Chapter 24

Ten Essential Historical Documents

In This Chapter

Retrieving lost history from a rock

Collecting scriptural riches in one volume

Forcing a contract with the king

Breaking free: America’s template

Reshaping empires with an economic treatise

Documents give humankind its history in that they preserve history. If no one had ever invented writing or started making formal records of battles, beliefs, laws, treaties, and so on, you’d have to sift history out of oral accounts.

Did you ever play the telephone game, where you whisper something into your neighbor’s ear and she whispers what she heard to the next person, continuing around the room? If you have, you know how oral history changes from person to person, even in a span of a few minutes. Over centuries of relying on oral history, people would be left with little idea of what really went down. As for contractual agreements, everybody knows that the really important stuff should be put in writing.

Documents are important, and some documents prove to be extra important, not just in preserving the past but also in shaping it. Documents set down basic tenets of understanding, societal identity, and principles of right and wrong. Rule of law is a concept crucial to modern democracies. It means no king, president, mayor, police officer, or anybody else can make up the rules on the spot. To legally take any action — whether it be to negotiate a treaty between nuclear powers, appoint a town dogcatcher, or make an arrest — public officials are supposed to go by the book. And the book is a document.

The Rosetta Stone

As much artifact as document, the Rosetta Stone is a slab of black basalt that bears an inscribed text in ancient Greek and in two forms of old Egyptian writing: formal hieroglyphics (as seen on royal tomb walls) and the more common demotic script. In 1799, during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt, some of his soldiers found this rock on the Rosetta fork of the Nile River at Raschid, near Alexandria. The stone had been carved about 2,000 years earlier, in 196 BC.

When the French soldiers recovered the stone, nobody knew how to read hieroglyphics (more on hieroglyphics in Chapter 4). Ancient Egyptian history seemed lost forever.

Scholars Thomas Young and Jean François Champollion worked long and hard to decipher the Rosetta Stone, establishing that the three texts all said the same thing in different languages. Using his knowledge of ancient Greek, Champollion was able to announce in 1822 that he could read hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone provided an entryway into the remote Egyptian past.

You can see the Rosetta Stone in London’s British Museum.

Confucian Analects

 In the Western world, people attribute the golden rule to Jesus. But 500 years before Jesus, a humble Chinese teacher, Kung Ch’iu, told his students, “Do to others what you would have them do to you.”

Kung lived from around 551–479 BC. He became a government official as a teenager, in charge of grain stores and pastures at 15, and worked his way up to high office. His ideas for reform made him popular with the public but also angered some privileged people.

After enemies forced him to leave his native province, Kung traveled and spread his ideas about respect for others, reverence for ancestors, obedience, shared values, loyalty, and self-improvement. He stressed the concepts of li (proper behavior) and jen(sympathetic attitude). His students gave Kung the respectful title Futzu, meaning “venerated master.” You can find more about Kung Futzu’s teachings in Chapter 10.

Late in Kung’s Futzu’s life and after he died, followers gathered his sayings into the Analects, a tremendously influential source of Chinese thought. Confucianism (from the Latin version of Kung Futzu, Confucius) shaped Chinese character, blending with other philosophical and religious schools such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Legalism. Until the twentieth century, every student training to be an official in the Chinese government had to study the Analects. Confucianism also influenced other Asian cultures. It was especially important in Japan during the Tokugawa, or Edo,period, which lasted from 1603–1867. Over most of those years, Confucian values were endorsed and enforced by a military dictatorship called the Shogunate and helped maintain a remarkable level of social stability in Japan.

The Bible

This is a package deal — a treasure chest of documents all wrapped up into one volume. Which version of the Bible you’re talking about depends on which tradition you follow, but regardless of how you know the Bible, it’s an indispensable document for understanding the course of many world events.

In its Christian form, the Bible includes writings that are at the heart of two major religions — Judaism and Christianity. (Chapter 10 talks about world religions.) The Bible contains the Pentateuch, or Jewish Priestly Law (the written Torah) and both the Ten Commandments (Old Testament) and the Christian golden rule.

Bible stories stand as an important source of history, even as many historians challenge their literal truth. The Bible’s teachings have shaped the courses of great nations, including the Roman and Byzantine empires, as I discuss in Chapters 5 and 6. The Bible also figures in a huge technological change, courtesy of Johannes Gutenberg, who chose it as the first book to come off his revolutionary printing press.

The Bible played a role in important linguistic changes, too. Both the German and English languages were shaped by early major translations of the Bible into those languages. For German, it was Martin Luther’s 1530 translation. For English, it was the King James edition of 1611. It may sound funny, but the way you talk right now owes a lot to a 400-year-old book full of “thee” and “thou.”

The Koran

A holy book like the Bible, the Koran (also spelled Qur’an) is the foundation of not just religious practice but also daily life, formal law, and government policy in most of the Islamic world — a huge, wealthy, and powerful part of humanity more than a millennium ago and today, too.

The Koran defines Islam’s place in history. Its verses spurred the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and continue to shape the Muslim worldview today.

Muslims believe that the Koran is God’s direct, infallible word, and that the angel Gabriel revealed it, as written in heaven, to the Prophet Mohammed, founder of Islam, in the seventh century AD (see Chapter 10). Muslims consider the text sacred. To touch sacred text without being ritually pure is forbidden. If you imitate its style — in which God (Allah) speaks in verse — you have committed a sacrilege.

