A Brief History of Humanity - The Last 5000 Years
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Imagine compressing the last 5000 years of human history into a 24 hour clock .......
Late last year, I was privileged to be asked by a group of leaders of the Association of European Lawyers, representing some of Europe's top commercial law firms, to conduct a one day workshop on managing international cultural differences in business. The workshop was held in Reykjavik, Iceland, home of the oldest continuously functional democratic parliament in the world, the Althing.
As an introduction to the workshop, I wanted to do something to put mankind as a whole in perspective. The way that I went about it was to create a highly graphic PowerPoint presentation that indeed compressed the last 5000 years of human history into a 24 hour clock.
5000 years ago mankind was already beginning to organize in the forerunners of urban settlements. Crops were being cultivated and livestock had been domesticated. The Judaic calendar was already at year 575. There was art, music and language. The people on the earth were the same species of man as today, Homo sapiens sapiens, and had been for at least 30 000 years. The first hominids of the genus "Homo," Homo habilis, emerged 2.5 million years ago.
My clock started at midnight, being 5000 years ago, passed noon 2500 years ago and ended in September 2005 at 12 midnight again. The presentation itself took snapshots of a range of events over the period, and made for a truly thought provoking exercise. Clearly, much of what we believe is modern is as old as the ages and deeply wired into our psyche, and much of what we regard as ancient happened just an eye-blink ago, in the greater scheme of things. I can't reproduce the actual graphics (the file is enormous) but the chronology of the clock is as follows:
01:03Stonehenge built, 2780BC
02:24The Sphinx is built in Egypt, circa 2500 BC
04:48Rise of Indus River civilization at Mohenjo Daro, circa 200BC
05:54First great imperial Chinese dynasty, the Xia, circa 1750BC
08:08Cuneiform script invented in Mesopotamia, circa 1300BC
10:39Rome founded by Romulus and Remus, 781BC
11:26Babylon overrun by the Medes and the Persians, 539BC
11:59Rise of the religion of Buddhism, circa 500BC
12:16The Parthenon is built on the Acropolis in Athens, 438BC
12:46Alexander the Great begins campaign across Asia Minor, 334BC
14:14Julius Caesar is murdered, 44BC
14:32Jesus Christ is crucified, 33
17:24The Prophet Muhammed conquers Mecca; birth of Islam, 630
18:50World's oldest continuous parliament (Althing) founded, 930
19:18Viking explorers reach the new world, 1025
19:30King Harold II is killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066
19:54The great Khymer temples at Angkor Wat built, 1150
19:59Oxford University is established in England, in 1168
20:12King John signs the Magna Carta, 1215
20:36Marco Polo returns to Venice via overland route from China, 1295
21:32Columbus lands in America in 1492
21:39Martin Luther nails his bans to door of church in Wittenburg, 1517
21:42Conquest of Mexico by Cortez, 1521
22:04The Dutch East India Company is founded, 1602
22:13Galileo forced to recant that earth revolves around the sun, 1633
22:14Descartes publishes De La Methode, 1637
22:17King Charles I of England is beheaded, 1649
22:27Isaac Newton publishes the Theory of Gravity, 1682
22:42Carl Linnaeus invents modern system of naming organisms, 1735
22:54Boston Tea Party; The American Revolutionary War, 1776
22:59The French Revolution; King Louis XVI beheaded, 1793
23:02Napoleon crowned Emperor of France, 1804
23:05Napoleon defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815
23:19The American Civil War, 1862
23:20Karl Marx writes Das Kapital, 1867
23:30First transatlantic radio broadcast in morse code, 1901
23:31Wright Brothers first heavier-than-air machine flight, 1904
23:34Battle of the Somme, 1916
23:38Start of the Great Depression, 1929
23:43Hiroshima + Nagasaki decimated by atom bombs, 1945
23:50Apollo 11; first man on the moon, 1969
23:559 November 1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall
23:57End of Apartheid in South Africa, 1994
23:58Dolly the Sheep - first mammal to be cloned, 1997
As we enter the 21st Century, the time is so close to midnight again that we have to include seconds in the countdown.
23:58:51 - 2001- Enron bankruptcy; 9/11, Kursk sinks, Swissair goes bankrupt; China joins World Trade Organization, first human heart transplant with an artificial heart.
23:59:08 - 2002 - Euro (currency) launched; USA invades Afghanistan; first Bali bombs; US Department of Homeland Security established
23:59:25 - 2003 - Last Concorde flight, last Volkswagen beetle manufactured; SARS epidemic; Saddam Hussein toppled; Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up on re-entry; first manned Chinese space mission; Swedish foreign minister assassinated in supermarket.
23:59:42 - 2004 - Indian Ocean Tsunamis; NASA's 'Scamjet' flies at just under 10x speed of sound; Madrid train bombings; Breslan school massacre; Ronald Reagan dies; Queen Mary II launched; SpaceShipOne - first private space mission; Lenova (Chinese IT company) buys IBM's PC business.
Note that the 20th Century only opens with 30 minutes to go to midnight and the 21st Century with only 2 minutes left out of the 1440 that make up a 24 hour day. An eyeblink!
Which does lead one inexorably to the question:
Where will be all be at, say, 5 minutes past midnight (2010.) Where would you like your firm to be? What do you need to do to get it there?
As always, comments are most welcome and may be posted below. This posting may also be freely forwarded to anyone else that you think might be interested.
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