”.

Evolutions is not as simple as “you die immediately if you are not fit to survive forever”.

The worst misconception about Neanderthals is that they were primitive.

They were not.

They had fire, fine stone tools, music, graphic art, and found ways to make adhesive birch bark tar (glue, in fact), craft simple clothes like blankets and ponchos, weave, go seafaring through the Mediterranean, and make use of medicinal plants, as well as treat severe injuries, store food, and use various cooking techniques such as roasting, boiling, and smoking.

It’s somewhat hard to imagine our ancestors were much more sophisticated than this, at that time.

Modern man – our ancestors some 100,000 years ago – presented a huge problem for everything and everybody else.

They came in huge numbers, and the result was the extinction of several species of plants, animals and perhaps even humanoids.

Everywhere, from Australia to Europe the mass extinction of lots of species happened shortly after the arrival of modern humans.

We are not just bad news for nature now – we have been so for at least 100,000 years.

But we were also our own worst enemy.

For about 97,000 years about one fourth of all humans got killed by other humans.

WANDERLUST

From the Rift Valley people walked out, in all directions and in waves.

A lot of them made a permanent stop in the Fertile Crescent, of course, but others pushed on north, to Europe, into Asia, many stopped by the great rivers south of the Himalayas, and others continued to the great rivers in present day China.

Some ventured south, through the south east Asian peninsula, and continued on through the islands that is present day Indonesia, and onwards to Australia and the islands in the pacific.

Some moved north, through present day Siberia, pouring down through the Americas, where some would even sail west to the islands in the eastern part of the pacific.

Some of the islands in the pacific the geeks actually argue loudly if the first population came from the east or the west.

Every time they stumbled on a place worth staying, like a river or a lake, some would stay, and some would move on.

Any reason you can think of is plausible.

In the end we populated the entire planet, if there were the slightest chance of survival.

Bad places are scarcely populated – like Siberia or Sahara – and others are heavily populated – like the river deltas in Europe and Asia.

Only Antarctica is unpopulated, for obvious reasons.

Some places are very rich in plants and animal life, but can only sustain a very small population of hunter-gatherers, because it is not suited for farming and city development.

A good example is the Amazonas in South America.

The nutrition is in the trees, not the soil, and every time you burn down the forest to make farmland, it almost immediately turns into desert.

Some modern people don’t understand this, and keep trying.

If they were right Brazil would now be a very very rich country, capable of feeding the whole world.

It is not.

As impressing as it may seem that people sailed very long distances about 80-100,000 years ago, you have to remember that the coasts were sometimes hundreds of kilometres closer to each other, because a lot of the worlds ocean water was bound in the ice capes in the North and the South Pole.

Some of the straits were actually land you could walk on.

Watch “Ice Age” on Netflix to get the idea.

Yes: Mammoths and sabre cats coexisted with humans.

We exterminated them.

It’s a habit.

You have to remember it is this simple: Humans need fresh water and something to eat.

The optimal temperature is somewhere between 0°C and 35°C, with periodic deviations +/-10°C.

It is possible to survive eating only plants or only meat from fish and sea mammals.

The more food and fresh water, the more variation, the better, and more people will settle, the older they will become, and the more children they will have.

If there is a river (providing fresh water and irrigated soil, which means lots of plants and animals) mouthing out in the ocean (easy access to fishing and travelling) a shitload of people will live there.

If there is a natural harbour, even better.

If the harbour has some kind of natural protection from enemy attacks and storms, like a fjord of some sort, it’s perfect.

Everybody wants to live there.

So you can take a look at a map and guess where most people live.

Compare your guesses with some demographic facts, and you will presumably be right.

When archaeologists claim that Copenhagen (in Denmark) has been populated since the 11th century, guess what, shitheads: Copenhagen has fresh water, a natural harbour with perfect natural protection, perfect soil, and a sea full of fish.

Obviously Copenhagen has been populated as long as there has been humans in the area.

People were not really concerned with property prices when the ice cape withdrew 10,000 years ago.

They were concerned with basic needs, and the area is perfect.

11th century – my arse…

THE SWEET SPOT

There are several – thousands – of perfect places around the world, Like Copenhagen, Hong Kong or Istanbul, and many many more less-than-perfect-but-acceptable.

The first perfect place humans discovered was the Fertile Crescent, many many thousands of years later to be known as Mesopotamia and Egypt.

