A Little History of the World, Ernst Gombrich
The way history is taught in schools today, almost all of us – myself included – have glaring deficits.
I recently came across this clip with Niall Ferguson (for 1 minute):
I decided to read it.
Written when Gombrich was just 26 – in 1935 in Vienna – he completed it, remarkably, in just six weeks.
The book does a terrific job of incorporating biography, as well as providing the big picture. And offering an overview of each major religion and how it came to be, it fits a prodigious amount of human history into 300 pages.
This is the book you ought to have been given at school, to help you better understand the world. A multi-vitamin of history – a chance to fill your deficiencies.
The book was written for adolescents. Ernst believed ‘it should be perfectly possible to explain most things to an intelligent child without jargon or pompous language’.
First written in German, the book was banned by the Nazis during WWII – Gombrich having travelled to England just in time to escape. Ernst insisted that if ever there were to be an English edition, he would be the one to translate it. He didn’t get around to this until the end of his life, and died in 2001, age 92, in London, while engaged in the task. The work was completed by his long-time assistant, and first published in English in 2005.
It was heartening to read that when writing the first version (in 1935, at 26), helping a publisher on a tight timeline, Gombrich set himself the challenge of writing a chapter a day, with the exception of Sundays – when he would read what he had written that week to Ilse Heller, who became his wife.
Here are some of my favourite passages from the book...
Days of the week
To each of the five planets known to them they dedicated a day, and with the sun and the moon, that made seven. This was the origin of our seven-day week. In English we still say Satur (Saturn)-day, Sun-day and Mon (moon)-day, but the other days are named after different gods. In other languages – such as French or Italian – most of the days of the week still belong to the planets that the Babylonians first named. Would you ever have guessed that our weekdays had such a strange and venerable history, reaching back all those thousands of years?
The alphabet
…with twenty-six letters you can write anything down. Anything? Yes, anything. In any language? Just about.
Isn’t that amazing? With twenty-six simple signs, each no more than a couple of squiggles, you can write down anything you like, be it wise or silly, angelic or wicked. It wasn’t anything like as easy for the ancient Egyptians with their hieroglyphs. Nor was it for the people who used the cuneiform script, for they kept on inventing new signs that didn’t stand just for single letter sounds, but for whole syllables or more. The idea that each sign might represent one sound, and that just twenty-six of those signs were all you needed to write every conceivable word, was a wholly new invention.
Egypt
the most important part of the Egyptians’ strange religion was their belief that, although a man’s soul left his body when he died, for some reason the soul went on needing that body, and would suffer if it crumbled into dust.
Themistocles
a new leader called Themistocles, an astute and far-sighted man, who repeatedly warned his fellow citizens that a miracle like Marathon could only happen once, and that if Athens were to continue to hold out against the Persians, it must have a fleet. So a fleet was built.
Athens
Whereas the great empires of the East bound themselves so tightly to the traditions and teachings of their ancestors that they could scarcely move, the Greeks – and the Athenians in particular – did the opposite. Almost every year they came up with something new. Everything was always changing.
Always trying out new ideas, never satisfied, never at rest. Which explains why, during the hundred years that followed the Persian wars, more went on in the minds of the people of the little city of Athens than in a thousand years in all the great empires of the East. The ideas, the painting, sculpture and architecture, the plays and poetry, the inventions and experiments, the discussions and arguments which the young brought to the marketplaces and the old to their council chambers still continue to concern us today. It is strange that it should be so, and yet it’s true. And what would it have been like if the Persians had won at Marathon? Or at Salamis, ten years later? That I cannot say.
The Acropolis still contains the most beautiful buildings we know. Not the grandest, or the most splendid. Simply the most beautiful. Every detail is so clear and so simple that one cannot imagine it otherwise. All the forms which the Greeks employed in these buildings were to be used again and again in architecture.
Solon
It was, in fact, a nobleman who had the wisdom to try to give the little state a new system of government. His name was Solon, and the laws he introduced in 594 BC – at the time of Nebuchadnezzar – were named after him. They stated that the people, that is, the city’s inhabitants, should decide the city’s affairs themselves. They should assemble in the marketplace of Athens and vote. The majority should decide and should elect a council of experts to put those decisions into effect.
‘Polis’ is Greek for city, ‘politics’, the affairs of a city.
Pericles
Pericles… the wisest and the most intelligent. His chief concern was that Athens should maintain its power at sea, and this he achieved through alliances with other Ionian cities who paid Athens for its protection. In this way the Athenians grew rich and could at last afford to make use of their great gifts.
