FOUNDATIONS · 165–180 · SCIENCE · 代价 4/5

The first plague Rome had a name for

In late 165 CE, the Roman army of Lucius Verus sacked Seleucia on the Tigris — a city that had surrendered without a fight, and was burned anyway. The legions returned home along the imperial road network, and within a year an unfamiliar disease was killing Romans from Smyrna to the Rhine frontier. The pandemic ran for fifteen years; somewhere between five and ten million people died, almost all of them slaves, urban poor, and frontier soldiers. The Roman elite, Galen of Pergamon included, fled. Marcus Aurelius's empire never recovered the demographic equilibrium it had taken to a war of choice in Mesopotamia.

FOUNDATIONS · 550 BCE–600 · LANGUAGE · 代价 1/5

阿拉米语成为波斯帝国的尚书之文（约公元前550—前330年）

公元前六世纪后期，一名阿拉米文书或许正在爱琴海边的萨第斯诵读一封税务公函，另一名则在临近印度河的巴克特拉将一张皮卷归档；同一双训练有素的手，本可同时写就这两份文件。阿契美尼德波斯人从他们所并吞的亚述、巴比伦两大帝国中继承了阿拉米语——这本是一种出身寒微的黎凡特方言。其最早的使用者，即北黎凡特的阿拉米诸王国，早已被同一套亚述帝国机器征服、流徙、消解，而正是这套机器在此后将他们的语言推向四方。自公元前539年居鲁士攻取巴比伦，至公元前330年亚历山大焚毁波斯波利斯，从尼罗河瀑布到巴克特里亚的诸位总督，皆以帝国阿拉米语签发文书。帝国终归覆灭，语言却又延续了八百年，先后衍生出希伯来方块字、阿拉伯文、婆罗米文、叙利亚文与蒙古竖写文字。

FOUNDATIONS · 1500 BCE–1000 · LANGUAGE · 代价 3/5

The Bantu expansion remakes a continent — at the cost of the populations already there

Sometime around 1500 BCE, populations speaking an early form of what would become the Bantu language family began moving outward from a homeland in the Cameroon-Nigeria border region around the Niger-Benue confluence. They carried with them iron metallurgy, polished stone tools, the cultivation of yams, oil palm, and (later) bananas, and a Niger-Congo language structure that would, over the next 2,500 years, give rise to the roughly 500 Bantu languages spoken today by ~350 million people from Kenya to South Africa to the Atlantic. The expansion is one of the largest demographic events of human prehistory. It is also a story conventionally told in the passive voice — "the Bantu spread," "the languages diffused" — that elides what happened to the hunter-gatherer, forest forager, and Cushitic pastoralist populations whose territory was being expanded into. Genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence from the past three decades has begun to reconstruct the cost. The Khoisan-speaking populations of southern Africa, today numbering perhaps 50,000, are the descendants of populations that occupied a territory ten times larger before the Bantu arrived. The forest-foraging Mbuti, Aka, and Twa survived in the dense Central African rainforests where Bantu agricultural settlement could not reach.

CONNECTIONS · 538–600 · RELIGION · 代价 3/5

A Baekje gift carries Buddhism to Yamato — and triggers a court war

In 552 CE, according to the Nihon Shoki, King Seong of the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent the Yamato court a gilt bronze image of the Buddha, ritual banners, and a set of sutras, accompanied by a letter recommending the foreign religion. The Yamato Great King Kinmei convened his senior nobles to deliberate. The Soga clan urged acceptance; the Mononobe and Nakatomi clans urged refusal, fearing offense to the indigenous *kami*. The dispute simmered for thirty-five years. In 587 CE it broke into open battle at Mt. Shigi: Soga no Umako defeated and killed Mononobe no Moriya, the Mononobe clan was effectively destroyed, and Buddhism was formally established under Empress Suiko's regent Prince Shōtoku. The arc from Baekje court to Yamato court, traced in a single generation, runs through every Japanese temple still active today — and through the *sōhei* warrior-monk armies, the Onin War, the Ikkō-ikki peasant uprisings, and the Hideyoshi-Nobunaga massacres of Buddhist sectarian populations a millennium later.

FOUNDATIONS · 65–220 · RELIGION · 代价 2/5

Buddhism rides the Silk Road that Han imperial wars opened

The Hou Hanshu records that the Eastern Han emperor Ming dreamed in 67 CE of a golden figure flying west of his palace; his courtiers told him this was the Buddha; he sent envoys, who returned with two monks riding a white horse and carrying sutras. The emperor founded Bai Ma Si — White Horse Temple — at Luoyang to house them. The legend is hagiographic, but the underlying transmission is real: monks from Kushan-controlled northwest India reached Luoyang along the Silk Road in the second half of the second century CE, the first systematic Chinese translation of sutras began, and a religion that had originated in northern India a half-millennium earlier became — over six centuries — one of the three pillars of East Asian thought. The Silk Road that carried it had been opened by Han military campaigns against the Xiongnu and the conquest of the Tarim Basin. The monasteries built on it would be repeatedly burned. The doctrine of nonviolence carried, in its institutional life, plenty of state violence in its wake.