So there they got a head start.

They domesticated cereals and goats, build huts, developed ceramics, traded cereals for goats, pottery and presumably daughters, made religious figurines and so on.

In what particular order is somewhat unclear, since Göbekli Tepe and other religious constructions might actually have been build by people who were not otherwise settled.

The geeks are not sure.

It could have been nomadic hunter-gatherers who came together to build a huge temple, though it sounds slightly illogical.

Over time they became more and more sophisticated.

Sailing distances to trade, developing better stone tools, better pottery (someone forgot it in the fire, eh?), and suddenly metal.

Two dots in a piece of clay meant two bags of grain.

Two lines meant two goats.

Now two lines with a line on top was a house, or something.

It developed and became Cuneiform – the first writing – about 5,000 years ago.

Maybe the ability to read and write even became a profession – who knows?

Some of the oldest cuneiform clay plates found – about the same size as a compact disc – are a form of trade agreements or contracts: “I give you this, you give me that”.

At the same time (give or take a thousand years) development picked up in the tools department.

Bronze was the new black, and tools and weapons became faster to make, lighter to carry, more sleek and definitely more shiny.

With better tools even pottery and fabric became more sophisticated.

Remember: History is not linear, and because bronze came to town doesn’t mean people stopped making stone tools.

Bronze wasn’t perfect for everything, and presumably not cheap.

If a stone axe costs a chicken, but a bronze axe will set me back a goat, I’ll have to think about it…

Maybe the invention of writing lead directly to the invention of credit.

Who knows?

“I gave you a boat, now you owe me a goat and an ox, or I will confiscate your wife.”

Given human nature shit like that is possible.

No doubt this development was copied in Egypt, where they took it one step further and developed hieroglyphs.

But it was presumably not an easy copy-paste to the Indus valley, and even later the Chinese river banks, but more likely they made the same developments more-or-less on their own devise.

It sounds exhausting, but they couldn’t just google that shit.

In these sweet spots – along the great rivers – development took speed, while in many other places people were hunter-gatherers, nomadic shepherds or low-tech farmers.

Painfully slowly some of these inventions travelled in all directions with traders and migrants.

Bronze and writing came quite fast and easy to present day Greece and Turkey, but it took ages before it came as far as Germany, even they have a quite good river to settle by.

A cruel tyrant who rules a large area is an advantage.

Lots of small clans fighting each other is a bitch.

The problem is that the more sophisticated you get, the more vulnerable you get.

To protect your precious metalworks and textile workshops you need a solid wall around the city.

This is a huge undertaking, demanding a lot of people cooperating.

Tricky if you’re a small tribe.

Easy if you are a huge kingdom.

In this department they also had a good head start in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

And, in later years, in the Indus Valley and present day coastal China.

The Europeans simply had to sit and wait for the mighty Roman Empire before they could get up to speed, and that’s still many many years into the future.

When they figured out how to milk a cow in the British isles they were already a highly sophisticated society in Egypt, building pyramids and shit.

To get the idea: Four thousand years ago primitive pottery came to present day England, and at the same time Zoroastrianism became the state religion in present day Iran.

Zoroastrianism was the sophisticated monotheistic religion that would later develop into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with only minor adjustments.

That Iran (Persia) would later become occupied by British forces borderlines mockery.

But back to 5,000 years ago they were actually trading with much less developed societies, for a number of reasons – and often through intermediaries.

Amber from northern Europe found it’s way to Mesopotamia and Egypt, along with precious stones and ivory from different parts of Africa.

Therefore bronze in limited amounts would also find it’s way to northern Europe and across the African continent.

Trade and conquest were the big issues at the time, and as soon as an area became sufficiently sophisticated it was worth conquering, so maybe Europe did itself a huge favour by remaining a gang of fucking hill billies for yet another thousand years.

Greece, on the other hand, was quite early in the game.

When Mesopotamia became Persia, and a little too sophisticated for their own good, and the Egyptians became to fat and lazy to spook anyone, the Greek clutter of small kingdoms would suck up all the good ideas and create something new.

One of them, in particular.

The Minoan kingdom on present day Crete and Santorini, perfectly situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, became the lighthouse of civilisation.

All new ideas would arrive with sailing merchants from Egypt, Persia, the Greek Peninsula, and civilised cities on the north African and south European coast.