Buddha
Gautama spent six whole years thinking about this and nothing else. The idea that came to him, his great Enlightenment, the solution to human suffering, was this: if we want to avoid suffering, we must start with ourselves, because all suffering comes from our own desires. Think of it like this. If you are sad because you can’t have something you want – maybe a book or a toy – you can do one of two things: you can do your best to get it, or you can stop wanting it. Either way, if you succeed, you won’t be sad any more. This is what the Buddha taught. If we can stop ourselves wanting all the beautiful and pleasant things in life, and can learn to control our greed for happiness, comfort, recognition and affection, we shan’t feel sad any more when, as so often happens, we fail to get what we want. He who ceases to wish for anything ceases to feel sad.
A person’s highest achievement on earth is to reach the point at which he or she no longer has any desires. This is the Buddha’s ‘inner calm’, the blissful peace of someone who no longer has any wishes, someone who is kind to everyone and demands nothing.
Confucius
Rather than helping individuals not to want things, and therefore not to suffer, what mattered most to Confucius was that everybody should live peacefully together – parents with their children and rulers with their subjects. That was his goal: to teach the right way of living together. And he succeeded. Thanks to his teachings all the peoples of China lived together for thousands of years, more contentedly and more peacefully than many other peoples of the world.
What Confucius proposed is quite simple. You may not like it, but there is more wisdom in it than first meets the eye. What he taught was this: outward appearances are more important than we think – bowing to our elders, letting others go through a door first, standing up to speak to a superior, and many other similar things for which they had more rules in China than we have. All such practices, so he believed, were not just a matter of chance. They meant something, or had done once.
It may seem to you that what Confucius taught was obvious. But that was exactly his intention. He wanted to teach something that everyone would find easy to grasp, because it was so just and fair. Then living together would become much easier. I have already told you that he succeeded. And, thanks to his teaching, that enormous empire, with all its provinces, was saved from falling apart.
Lao-tzu
He is said to have been an official who became tired of the way people lived at court. So he gave up his job and wandered off into the lonely mountains at the frontier of China to be a hermit.
…whether the border guard could make head or tail of them I do not know, for they are very mysterious and hard to grasp. Their meaning is roughly this: in all the world – in wind and rain, in plants and animals, in the passage from day to night, in the movements of the stars – everything acts in accordance with one great law. This he calls the ‘Tao’, which means the Way, or the Path. Only man in his restless striving, in his many plans and projects, even in his prayers and sacrifices, resists, as it were, this law, obstructs its path and prevents its fulfilment.
Aristotle and Alexander
Now Alexander wasn’t just a brave and ambitious warrior – there was much more to him than that. He was exceptionally handsome, with long curly hair, and he knew just about everything there was to know at the time. His tutor was the most famous teacher living: the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle wasn’t just Alexander’s tutor but – in a manner of speaking – the teacher of mankind for 2,000 years…
In the 2,000 years that followed, whenever people failed to agree on one thing or another, they turned to his writings. He was their referee. What Aristotle said must be right. For what he had done was to gather together all the knowledge of his time. He wrote about the natural sciences – the stars, animals and plants; about history and people living together in a state – what we call politics; about the right way to reason – logic; and the right way to behave – ethics. He wrote about poetry and its beauty. And last of all he wrote down his own thoughts on a god who hovered impassive and unseen above the vault of heaven.
Alexander studied too, and no doubt he was a good student. Best of all he loved the stories about heroes in Homer’s great lyric poems – they say he kept them under his pillow at night. But Alexander didn’t spend all his time with his nose in a book. He loved sport, and riding more than anything. No one rode better than he.
Diogenes. He had views not unlike those of the Buddha. According to him, possessions and all the things we think we need only serve to distract us and get in the way of our simple enjoyment of life. So he had given away everything he owned and now sat, almost naked, in a barrel in the market square in Corinth where he lived, as free and independent as a stray dog.
Curious to meet this strange fellow, Alexander went to call on him. Dressed in shining armour, the plume on his helmet waving in the breeze, he walked up to the barrel and said to Diogenes: ‘I like you… If I weren’t Alexander I should like to be Diogenes.’
…with increasing confidence, Alexander marched on Persia. He gave everything he owned to his friends. They were horrified and said: ‘But what are you leaving for yourself?’ ‘Hope’, he is said to have replied.
