The Pyramids Rise
Placeholder β on Giza as a machine for turning a kingdom's entire labor surplus into a claim on eternity, and what that says about the earliest link between power and permanence.
Permanent Exhibition
Six rooms, one long argument. Click an era to walk in β these are placeholder notes for now, waiting on the essays that will eventually replace them.
Antiquity
c. 3000β800 BCHammurabi Writes It Down
Placeholder β the first time "the law applies to you too" got carved in stone where everyone could see it, and why that's a stranger idea than it sounds.
The Bronze Age CollapseCollapse
Placeholder β every major civilization in the eastern Mediterranean falls apart within a few decades, for reasons still argued over. The original systemic collapse, and a preview of a recurring theme on this blog.
Cyrus and the First Empire Built on Mercy
Placeholder β Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and, unusually for the time, doesn't burn it down. Ties directly to the upcoming essay on Cyrus.
Classical
c. 800 BCβ500 ADRome Becomes a Republic
Placeholder β Rome throws out its kings and spends the next four and a half centuries trying to prevent any one man from becoming one again. It mostly works, until it doesn't.
Alexander Breaks the Map
Placeholder β a twenty-year-old inherits a kingdom and spends the next decade redrawing the known world, then dies before anyone's figured out what to do with it.
Caesar Crosses the Rubicon
Placeholder β soldier, priest, eventually god. Full essay on this coming soon; this is the one-line version.
Rome Falls in the WestCollapse
Placeholder β less a single dramatic night and more the slow realization that no one was coming to fix it. The end of one Rome; the beginning of a very long argument about what "Rome" even meant.
Medieval
500β1400Charlemagne Crowned
Placeholder β a Frankish king gets crowned Roman Emperor in Rome by the Pope, roughly three centuries after Rome stopped having one. Everyone involved knows this is a bit of a stretch and does it anyway.
The Crusades Begin
Placeholder β a call to arms in a French field turns into two centuries of holy war, trade routes, and unintended cultural exchange across three continents.
Hildegard von Bingen's Century
Placeholder β a Benedictine abbess who composed music, wrote on medicine and botany, corresponded with popes and emperors, and generally out-Renaissanced the Renaissance three hundred years early. Full essay coming soon.
The Black DeathCollapse
Placeholder β somewhere between a third and half of Europe dies in four years, and the labor shortage that follows quietly breaks the back of feudalism.
Renaissance
1400β1650The Medici Buy Beauty
Placeholder β a banking family turns Florence into the most important city in Europe by, essentially, deciding that art was a good investment. It was.
Gutenberg's Press
Placeholder β movable type turns the book from a luxury object copied by hand into something an ordinary person might actually own. Everything downstream of this β the Reformation included β owes it something.
Luther Nails the Door
Placeholder β ninety-five complaints pinned to a church door in Wittenberg split Western Christianity in two and rewrite the relationship between individual conscience and institutional authority.
Industrial
1650β1900The Ancien RΓ©gime FallsCollapse
Placeholder β the French monarchy, and the entire idea of divinely-ordained rule in Europe, doesn't survive contact with a bankrupt treasury and an angry Paris.
Steam Changes Everything
Placeholder β a more efficient engine turns coal into motion at a scale nothing organic ever could, and the relationship between human labor and machine labor is never the same again.
Britain's Empire Peaks
Placeholder β at its height, roughly a quarter of the earth's land and population answers, one way or another, to London. The bill for this comes due in the twentieth century.
Modern
1900βPresentTwo World Wars
Placeholder β the short twentieth century's defining catastrophe, arriving in two installments. Ties directly to the upcoming essay on Britain at Bay, 1938β1941.
The Iron Curtain FallsCollapse
Placeholder β a wall comes down in Berlin, then an entire empire dissolves without (mostly) a shot fired. The fastest great-power collapse in this whole collection.
Where We Are
Placeholder β the room this blog is actually being written from, and the hardest one to get any real perspective on. More to come.