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I’m back where I started.

Making the Connections

      If you’re not thrilled with the tapestry analogy, how about the notion of six degrees of separation, also known as “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” when applied to entertainment figures. The idea is that anybody on Earth can be linked to anybody else in six or fewer interactions. Depending on which interpretation of this idea you like, the interaction could be as simple as a shared acquaintance or a handshake. Some people call it an urban legend, but a few researchers have tried to test the notion, with mixed results.

The game calls for making the connection in six steps or less. Let’s see whether I can do that with Alexander the Great, who died in ancient Babylon, and the Iraq War that started in 2003.

      1 Alexander’s conquests spread Greek influence around the Mediterranean Sea.

      2 Romans embraced aspects of Greek religion and philosophy.

      3 The Roman Empire eventually adopted Christianity.

      4 The Roman Catholic Church preserved ancient writings containing classical (Greek and Roman) ideas through the Middle Ages.

      5 Christian scholars rediscovered Greek philosophy, sparking the Renaissance.

      Oops. Darn. I’m not there yet.

      So historical connections aren’t as easy to make as movie-actor connections, but I was on my way. See, the Renaissance led to the Enlightenment, when ideas such as government by consent of the governed took hold. That period led to the American Revolution and modern democracies — the style of government that George W. Bush said he would establish in the Middle East after getting rid of Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq, which helped make room in Iraq and Syria for the rise of ISIS. That’s more than six steps, but not bad.

      

If you fill in enough steps and make enough connections, you’ll begin to see the interconnectedness of virtually everything people do on Earth. Maybe once upon a time, a band of hunter-gatherers in what would later be Yemen or Thailand could live for 1,000 years in ignorance of the rest of the world, and no other band of hunter-gatherers anywhere would have known that those prehistoric Yemeni or Thai people existed. But that moment is long gone. Delve into any bit of humankind’s story now, and you’re on a path that reaches far beyond whatever city or village you started in. Each path branches into countless others that together reach around the world and stretch through time to what came before. Everything that ever happened, somebody once said, is still happening. History is now.

Tracking the Centuries

      Before 12,000 BC: The Pleistocene Epoch, known today as the last major Ice Age, ends after ice sheets recede northward.

      Perhaps 10,000 BC: Agricultural societies develop in an area called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East.

      About 2400 BC: The town of Babylon, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, has grown into a city.

      About 323 BC: Alexander the Great dies of a fever in the ancient city of Babylon.

      27 BC: Augustus becomes the first Roman emperor.

      962 AD: Otto the Great is crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany.

      1535: Ottoman Turks conquer Baghdad.

      1919: The Treaty of Versailles sets out terms of peace to officially end WWI.

      1932: The Kingdom of Iraq wins its independence from British rule.

      1947: The United Nations partitions what had been British Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas.

      1965: The United States escalates its involvement in the Vietnam War by sending troops to fight on the side of the South Vietnamese government.

      2001: Nineteen suicide terrorists hijack four commercial airlines and succeed in crashing two of them into New York City’s World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashes in Pennsylvania.

      2003: The United States and the United Kingdom, along with small contingents of troops from other allied countries, invade Iraq.

      2016: The United Kingdom votes in a referendum to separate from the European Union, a move known as Brexit.

      2019: A previously unknown viral illness called COVID-19, arises in China, on its way to becoming the fastest-spreading pandemic the world has yet seen.

      2021: President Joe Biden withdraws American troops from Afghanistan.

Chapter 2

      Digging Up Reality

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Unearthing long-lost legendary cities

      

Spawning myth or reality: Plato’s Atlantis

      

Connecting with the past in the form of preserved bodies

      If you think of history as lists of facts, dates, battles, and key civilizations, you may memorize a lot, but you’ll never experience the thrill of the past. If, on the other hand, you’re able to make the leap to identify with people who are long dead and to imagine what their lives must have been like, you may be among those for whom the past becomes a passion — and perhaps even an addiction.

      Maybe you read history, and your imagination brings the stories to life. Or maybe you need help. Hard evidence, the kind you can examine at historic sites or in museums, often works. Seeing what the people of the past left behind — what they made and built, and even their preserved bodies — can bridge the gap between then and now. These things are reminders that real people walked the Earth long ago, carrying within them dreams and fears not so unlike yours.

      In this chapter, I look at two “lost” cities and discuss evidence for their actual existence. I also look at mummies and discuss the ways they can bring history alive.

Homing In on Homer

      The Iliad and The Odyssey, ancient epic poems, tell fantastic stories about a long war between Greeks and Trojans and the journey home from that war. They’re so fantastic — full of vengeful gods and supernatural peril — that it’s hard for modern people to credit any part of them as true.

Yet a kind of history is in these poems. This history became more tantalizing in the late 19th century, when an eccentric German businessman dug up the city of Troy, revealing that it had been a real place, one of many ancient Troys built in just the place the poems describe. Each city rose and fell, and another rose on top of it while the old one was forgotten.

      The Troy story

      Greeks attacked Troy more than 3,200 years ago, in the 13th century BC. (In the next chapter, I explain BC, AD, CE, and BCE.) The stories about that decade-long war were already ancient by the time of the philosopher Aristotle and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposedly the work of a blind singer–poet called Homer, but nobody knows for sure who he was, when he lived (maybe the ninth century BC), or even whether he lived. One widely respected theory is that, long before anybody wrote these

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