In science, culture, language, music, performing arts, tools, fabrics, pottery and fashion the Minoans were centuries ahead of everybody else.

The more input you get the better you can mix it up and create something mind-blowing.

Sadly it ended with a bang.

Santorini was a volcano, and it didn’t erupt in an orderly fashion.

It literally exploded, leaving only a crescent shaped excuse of a sad little island – a fifth of a crater – and created both an earthquake and a tsunami to wipe out everything in the main island, Crete.

To this day the tales of “Atlantis” will give some people a dreamy look in their eyes.

Next in line to pick up the slack was Athens.

Of course a few hundred years had to pass; people were not in a hurry back then.

Athens managed to create some kind of stability in the area, though a few small wars between the Greek kingdoms couldn’t be avoided altogether.

But they managed to keep the trading going, develop the first known form of democracy, and even feed people who only contributed to society with thinking.

Philosophy, advanced literature, collecting and further developing all known maths, and laying the groundwork for European “modern” architecture…

All in all the Athenians are credited for being the cradle of European civilisation.

They even thought so highly of them selves that they developed a word for people less sophisticated: “Barbarians”.

That was everybody except them selves, the Persians and the Egyptians (who were now under Persian control).

When they became too advanced – and therefore too vulnerable – one of these fucking barbarians actually took over.

Oh yes, Alexander… Alexander the great.

If everything said and written is true he was a busy man, primarily driven by his mother’s ambitions.

Please keep in mind it’s not necessarily the whole truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth.

We are now in historic time, everything is written down, most of it in real time, but for political, dramatic and artistic reasons presumably not even close to actual events.

Alexander wanted to be king of Macedonia, and he – or his mum – couldn’t wait for his father to die of natural courses.

So he stabbed daddy.

As he was educated by the famous philosopher Aristotle he could no doubt make up a sufficiently profound explanation for doing this.

Anyway, he became king of Macedonia at the age of twenty.

He consolidated his power by killing a couple of hundred important blokes in the city state, and some hesitant leaders in some vassal states in the Balkans.

Then he went on to conquer everything in front of him, as he went south.

All of present day Greece, Turkey and Syria.

The Persians provided him with a few headaches before he managed to conquer Persia, Babylon and Egypt as well.

For political reasons he married a Persian princess, even though he was very obviously gay.

The important port city, where the river Nile runs into the Mediterranean, he named Alexandria.

That wasn’t the only city he somehow named after him self.

After living the good life in Persepolis, and being accused of getting “soft” and going native, he pushed on through present day Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and into India, where his army commanders made it very clear to him that enough was enough.

They didn’t want to go further east – they wanted to go home.

They pulled back to Babylon, where Alexander died 32 years old, in 323 BC.

In his 12 years as the Macedonian king he conquered more land than anyone before him, and for a very long time after his death.

The total conquest can be divided into more than 20 major battles and hundreds of minor ones.

According to legend he was always in the frontline.

His death is still debated, with people guessing everything from influenza to murder by toxins.

Some even claim he died of sorrow, following the death of his life long companion (and boyfriend) Hephaestion.

After his death the Macedonian-Greek Empire fell into pieces, paving the way for the Roman Empire.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the Greeks remained in power in Egypt for many years to come, adapting to the Egyptian society by taking on Egyptian religion, and proclaiming them selves Pharaohs – the Ptolemy dynasty.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Rome was a kingdom that became a republic by mimicking the Athenians.

The republic managed to conquer most of Italy, while keeping an eye on Carthage, a thriving city state on the other side of the Mediterranean.

The fear of an attack from Carthage – in present day Tunisia – was what kept them awake at night.

The famous Carthaginian general Hannibal had led an expedition through Spain over the Alps – with elephants! – against Rome but failed to capture the city.

So they did what people do, when they are afraid of other people: Attack and kill.

Always better than to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking: “Oh fuck – what if...?”

So around 150 BC the Romans flattened Carthage.

Like: Totally!

After this overwhelming victory they suddenly believed themselves to be the masters of the universe.

They conquered basically everything around the Mediterranean, including all of present day Greece, Turkey, Syria, Spain, Portugal, and well beyond the coast of everything else.

In Rome they could appoint someone to have absolute power during wartime, not to be strung up in political debates in the middle of a good conflict.

The official title was Dictator, and you were obligated to give up the title after a few years.

After a successful conquest in Gaul (present day France) Julius Caesar forced the senate to appoint him Dictator for life.