FOUNDATIONS · 600 BCE–30 · SCIENCE · 代价 2/5

Greek scholars travel to Egypt — and bring back the foundations of European science

From the sixth century BCE onward, Greek scholars — Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, Eudoxus, Plato — traveled to Egypt to study at the temple schools of Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes. They returned with mathematical, astronomical, and medical knowledge that Egyptian priests had been refining for two thousand years. After Alexander's conquest of Egypt in 332 BCE and the Ptolemaic dynasty's establishment of Alexandria as a Greek-speaking capital, the transmission accelerated and reversed direction: the Library and Mouseion at Alexandria became the place Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian intellectual traditions were translated into Greek and transformed into the systematic deductive tradition that became Hellenistic science. Euclid's Elements, Hippocratic medicine, Ptolemy's astronomy — the foundations of European scientific tradition — were assembled in this contact zone. The Egyptian intellectual tradition that contributed so heavily to it did not survive the absorption.

FOUNDATIONS · 1850 BCE–1200 BCE · LANGUAGE · 代价 1/5

Forced labor in the Sinai turns Egyptian signs into the world's first alphabet

Sometime around 1800 BCE, at Serabit el-Khadim — an Egyptian state mining station in the Sinai, worked by Levantine *ʿAamu* ("Asiatics") who were in many cases prisoners of war or hereditary state laborers — workers began scratching short inscriptions onto the rock. The signs looked Egyptian: a head, an ox, a house, a hand. But they spelled out a Semitic language using just twenty-some uniliteral hieroglyphs. The result, over six centuries, became the Phoenician alphabet — and from it Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and every European script. What the alphabet replaced was the scribal monopoly itself: cuneiform and hieroglyphic literacy had taken years to acquire and gated administrative power. The alphabet took weeks. The cost was the labor system that produced it.

CONNECTIONS · 770–850 · SCIENCE

Indian numerals reach Baghdad — and become the digits of the world

Sometime around 770 CE, an Indian astronomical embassy reached the Abbasid court at Baghdad bringing Sanskrit treatises that included Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta of 628 CE — a comprehensive work of mathematics and astronomy that systematically used a decimal place-value system with a written zero. The caliph al-Manṣūr ordered the texts translated into Arabic. Within two generations, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, working at Baghdad's House of Wisdom, had produced two foundational works: his Kitāb al-Jabr (the book that gave English the word algebra) and a companion treatise on Indian arithmetic. The Arabic original of the latter is lost; it survives only in twelfth-century Latin translations that gave Europe the word algorism, later algorithm. The intellectual transmission was as clean as any in this atlas. The contexts that produced it — the institutional life of the House of Wisdom, the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and Sicily that allowed the system to reach Latin Europe — carried other costs.

FOUNDATIONS · 2100 BCE–1200 BCE · TECHNOLOGY · 代价 3/5

战车驰出草原，重塑了三大文明的军事面貌

约公元前2000年，在乌拉尔南麓辛塔什塔河与托博尔河流域的设防聚落里，牧人开始为部分逝者举行特殊的葬仪：随葬两匹马和一辆轻便的辐条轮车——这种器物当时世界其他地方均未见踪影。四个世纪之内，这项技术已抵达从埃及到印度北部的所有定居文明。公元前1274年的卡迭石战场上，赫梯王调动了数千辆战车；新王国时代的法老以战车队为军队核心；吠陀印度-雅利安人为「ratha」（战车）和拉车的骏马咏唱赞美诗；迈锡尼宫殿的线形文字B泥板上，记载着战车的清册。荷马史诗、《梨俱吠陀》、《阿维斯陀》以及古伊朗英雄传统中那种贯穿始终的贵族武士意识形态，从结构上讲，正是战车的意识形态。这项技术经由贸易与通婚和平传播；但它所装备起来的战争，以及它在公元前1200年前后所终结的那个世界，则并不和平。