Pyrrhic victory
One day a city in the south of Italy asked a Greek prince and commander called Pyrrhus to come to its aid against Rome. He arrived with war elephants – whose use the Greeks had learnt from the Indians – and succeeded in defeating the Roman legions. But at a cost: he lost so many of his men that he is said to have cried out, ‘One more such victory and we are lost!’ Which is why people still speak of a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ if it has been won at too great a cost.
Hannibal
Hannibal was a truly extraordinary young man. Reared among soldiers, he knew everything there was to know about warfare.
Hunger and cold, heat and thirst, forced marches night and day, he had seen them all. He was fearless, unbelievably tenacious and a born leader. He could outwit the enemy with his cunning and sum up a situation in an instant, and he had a cool head. He was that rare thing: a man who made war like a chess-player, carefully considering each move before he made it.
Though the Romans no longer dared attack him directly, they called up all their men to fight.
They fought the Carthaginians both in Sicily and in Spain. And everywhere they fought, as long as it wasn’t Hannibal they were fighting, they always won.
China
At about the same time as Hannibal was in Italy (that is, shortly after 220 BC), an emperor was ruling over China who hated history so much that, in 213 BC, he ordered all history books and all old reports and records to be burnt, along with all collections of songs and poems and the writings of Confucius and Lao-tzu – in fact everything he considered to be useless rubbish. The only books he permitted were ones on agriculture and other useful subjects. Anybody found in possession of any other sort of book was to be put to death.
This emperor was Shih Huang-ti, the first emperor of all China and one of the greatest warriors there has ever been. He was not born into an imperial family but was the son of one of the princes I told you about, who ruled the many Chinese provinces. His province was called Ch’in, from which his family took its name, and it is likely that the whole country now known as China was named after him. There are certainly more than enough reasons for China to take its name from the Prince of Ch’in. Not only did he make himself the first emperor of all China, by conquering all the other provinces one by one, but he transformed the entire country. He threw out all the princes and totally reorganised his empire. And if you ask me why he hated history and destroyed all those books, it was because he wanted to wipe out every trace of how things had been done before, so he could build an entirely new China – his China – starting from scratch. He built roads everywhere and began work on an enormous project: the Great Wall of China.
Shih Huang-ti didn’t have a long reign. Soon a new family ascended the throne of the Son of Heaven. This was the Han family. They saw no need to undo all Shih Huang-ti’s good works, and under their rule China remained strong and unified. But by now the Hans were no longer enemies of history. On the contrary, they remembered China’s debt to the teachings of Confucius and set about searching high and low for all those ancient writings. It turned out that many people had had the courage not to burn them after all. Now they were carefully collected and valued twice as highly as before. And to become a government official, you had to know them all.
China is, in fact, the only country in the world to be ruled for hundreds of years, not by the nobility, nor by soldiers, nor even by the priesthood, but by scholars. No matter where you came from, or whether you were rich or poor, as long as you gained high marks in your exams you could become an official. The highest post went to the person with the highest marks.
Frederick II
There was one thing he could never understand: why people were always fighting.
What all other crusades had achieved only through great sacrifices and loss of life, Frederick did without any fighting at all: Christian pilgrims were allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre without fear of being attacked and all the land around Jerusalem was held to belong to them. And how did he do that? He just sat down with the sultan who ruled there and they came to an agreement.
The Renaissance
…they discovered antiquity. And I mean literally discovered. It mattered little to them that the people of those times had been heathens. What astonished them was what those people could do. How they had freely and openly debated and discussed, with arguments and counter-arguments, everything in nature and the world. How everything interested them. These people were to serve as their models.
A great search for books written in Latin began, and people strove to write Latin that was as clear and as precise as that of the ancient Romans. They also learnt Greek and so discovered the wonderful works of the Athenians of the time of Pericles. Soon people were more interested in Themistocles and Alexander, in Caesar and in Augustus than in Charlemagne or Barbarossa.
People suddenly felt they were witnessing a rebirth of the ancient, long-gone era of Greek and Roman culture. They themselves felt born again through the discovery of these ancient works.
Lorenzo de’ Medici
Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as ‘the Magnificent’ because he made such wonderful use of his great wealth, and gave his support and protection to so many artists and scholars. Whenever he came across a gifted young man he instantly took him into his household and had him educated.
A description of the customs of Lorenzo’s household gives you an idea of how people thought at the time. There was no seating order at table. Instead of the eldest and most respected sitting at the top of the table above the rest, it was the first to arrive who sat with Lorenzo de’ Medici, even if he were no more than a young painter’s apprentice. And even an ambassador, if he came last, took his place at the foot of the table.