Obviously the senators made a conspiracy and killed him, but it was too late: Democracy was dead, and the Empire was a reality.

If you want to see how democracy turns into an empire, Roman style, make some popcorn and find Star Wars on a streaming service.

The whole political intrigue is actually the history of how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire.

If you want to see Julius Caesar being ridiculed, read Asterix comic books.

A few fun facts follows…

Julius Caesar went to Alexandria to get help in his civil war, and ended up in bed with the last Ptolomean Pharaoh: Cleopatra.

She was co-ruling with – and at war with – her brother (and husband!), but Caesar helped her out and got the brother/husband/rival killed.

The result of sharing the bed with her was a son – Caesarion.

After Caesar’s death his comrade Marcus Antonius became her next lover.

They both committed suicide when they were about to lose the Roman civil war.

The opposite site in the civil war even got Caesarion killed.

The name Caesar has in different variations become the title of emperors in European countries: Kejser (German), Czar (Russian) etc.

The Romans managed to conquer most of south and central Europe, most of Africa north of Sahara, present day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Turkey, England and Wales.

At the same time the emperors became more and more insane.

You may recognise names like Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.

In the end the Empire became ungovernable, and was divided into two jurisdictions: The West Roman Empire and The East Roman Empire.

Rome was the capital for the first, Constantinople for the second.

The idea was to consult each other and collaborate, but that didn’t work out very well, and when finally both Roman Empires gave in to Christianity, they became rivals for real: The West Roman Empire became the birthplace for the Roman Catholic Church, and the East Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire) became the cradle for the Orthodox Christian Church.

At that point all conquests were lost and none of the Roman so-called empires had any power worth mentioning left.

Small rivalling kingdoms fought over the remains in all the areas that was once the mighty Roman Empire.

It took more than a thousand years before the Ottoman Empire could show force like that in the area, by conquering the north African coast, present day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Arabian peninsula, and eastern Europe, including Ukraine and a chunk of Russia.

ABRAHAM

Superstition – or religious beliefs, if you insist – has always been a part of peoples lives.

The idea that nature has a will and consciousness of some sort.

One Egyptian Pharaoh – Akhn Aton – flirted with the completely absurd idea that there was only one God, Aton (the sun).

That was not a particularly bright or popular idea, and it got him assassinated.

The first real monotheistic religion was Zoroastrianism.

It still exists, but with a very limited number of followers.

Many of the stories got rewritten, adapted and tuned into Judaism, that is both a religion and an ethnic group (or sub-group or however you define it – you have to be born into it, anyway).

The funny thing about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that of you take DNA samples from both groups it turns out they have been sharing this area for at least five thousand years.

But anyway, the Jews lived in present day Israel, and developed this religion, largely copy-pasted from Zoroastrianism and other religious myths in that part of the world.

In 20-something BC the Romans conquered present day Israel and Palestine and made life rather difficult for the Jews, and they stayed until 400-something AD.

Sometimes they were just present, and collecting tax, and sometimes they really gave the locals a hard time.

So many Jews chose to live somewhere else in the Roman Empire, where life was oddly enough much easier.

This is called the Diaspora (“Exile”).

At one point the Romans even totally smashed the temple of Salomon, that the Jews held in very high esteem, and to this day the only remaining wall of the original temple, the wailing wall, is still considered holy.

The Jews were generally seen as good people, and for many years thrived in Rome, in Spain and in other countries, and you could find popular Jews in most of the Roman Empire – except in Israel, where they were generally regarded as a pain in the arse.

We’ll get back to the Jews.

Now to the odd one: Jesus Christ.

According to legend Jesus was born year 0, in Bethlehem, received a lot of attention as a newborn, fled to Egypt, came back, did nothing for about thirty years, rebelled against the Jewish religious authorities, but not the Roman occupying forces, created a new religion by telling his followers to include everybody, made a scene in the temple, got himself arrested, tortured and executed at the age of 33.

The execution was carried out by the Romans, but on the Jewish rulers initiative.

All the time he claimed to be the son of God, performed some miracles to prove it, and gained quite a following, that almost exploded in size after his death.

A large number of biographies (“Gospels”) have been written over the first couple of hundreds of years after his death, but when Christianity became an institutionalised religion, in 400-something AD, in the East Roman Empire, most of these biographies has been rejected as “apocryphal” (not sanctioned by the church), while four of them made it into the Bible.

