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You can remember the big things that have happened in your own lifetime.
Perhaps you may have heard your grandparents or your parents tell about things that happened in their own lives — things like World War II or the wars in Korea or Vietnam.
And your grandparents, of course, had parents and grandparents and great grandparents, just like you.
Perhaps your
great,
great,
great,
grandparents
may have been living when Washington was President, and his
great,
great,
great,
great,
great,
grandparents
were living in the days of Julius Caesar.
Although these ancestors, as they are called, are dead long since, the story of what did happen in all their lifetimes ’way, ’way back has been written down in books and this story is history— his story one boy named it.
Christ was living in the Year 1—no, not the first year of the world, of course.
Do you know how many years ago that was? You can tell if you know what year this is now.
If Christ were living today, how old would He be?
Two thousand years may seem a long time. But perhaps you have seen or heard of a man or a woman who was a hundred years old. Have you?
Well, in two thousand years only twenty people, each a hundred years old, might have lived one after the other—twenty people one after the other since the time of Christ—and that doesn’t seem so long after all!
Everything that happened before Christ was born is called B.C., which you can guess are the initials of Before Christ, so B.C. stands for Before Christ. So much is easy.
Everything that has happened in the world since the time of Christ is called A.D. This is not so easy, for though A. might stand for After, we know D. is not the initial of Christ.
As a matter of fact, A.D. are the initials of two Latin words, Anno Domini . Anno means in the year , Domini of the Lord , which in ordinary, everyday language means of course since the time of Christ .
I have told you about things I have had to guess at. We call these things before-history , or pre-history , which means the same thing. But the things that have happened in the lifetime of people who wrote them down—the stories I don’t have to guess at—we call history. The first history that we feel fairly sure is true begins with the people in North Africa and the Middle East.
Some people began writing down their stories thousands of years ago. What’s interesting is that different peoples in parts of the world that were really far apart figured out all by themselves how to write, and they did this at different times. Ancient people in the Middle East invented a written language called cuneiform Ancient people in Egypt wrote in hieroglyphics. Centuries ago, people in India were writing in Sanskrit. People as far away as China, Nubia, and Central America invented their own writing. So did people on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea, halfway between Egypt and Greece.
Today, we know how to read some of these languages from several thousand years ago. But other languages are like an unsolved puzzle. We see the writing, but we don’t have any idea what it means.
If you think about all these early civilizations, which ones do you suppose we know the most about? The ones whose writing we can read, or the others? Well, I’ll bet you all guessed the right answer to that question! Of course, we know the most about places whose stories we can read.
Four places whose early stories we can read about are Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. We can read their writing, so we know what people were there during all those long years ago. We’re not as good on the writing of Nubia or Central America or Crete, so we don’t know as much about what was happening in those places long, long ago.
What’s really interesting is what we do know about the places whose history we can read. We know that all four of those ancient civilizations grew up along river valleys.
Egypt was built along the Nile River valley. And Mesopotamia grew along the valleys of two rivers—the Tigris and the Euphrates. But you already know about those rivers.
Now here are two new rivers for you. India’s first history took place along the valley of the Indus River and China’s along the Huang River. The Huang River is sometimes called the Yellow River because the river’s bottom is thick yellow mud.
Even though they lived far apart, the peoples who lived along these rivers did a lot of the same things. This isn’t too surprising when you think about it. You may never have visited Africa or India or China today, but you can guess that girls and boys there play games, and that mothers cook, and so on. Even in ancient times, people around the world did many of the same things.
Trading boat of river valley town
The river valleys were a good place to live because food was plentiful. There was lots of water for animals to drink, and to use to water plants. So men and women and boys and girls all settled down next to the rivers—in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in India and in China.
Soon enough people were living so close together that they were living in what we call a town. Then people in these towns began to build little boats, then bigger boats. Soon the boats were sailing up and down the river to the next town and to towns farther away. The towns began to trade with each other. And sometimes the towns began to fight with each other.
One of the best ways to stop the towns from having little wars was to put them all under the rule of one person. So, in place after place, a government grew up. Sometimes the towns agreed to get together. Other times they were united when one strong man conquered his neighbors. Either way, a king, or emperor, or pharaoh was in charge of the government and was ruler of what we now call a nation.
So, if you look back at these river civilizations, you can see a piece of history that is really quite remarkable. At a time when many people were still hunters and gatherers, maybe even living in caves, something new and exciting was happening first in Egypt and Mesopotamia and soon afterwards in India and China. People settled down and farmed, then built towns, then traded with each other, and then built nations. And, sometime during all this, they figured out that it would be a great thing to write—and so they wrote down their history for us to read today.