The Jesuits
In one of the battles between the emperor Charles V and the French king Francis I, a young Spanish knight was gravely wounded. His name was Ignatius of Loyola. During his long and painful convalescence he thought hard about his past life as a young nobleman, and immersed himself in readings from the Bible and the lives of the saints. And as he did so, the idea came to him that he would change his life. He would continue to be a warrior as he always had been, but he would serve a very different cause: that of the Catholic Church, now so imperilled by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Henry VIII. But when he was finally restored to health, he didn’t simply go off and fight in
…He took himself to university. There he studied and reflected, and reflected and studied, to prepare himself for the battle he had chosen to undertake. For it seemed clear to him that if you want to conquer others you must first conquer yourself. So with unbelievable severity he worked at mastering himself. Somewhat like the Buddha, but with a different aim in mind. Like the Buddha, Ignatius wished to rid himself of all desires. But rather than seeking release from human suffering here on earth, he wanted to devote himself, body and soul, to the service of the Church. After many years of practice he reached a point at which he could successfully prevent himself from having certain thoughts, or, if he wished, picture something so clearly in his mind that it was as if he saw it there in front of him. His preparation was complete. He demanded no less of his friends. And when they had all achieved the same iron control over their thoughts, they founded an order together called the Society of Jesus. Its members were known as Jesuits.
This little company of select and highly educated men offered itself to the Pope to campaign for the Church, and in 1540 their offer was accepted. Their battle began immediately, with all the strategy and force of a military campaign.
The Church would take better care of the poor. Above all, it would take steps to educate the people. And here the Jesuits, as learned, disciplined and loyal servants of the Church, came into their own. For as teachers they could make their ideas known, not only to the common people, but to the nobility as well through their teaching at universities. Nor was it only through their work as teachers and preachers of the faith in distant lands that their influence spread. In the courts of kings they were frequently employed as confessors. And because they were men of great intelligence and understanding, trained to see into the souls of men, they were well placed to guide and influence the mighty in their decisions.
People became very austere and strict during this period of religious warfare. Almost as austere and strict as Ignatius of Loyola himself.
Galileo
So in 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, Galileo, who had devoted his whole life to scholarship, was brought before the religious tribunal known as the Inquisition, and made to choose between being burned as a heretic or renouncing his theory about the movement of the earth around the sun. He signed a declaration saying that he was but a poor sinner, for he had taught that the earth moved round the sun. In this way he avoided being burned, the fate of so many of his predecessors.
Louis XIV, advice to his grandson
They were what Louis XIV only played at being: somewhat comical puppet-kings, with pompous airs and glittering fancy dress. Louis XIV himself was more than that. And in case you don’t believe me, I’m going to quote something from a letter he wrote to his grandson, when his grandson was leaving to become king of Spain: ‘Never favour those who flatter you most, but hold rather to those who risk your displeasure for your own good. Never neglect business for pleasure, organise your life so that there is time in it for relaxation and entertainment. Give the business of government your full attention. Inform yourself as much as you can before taking any decision. Make every effort to get to know men of distinction, so that you may call on them when you need them. Be courteous to all, speak hurtfully to no man.’ These really were the guiding principles of King Louis XIV of France, that remarkable mixture of vanity, charm, extravagance, dignity, indifference, frivolity and sheer hard work.
Napoleon – a letter to his brother
‘I’ve seen one of your orders of the day to the soldiers that will make you the laughing stock of Germany, Austria and France. Have you no friend to tell you a few home truths? You are a king and the emperor’s brother – titles worth nothing on the battlefield. There, you have to be a soldier and nothing but a soldier. Forget your ministers, your ambassadors and your finery. You have to sleep out in the vanguard with your men, sit on your horse, day and night. March in the vanguard, so you know what’s going on.’
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There are many other passages I could highlight.
In the closing chapter – updated between his first writing in German in 1935, and translating the book into English at the end of his life in 2001 – Gombrich noted:
In chapter 33 it says that a ‘truly new age’ began in which people started to turn their minds away from the brutality of earlier times, because the ideas and ideals of the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had by then become so widespread that people took them to be self-evident. At the time that I wrote that it seemed to me inconceivable that anyone might ever again stoop to persecuting people of a different religion, use torture to extract confessions, or question the rights of man. But what seemed unthinkable to me happened all the same. Such a painful step backwards seems almost beyond our understanding,
This is why we need to remember our history.