I really don’t know why you would have four versions of the same story in a book, instead of just choosing one, and stick to it.

The Bible contains the Old Testament (a selection of old Jewish texts) and the New Testament (the four gospels and some random letters – plus the Revelation, written by a bloke who smoked something very very unhealthy).

With all the attention there is no doubt that this person – or persons – have lived and made an impression.

The question is if it is in fact one person who inspired all this attention, or it is a composite character (more than one person compiled into to one for simplification – very common in the oral tradition).

Christianity had a political shadow, insinuating that all humans have equal significance, and that earthly riches isn’t the path to a really cool afterlife.

In a world where most people were poor, and almost half of the population were slaves this made a huge impact, and in spite of persecution and public executions Christianity grew rapidly in the Roman Empire, like aggressive cancer.

Executing Christians made very popular shows in the Colosseum, but it didn’t help.

The ruling class were helpless as the very fabric of the Roman institution died around them.

There was only one thing to do: Become a Christian.

In less than a thousand years all of Europe and most of the middle east became Christians.

However…

In 570 AD, in Mecca, Muhammad was born.

He was orphaned as a child, but was lucky enough to gain financial security at the age of 25 by marrying his employer, the widow(?) and successful businesswoman Khadija.

As Mecca was becoming an important trading and caravan centre at that time he was receiving a lot of input and impressions.

When it became too much – information overflow – he started retracting to a cave, where he could process it all.

That’s when God started to talk to him.

Take a minute or two thinking about how we treat people today, who are hearing the voice of God in their head.

At the age of 40 he had a clear vision of what God wanted from him: A clear set of rules, some well defined rituals etc.

In the beginning it was slightly difficult for him to get a following, but with time it got better, and the next problem arose: His Christian-inspired monotheistic sermons, telling people – especially the poor and the slaves – that riches on earth isn’t the path to a great party in paradise, made him really unpopular in the ruling class.

So he fled Mecca, and moved to Medina.

By converting a shitload of people he managed to unify all the Arabian tribes into one unity, and even take over Mecca.

The main enemy was the polytheistic population in and around the Arabian peninsula.

The Jews and Christians were considered allies.

So when Muslim troopers conquered most of the Middle East and north Africa they only forcibly converted people of polytheistic observation, and left the Christians and Jews to them selves.

In Moorish Spain Islam was of course the official religion of the land, but Jews and Christians were allowed to practise their religion as they wished – while paying a slightly higher tax, though.

So far so good.

Now the history gets dark!

When power hungry and greedy warlords get their hands on religion it turns really fucking ugly.

Crusades became a way of not just forcibly converting polytheistic people to Christianity, but also steal, kill, rape and burn.

And when you run out of polytheistic people, everybody is fair game, including Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.

It started with small isolated tribes in northern, eastern and central Europe, turned on present day Russia, Ukraine and even the Byzantine (East Roman) Empire.

As the crusaders grew in numbers the holy city of Jerusalem was suddenly a realistic goal, along with Spain.

The first crusades into the Middle East and southern Spain was an unprecedented bloodbath.

In Jerusalem the Muslims had to regroup and make new strategies, and it took quite a while for them to gather their strength and kick the crusaders out.

For the European crusaders the last couple of crusades was a total defeat.

In Spain, however, the Muslims were firmly driven out.

After this win/loose situation stabilised, it was time to consolidate a united Christian Europe.

Not a single Muslim to be found anywhere, Jews where bullied systematically, and even Christians were tortured and killed for not being Christian enough.

The Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunts had started.

Jews were not allowed to live inside the walled cities, and when the open sewers made the rapidly growing populations inside the cities fall ill with cholera and other fun diseases, the Jews were blamed, just like they were blamed when the plague swiped through Europe.

Jews were a group of people who refused to integrate (marrying non-Jews), had weird names and weird rituals, in a world where stupidity is being cultivated from both political and religious leaders – that’s a fucking dangerous cocktail.

And it didn’t stop in the mediaeval times.

As we all know it culminated in the 1940’s when Adolf Hitler proclaimed that he had found, and would implement, “the final solution to the Jew-problem”.

Many people thought the solution was to incarcerate the Jews in the ghettos (“out-of-sight-out-of-mind”), when in fact the Jews where being transported out of the ghettos to concentration camps, where more than 5,000,000 were being gassed to death in an industrial fashion.