FOUNDATIONS · 1500 BCE–1300 · TECHNOLOGY · 代价 2/5

拉皮塔—波利尼西亚人对太平洋的殖民（约公元前1500年至公元1300年）

约公元前1500年，于新几内亚以北的俾斯麦群岛，拉皮塔文化复合体凝聚成形：独特的齿状压印纹陶器、可横渡四千公里外洋的双体与舷外支架独木舟，以及一套可移植的农业组合——芋头、面包果、香蕉、猪、鸡、犬——使远海岛屿得以自给自足地殖民。在随后的二十八个世纪里，他们的南岛语系后裔散播至瓦努阿图、斐济、汤加、萨摩亚、马克萨斯、社会群岛、夏威夷、拉帕努伊，并最终于公元1280年前后抵达奥特亚罗瓦——以无仪器的天体导航方式殖民了地球表面的四分之一，欧洲航海者其后还需五个世纪才能企及。这一传播在赠与的姿态上大体平和。代价以不能飞行的鸟类支付：约五十种夏威夷特有鸟种灭绝，奥特亚罗瓦的恐鸟在一百五十年内被猎尽，太平洋每一岛屿的鸟类相皆因引入的鼠类与人为压力而被改写。

FOUNDATIONS · 1200 BCE–400 BCE · RELIGION · 代价 1/5

奥尔梅克之赠：化为玛雅的文字、历法与宇宙观

约在中部形成期——大致公元前1000年至前600年之间——佩滕雨林与太平洋山麓的玉米耕作村民开始吸收一套此前已在墨西哥湾沿岸结晶了半个千年的制度与观念：长纪历的前身、迄今所获中美洲最早的文字、以橡胶球为器的礼仪球赛、立有石碑与祭坛的等级化祭祀院落、以玉米神与「美洲豹—人」形象为核心的神谱，以及联缀其间的玉与黑曜石长程贸易。中心由圣洛伦佐而拉文塔的奥尔梅克人，并未征服玛雅。他们与之贸易、通婚、输出威望。十五个世纪间，前古典期玛雅人将所受之物锻造为古典期玛雅文明：蒂卡尔的王朝石碑、帕伦克的历法字符、埃尔米拉多尔的巨型金字塔。其底层是奥尔梅克。其精炼是玛雅。账单——徭役、世袭贵族、献祭宇宙观——则在奥尔梅克人本身消逝许久之后，由后人分期偿付。

FOUNDATIONS · 900 BCE–750 BCE · LANGUAGE · 代价 2/5

The Greeks borrowed the alphabet while Phoenicia was being conquered

Sometime in the ninth or eighth century BCE, along the trade routes that linked Tyre and Sidon to Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean, Greek-speakers borrowed the writing system used by Phoenician merchants and clerks. They took twenty-two consonantal letters and made one decisive change: they used a handful — alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, upsilon — for vowel sounds Phoenician had never written. The Greek alphabet was born from that adjustment, and from it descend Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and every script in Western use today. The borrowing itself was peaceful. Over the next six centuries, while Greek-speakers built the literary tradition the alphabet enabled, the Phoenician city-states that had given them the script were sacked by Babylonians, conquered by Persians, besieged by Alexander, and finally annihilated by Rome. The alphabet survived because the daughter cultures outlived the parent.

FOUNDATIONS · 3200 BCE–2300 BCE · LANGUAGE · 代价 1/5

The first writing system crosses into a second language

Around 3300 BCE in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, scribes pressed reed styluses into wet clay and produced the world's first writing system. For roughly seven hundred years, that script was used only for Sumerian — the language isolate in which it had been designed. Then, in the mid-third millennium BCE, Akkadian-speaking populations to the north began doing something no literate culture had done before: they used the same signs to write a structurally unrelated Semitic language. Personal names crept into Sumerian tablets first; full Akkadian-language documents followed by 2500 BCE; under Sargon of Akkad after 2334 BCE the script became the chancery instrument of the world's first territorial empire. The transmission itself was undramatic — no royal decree, no shipwrecked sailor, just centuries of bilingual scribes finding the workarounds. But the principle they established is what every later borrowed alphabet, syllabary, and abjad rests on. Writing was no longer the property of one language.

ENTANGLEMENT · 1543–1638 · TECHNOLOGY · 代价 4/5

Three sailors at Tanegashima ignite Japanese unification — and a century of religious massacre

When a storm-blown Chinese junk grounded on Tanegashima in 1543 with three Portuguese sailors aboard carrying matchlock arquebuses, the local lord Tanegashima Tokitaka paid an enormous sum for two guns and ordered his swordsmith to copy them. Within thirty years Japan was producing more firearms than all of Europe combined. The tactical revolution at Nagashino in 1575 — and the unification under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu that followed — runs directly through that beach. The same Portuguese ships brought Francis Xavier and the Jesuit mission of 1549. By 1597, twenty-six Christians were crucified at Nagasaki. By 1638, around 37,000 Christian peasants and ronin had been slaughtered at Shimabara. By 1639, the country had sealed itself for two hundred and fifteen years. Both stories — the unification and the killings — are products of the same boats and the same arcs across the East China Sea.