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first millennium BC were influenced in part by the earlier culture of the Vedas, and animal sacrifice had a central role in it. The religion was polytheistic, and the Rig Veda includes hymns to a number of deities, including the warrior god Indra, the fire god Agni, and Soma, identified with a mind-altering drug of some kind, possibly derived from mushrooms. These cults were the forerunner of Hinduism, and the urban societies that developed along the Ganges were the communities among whom appeared in the 5th century Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, and the Buddha himself.

      c. 3000 TO 950 BC

      MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATIONS

      In the late 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the remains of previously unknown civilizations. Although the names of Troy, Mycenae and Knossos were familiar from the poems of Homer, the Bronze Age societies of the Aegean revealed by these excavations had much more in common with contemporary Near Eastern societies than they had with later Greece.

      Substantial settlements appeared in mainland Greece and Crete by the end of the 3rd millennium BC. These were subsistence farmers, with households producing goods for their own consumption. The subsequent appearance in Crete of large stone-built complexes marked the emergence of a new form of social organization. There are some parallels between these “First Palaces” and Near Eastern buildings, and they are accompanied by other signs of such influence, including the appearance of a form of hieroglyphic writing in Crete. However, it is likely that local needs as much as outside influence determined the island’s overall development.

      There is no agreed explanation for the later destruction of the “First Palaces”, but in their place the large complexes of the “Second Palace Period” emerged. These were not fortified, but they were the focus of the economic and religious life of the Minoan communities.

      By 1700 BC Knossos had achieved a dominant position within Crete, and the palace there reveals much information about Minoan society. Surviving frescoes depict scenes of communal activity including processions, bull-leaping, dining and dancing. It is clear from Knossos and other palaces that Cretan society depended upon intensive agriculture—the palaces incorporate large storage areas where crops could be gathered for later redistribution to the population. Outside the towns, especially in eastern Crete, large “villas” had a similar role, and acted as processing centres for grape and olive crops.

      The two hundred years of the Second Palace Period witnessed considerable destruction and rebuilding at a number of sites. The eruption of Thera in 1628 BC left its mark on sites in eastern Crete but otherwise appears to have had little long-term impact. More significantly, a little over a century later many Cretan settlements were widely devastated, possibly as a result of invasion from the Greek mainland.

      MYCENAEAN GREECE

      Mainland Greece did not share in the prosperity of Crete and the Aegean islands until after c. 1700 BC, when rich burials, especially in the “shaft-graves” at Mycenae and in tholos tombs, point to the emergence of a powerful warlike elite. After 1500 BC mainlanders, called Mycenaeans, appear to have been in control of Knossos, where the palace functioned for another century. It was only after then that palaces started to appear on the mainland. While they owed something to Minoan models, and, like them, acted as centres for agricultural storage and redistribution, they were fortified and less luxurious. The Mycenaeans spoke a form of Greek, and wrote in a syllabic script, Linear B, adapted from the still-undeciphered script in use in Crete, Linear A. Documents inscribed on clay tablets reveal a strongly hierarchical society, with the ruler (wanax) at the top, lesser lords below and the mass of the people at the bottom.

      Soon after 1200 BC, more or less simultaneously, the palaces on the mainland were destroyed. In the centuries following there is no trace of Linear B writing, nor of the figurative decoration that characterizes Mycenaean art. When written Greek appears again in the 8th century, it uses a version of the Phoenician alphabet.

      The absence of firm evidence—mirrored by the lack of firm dates for this period—has led historians to examine myths in the search for historical facts. On this basis it has been suggested that the Mycenaeans fell victim to Dorian invaders from the north, or that a long war against Troy caused revolution in the Greek homeland. Neither finds support from archaeology, and an agreed explanation for the complete social breakdown of Mycenaean society is yet to emerge. One contributing factor may have been major political upheavals further east, cutting off access to the tin needed to make the bronze on which the Mycenaean rulers based their power. Certainly the society which emerged from the “dark age” that followed the collapse was reliant on the more widely available iron.

      The massive ruins of the Mycenaean palaces remained visible to the Greeks of later times, and these, together with a tradition of oral poetry that developed over the following centuries, led to the invention of a heroic world, most famously celebrated in the epic poems of Homer, that was very different from Bronze Age reality.

       THREE THE CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS OF EURASIA

      The earliest civilizations arose at a few scattered points in the vast and sparsely inhabited Eurasian landmass. Between 1000 BC and AD 500 the pattern began to change. Although America, Australasia and Africa south of the Sahara still stood outside the mainstream of world history, and were to stay so for a further thousand years, the civilizations of Europe and Asia now formed a continuous belt. By AD 100, when the classical era was at its height, a chain of empires extended from Rome via Parthia and the Kushana empire to China, constituting an unbroken zone of civilized life from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

      This was a new and important fact in the history of the Eurasian world. The area of civilization remained narrow and exposed to unrelenting barbarian pressures, and developments in the different regions remained largely autonomous. But with the expansion of the major civilizations and the elimination of the geographical gaps between them, the way lay open for inter-regional contacts and cultural exchanges which left a lasting imprint. In the west, the expansion of Hellenism created a single cultural area which extended from the frontiers of India to Britain; in the east, the expansion of the Chinese and Indian civilizations resulted in a kind of cultural symbiosis in Indo-China. These wider cultural areas provided a vehicle not only for trade but for the transmission of ideas, technology and institutions, and above all for the diffusion of the great world religions. Beginning with Buddhism, and continuing with Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam, religion became a powerful unifying bond in the Eurasian world.

      550 BC TO AD 752

      THE COMMERCIAL AND CULTURAL BONDS OF EURASIA

      The rulers of the empires of the ancient world had no commercial policies, and were seldom interested in trade. Yet the activities of traders, operating at the margins of society, and rarely mentioned in ancient literature, had a profound effect on the development of the world, transmitting not only goods, but also cultural ideas—and occasionally deadly organisms.

      The quantity of goods passing across the Eurasian landmass varied enormously depending on the political conditions of the time. Between 200 BC and AD 200 stable regimes in the Roman Mediterranean, the Persian Parthian empire, the Kushan empire and China under the Han dynasty, helped to stabilize the routes between Europe, Persia and China. Such favourable conditions for the movement of goods and people did not recur until the 8th century AD. These earlier empires, however, were not directly interested in facilitating trade. Chinese campaigns in the area of the Silk Road in Sinkiang, north of Tibet, such as that of Pan Ch’ao against the Kushans in c. AD 90, confronted a military rather than a commercial threat. The Han emperors certainly wanted valuable commodities like horses from Ferghana, but they expected to receive them as diplomatic gifts, tribute or booty from war.

      Since the time of Assyrian merchants in Anatolia in the second millennium BC there are examples of communities of traders who settled in foreign territories to import goods from their homelands. In the 8th century BC Greek and Phoenician trading posts were

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