What makes this so scary is not just the number of people, or the injustice, but the cold, calculated mechanised efficiency.

Obviously Hitler is to blame.

The fucking psycho was in charge and approved everything that happened.

But trust me when I say that he didn’t come up with a details plan for this.

There is nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, if you balance your diet.

He did not.

As a result he could only walk short distances, he only worked two hours a day, he was bad tempered and had difficulties understanding what people told him.

He might have cooked up a plan to kill five million people, but rest assured he did not specify how, in detail.

Someone else has this shit on his conscience too.

After the crusades relations between the Christians and the Muslims would never heal – they could only see each other as “bloodthirsty demons”.

After the holocaust the Jews had had enough.

Time to go home.

Time to retake Israel.

And with a bad taste in their mouth the rest of the world approved the Jewish state of Israel, in (British controlled) Palestine, in 1948.

It sounds like the end of a story.

As we all know: It was not.

Even if Jews, Christians and Muslims all agree that it started with the shared prophet Abraham (Ibrahim), the relation gets increasingly complicated over time.

One highly interesting outcome of the crusades worth dwelling on, is the Knights Templars, who came up with a brilliant idea: Deposit your money at the starting point of your journey, at a Knights Templars castle, get a piece of paper on it and take out the money at your destination, in another Knights Templars castle.

Minus some interest.

They invented Travellers Checks, and made a fucking fortune.

With the money came influence.

The kind of influence that was a threat to even the Pope and the King of France.

At dawn on Friday, October 13th 1307 they were all arrested in an almost humanly impossible achievement of coordination.

As they were falsely accused of worshipping the Devil, etc., and burned at the stake, the general population came up with two weird things.

Firstly the idea that Friday the 13th is a day where impossible shit can go down, in a very bad way.

Secondly the idea that the Knights Templars had found the holy grail, that is still hidden somewhere.

INDUS

Now, let’s back up in time and move east, to the Indus valley.

Basically the story repeats itself.

People settle by the river, invent domestication, refine their tools and lifestyle.

Just like everybody else they came up with a belief in a number of gods with each their domain.

Just like everybody else they came up with some kind of trading traditions, infrastructure and writing.

Slightly different to look at, but that’s just the sound having a different colour.

In all important respects it was exactly the same development as in the fertile crescent.

What is really noteworthy is that they didn’t come up with monotheism, until it came to them with migrants and conquerors.

Instead they developed a huge number of philosophical schools of thought.

A gazillion ways to interpret the wishes of the gods, a myriad of opinions on which god was how important, thousands of strategies to navigate in the labyrinth of divinity.

Oh my gods!

Like the children of Abraham came up with holy books, so did the followers of Brahma: The Bhagavad Gita (or just Gita).

Difference is if you put the Torah, the Bible and the Quran on top of each other, and lay the Gita next to, the Gita is five times more pages.

I think it’s safe to say: If you read the Gita, in its entirety, you are a fanatic.

The number of religious or semi-religious philosophers are mind blowing, but I will focus on one bloke who really had an impact – especially after his death: Prince Siddhartha Gauthama of the Shakya tribe, also known as the Buddha.

Born as the heir to the Kapilavastu kingdom (A small and totally insignificant city-state in present day southern Nepal, about to be absorbed by a much larger neighbour kingdom), he decided to fuck it all, pack up and leave.

According to legend he tried out all the different religious paths available, including almost starving to death, in order to become a Sadhu (holy man, disregarding earthly possessions, destined for spiritual greatness).

None of them worked to his satisfaction, and after discovering moderation (“The Middle Path”) he sat under a tree in Bodh Gaya (somewhere in present day northern India) and saw the light.

He became the Buddha (“the enlightened one”).

The rest of his life he walked around preaching that Gods don’t matter, you have to find salvation on your own, and the way to do this is stop craving impermanent stuff.

Then he died of food poisoning, and managed to tell his followers on his deathbed not to find salvation in his image.

So they didn’t.

For almost five hundred years nobody made pictures or statues of Buddha.

When they started doing it, obviously nobody had a clue what he had looked like.

So there are a few variations around the world…

After his death his teachings (the “Dharma”) spread like wildfire, and especially a King named Asoke, who managed to conquer most of present day India, Pakistan and some surrounding areas, before suddenly becoming a peace-lover, really managed to push the religion to people.

The most Buddhist area was for many years present day Afghanistan.

