Reconstructed setting· The columns of time

Empires and roads

801 BCE → 1450

Colonnades and an aqueduct, a square-rigged ship and a camel caravan, then bell towers and minarets rising behind them. Two thousand years in which distance became a cost rather than a wall.

What the evidence shows

The architecture is the Mediterranean antiquity everyone pictures, and the aqueduct is there for a reason: it is the visible sign of a state able to plan a public work, raise the taxes to pay for it and maintain it for centuries. The ship and the caravan carry the other half of the argument, since sea lanes and the silk roads linked Eurasia end to end for the whole of that stretch. The towers and minarets appear only in the later part of the band, after 500 CE, and they are there to say that these centuries do not stop at the fall of Rome.

Bounds and conventions

The most Eurocentric backdrop on the timeline, and the one covering the longest historical span. Han and Tang China, the Gupta empire and the West African gold states belong to these centuries as fully as Rome does, and none of them is drawn.

Sources

1. Scarre, C. (dir.) (2018). The Human Past, 4e éd. Thames & Hudson. Ouvrage de référence, à valider en relecture.
2. Hodge, A. T. (2002). Roman Aqueducts & Water Supply, 2e éd. Duckworth. ISBN 9780715631713. Monographie, à valider en relecture.
3. Liu, X. (2010). The Silk Road in World History. Oxford University Press. Monographie, à valider en relecture.
4. Zohary, D., Spiegel-Roy, P. (1975), Science, doi:10.1126/science.187.4174.319
5. D'Auria, A., et al. (2020), The Holocene, doi:10.1177/0959683619875812. Résumé lu.
6. Bagnoli, F., et al. (2009), Molecular Ecology, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294x.2009.04182.x. Résumé lu.