But it spread throughout Asia, and became the most dominant religion in most countries.

Since it is – like many Asian religions – more philosophy than religion, in a western definition, you can actually mix and match as you wish.

Therefore many Buddhists are also Confucianists, Hinduists, Taoists, Shintoists, and so on.

There are no historical or archaeological reasons to believe that Prince Siddhartha – the Buddha – has ever lived.

The prince of a kingdom destined for extinction, who became the saviour, is maybe a little too convenient.

And there are good reasons to believe that the Buddha, just like Jesus, is in fact a composite character.

The difference is that Christians’ faith is based on believing in Jesus Christ, where Buddhists don’t really give a shit.

To them the words are important, not who – or how many – spoke them.

They have, rather ironically, produces a trillion statues, but of a person nobody knows what looked like.

It’s not a statue of a man, or a god, but of an idea.

Buddhism has never been used as an excuse to go to war, or sparked religious conflicts, but that doesn’t mean that Buddhists are more peaceful than anyone else.

If you believe that particular myth, think of the Mongols invading China, the wars between Siam (Thailand), Burma (Myanmar) and the Khmer Kingdom (Cambodia), or the way Burma treats ethnic minorities, especially the Muslim Rohingya people.

The number of ethnic groups who has migrated to the area around the Indus valley, and spread out through present day India and Pakistan is mind boggling.

This includes minor military invasions from time to time.

One invasion that failed, but found its way into the history books, is Alexander the Great.

The one that really mattered – many many years later – was the Mongols (Moguls), that came, took over, and stayed even after the collapse of the Asian wide Mongol Empire collapsed.

This group of mongols became Muslim which characterised both their culture, architecture and bureaucracy.

As Europe started evolving – and let’s face it: Food wise it’s a shithole – the new black was spices.

Importing from the Mediterranean countries, who were at the end of the Silk Road, simply didn’t cut it.

So they started sailing to Africa, around the southern tip of Africa, and eventually came to the Indian subcontinent.

Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, English and even Danish East India companies Arrived in India and created small trading stations, that evolved to small colonies.

The English, however, went all in, and in time colonised all of present day India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

After this achievement they settled for real.

They actually stayed for a couple of hundred years.

The British Empire did an impressive job governing such a huge area, with such an insane variety of ethnicities, religions and languages.

Of course they did it by being arseholes, and as the rest of the world became increasingly modern and humanistic, it became painfully obvious that this feudal way of governing a colony was doomed.

One man in particular was a genuine pain in the arse.

Born into a wealthy family Mohandas Karam-chand “Mahatma” Gandhi was destined for a successful career in British India.

He was sent to England to study law, and took his first job for the Empire in British South Africa.

That’s where he got angry at the British, and found a method to drive them up the fucking wall.

Don’t fight them, don’t even fight back when they attack you, but refuse to cooperate.

Be prepared to die for your cause, but not to kill.

It takes a shitload of self discipline, and an almost impossible cooperation, but if you can convince the followers of the course it’s flawless, and it becomes impossible to lose.

The British went mad.

They totally lost control of India, and the massacres they performed only served to display their desperation.

In 1946 the British left, and India became independent countries: Pakistan and India.

A few years later Pakistan was further divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It sounds like a happy ending.

Sadly it was a fucking nightmare.

CHINA

I’ll rewind again, and move even further east from the Rift Valley.

This time to present day China and neighbouring countries.

Again: Same development from settling on the river banks.

Domestication, pottery, writing, bla-bla-bla…

The Chinese, however, really excelled in hard labour and sophistication.

You can say the same about the Egyptians, but the Chinese were slightly more practically oriented.

Instead of building pyramids they spend their time creating terrace fields on mountainsides, and huge irrigation projects.

In philosophy, poetry, art, and fine textile production they impressed the shit out of everybody else.

Their export of silk, spices and ceramics made China the undisputed centre of the world.

The poor countryside population worked themselves to death, while the upper class men became increasingly metro-sexual, and the women where made disabled to be as delicate and fragile as possible.

In chemistry they made a lot of trials and errors, to the extend where they invented gunpowder, and one emperor drank mercury everyday, in order to live forever.

Spoiler alert: He didn’t.

The Chinese public administration was huge, and the number of public officials were mind blowing, and every time people got sick of it, and especially the corruption and cruelty of the officials, they made a revolution, killed the emperor, and made the leader of the uprising the new emperor.

He would probably be kind of okay, but his son would be just as much of an arsehole as the previous dynasty emperor, and his son would be even worse, and so they made a new uprising, or were conquered – or liberated – by another emperor wannabe.

It sounds like a mess, but this was over many years, and they had long periods of peace and tranquillity.

One problem, however, were the nomadic tribes to the north, who couldn’t stop attacking these fragile and delicate over-sophisticated Chinese.

So they build a wall, to keep the rednecks out.

Not just a wall but The Chinese Wall.

Thousands of kilometres long, and in some places big enough to ride horses on top of the wall.

In the Mongolian steppes the divided tribes fought each other as much as they plundered the Chinese.

One man, raised in a totally fucked up family, and who lost his father at a young age to the tribal disputes, managed to gather all the tribes in one unity, and a pretty big army.

Wall or not, Djengis Khan took over China, and created the Mongolian Empire.

And then he started expanding into Burma, India, the Middle East, Russia and even parts of Eastern Europe.

By the time his grandson, Kublai Khan, ruled, the Mongolian Empire was the largest empire the world had ever seen.

They were not solely focused on looting and killing, but also took their time to get laid.

Djengis Khan is quoted for saying: “The greatest happiness is to defeat one’s enemies, to chase them before you, rob them of their wealth, see their loved ones bathed in tears, and take their wives and daughters into bed.”

He had a ridiculous number of children.

Genetic analyses indicate that approx. 8 per cent of the men in a large area of Asia (about 16 million, i.e. about 0.5 per cent of the world’s population) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.

His eldest son, Tushi, is said to have had 40 sons.

The grandson, Kublai Khan, who established the Yuan dynasty in China, had 22 legitimate sons and reportedly brought 30 virgins to his harem each year.

You could live the life you wanted, practise the religion you preferred, and go on with your daily life pretty undisturbed, in a world where peace and prosperity and trade was secured, as long as you accepted the Khan leadership and paid your taxes.

If not your whole city would be burned to the ground, everybody killed, except for the virgins, who would end up in a harem.

Not just killed.

Killed in a way that would pretty much be a statement for the world to see and fear.

The mongols were exceptionally civilised, or exceptionally cruel, depending on your attitude.

After Kublai Khan’s death the following emperors didn’t understand the necessity of keeping the discipline, and the whole thing collapsed, and got fragmented.

China was back on Chinese hands, and it took centuries before something interesting happened.

INDOCHINA

The interesting part of Indochina was obviously the Mekong River, where civilisations evolved, like everywhere else.

First the Khmers made a big empire, stretching out from present day Cambodia.

Then it was the Siamese, in present day Thailand, and then the Burmese Empire rose to combat them, and the game was on.

Back and forth – back and forth.

Each had their own writing, their own language and slightly different cultures.

Ancestral and spirit beliefs were the predominant religious thing they had going for them, though the Khmers were pretty influenced by Brahmanism from India, until Buddhism really swept everyone off their feed.

You would think that if everyone shares the same religion, in such a huge area, it will bring peace.

That was not the case.

It is rumoured that the gold that went into making the huge pagoda in Yangon is stolen from the Siamese previous capital Ayutthaya.

Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s a false rumour, but there is no doubt most gold is stolen from someone else, probably more than once.

They took slaves, burned down villages and stole each other’s Buddha statues, over and over again for centuries.

No stone left unturned, no girl left un-raped.

When the first Europeans arrived they found huge cities, lots of gold, very sophisticated societies with equal cultural import from China, from India and all their own development.

They were impressed.

So impressed, in fact, they decided to take over, a few hundred years later.

Northern Laos and the northern part of present day Vietnam became the privately owned Tonkin colony, in the hands of rich French people.

The central part of Vietnam and southern Laos became the French controlled kingdom of Annam.

South Vietnam and present day Cambodia became the French colony Cochinchine.

These three later became a single administered unity called Indochine Francaise – French Indochina.

Meanwhile the British took over Burma, as an extension of British India.

Siam – later Thailand – was never colonised.

The Portuguese took the eastern part of the Island of Timor, in present day Indonesia, but the Dutch took the rest of the archipelago to create the Dutch East Indies.

This made the British very angry.

India, Burma, and colonies in both Africa and America might be a little interesting, but the real money were in spices, and most spices originates in present day Indonesia.