Like other religious scripture, the Koran has been subject to conflicting interpretations. Some extremist Islamic teachers cite the book as a source of justification for acts of violence carried out by anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-Indian, and other terrorist organizations. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide, however, see nothing in the Koran that justifies modern terrorism.

In addition to its impact on world events, the Koran is also the book from which Muslims traditionally learn to read Arabic. That makes the Koran perhaps the most widely read of all books, ever.

The Magna Carta

The idea of the divine right of kings (covered in Chapter 12) was based on the understanding that the monarch, as God’s deputy, had to care for creation’s lesser children. A subject, whether commoner or noble, had a duty to respect and obey the king. But the king’s godly duty, in return, was to defend and protect his subjects. A certain mutual respect was implied.

Often it didn’t work like that, however. John, the most unpopular of England’s kings, upset his barons and they rebelled. In 1215, the barons got the upper hand, forcing King John to sign a contract, the Great Charter, or Magna Carta in Latin (official language of thirteenth-century Europe).

 By signing, King John agreed to specific rules on respecting his subjects. The Magna Carta contained 63 clauses, most relating to King John’s misuse of his financial and judicial powers. Clauses 39 and 40, the two most famous, say that

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. [A freeman was an adult male subject of the crown who wasn’t a serf or slave.]

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.

This first formal attempt at separating kingship from tyranny didn’t solve all the problems between King John and the barons, but the charter set a precedent for laws regarding rights, justice, and the exercise of authority in England, the British Empire, and beyond. The Great Charter pointed toward constitutional freedoms guaranteed by the founders of republics such as the United States of America.

The Travels of Marco Polo

When thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Venetians called Marco Polo Il Milione, they were repeating one title of his well-read book about his travels and his life in China. (Polo’s book appeared under other titles in various translations and editions.) Il Milionereferred to the vast wealth (millions) possessed by China’s emperor, Kublai Khan.

But some of Polo’s fellow Europeans also used the term Il Milione to mean that Marco Polo told a million lies. Many couldn’t believe his tales of Kublai Khan’s magnificent empire. China seemed almost as remote as another planet; only a few other Western travelers of the thirteenth century had seen Beijing, including Polo’s father and uncle, who took the lad along on their second journey east in 1271.

Marco Polo’s knowledge of the East and its riches gained believers because he put his experiences in writing. More and more people became fascinated by his reports, and his book, known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo, became a fourteenth-century must-read. It fed hunger for silk, ceramics, and other exotic goods and drove the quest to find a sea route to transport those goods. As historian Daniel J. Boorstin puts it in his book The Discoverers, “Without Marco Polo . . . would there have been a Christopher Columbus?” You could go so far as to trace the age of European conquest and colonialism to Polo’s account of travels through the Far East.

The Declaration of Independence

 When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Say what? It’s my pared-down version of the opening sentence from a great document written largely by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 (see the previous chapter for more on that monumental date).

The Revolutionary War was already on, so the Declaration of Independence wasn’t about war as much as it was an explanation of why America’s colonial leaders felt they had to do what they were doing. For example, it’s full of specific grievances against King George III. But Jefferson — with assists from Benjamin Franklin and John Adams — also did a brilliant job of summing up some of the most compelling political and social philosophy to come out of the eighteenth century philosophical movement, the Enlightenment. Here’s a perfect example:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration doesn’t mention women and didn’t apply to all men — it excluded slaves. Still, Jefferson’s were powerful words. The document says that people have not just a right but a responsibility to stand up to government when the exercise of authority is unjust. Those words echoed through the rest of the eighteenth century, the two centuries that followed it, and into this one. (Chapter 15 has more about revolutionary philosophies.)

The Bill of Rights

Drawn up in 1789 and added to the U.S. Constitution on December 15, 1791, the first ten Constitutional amendments were powerful afterthoughts intended to limit the power of government and to guarantee certain rights — civil liberties — to everybody.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion come from the First Amendment, which specifically guarantees those freedoms. The Second Amendment, the one that begins, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State . . . ”, is the one that gun control advocates and gun-rights advocates continue to argue about more than 200 years after it was passed.

People argue all the time about the Bill of Rights. Everyday citizens, members of Congress, talk show hosts, and judges interpret and reinterpret this essential American document. Supreme Court justices spend much of their time deciding what the framers of the Constitution meant when they wrote these amendments.

Debatable but indelible, the Bill of Rights provides a permanent curb on what government can get away with. Like the Declaration of Independence, these amendments have been copied and elaborated upon by many other democracies around the world.

The Communist Manifesto

The 1848 Communist Manifesto and its 1869 sequel, Das Kapital, seem thoroughly discredited now. The biggest governments founded upon Das Kapital’s arguments collapsed (the Soviet Union in 1991) or made concessions to private property and individual incentive (the People’s Republic of China).

Still, the worldwide impact of this economic-political treatise by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has been incredible. The work has incited numerous revolutions and drastically reshaped societies.

The Communist Manifesto attacks government, religion, and traditional culture as tools of a repressive capitalist class, defined as people who own factories and mines and use other people to get profit from these properties. Marx and Engels present communism — with collective ownership of industry and farms and equal distribution of resources among everybody — as the only economic system fair to everybody. In theory, their arguments struck a powerful chord among working people worldwide in the nineteenth century. In practice, no so-called communist society ever achieved anything close to its ideal of a classless society in which all are equal and none enjoy special privilege. Communist party leaders in the Soviet Union, for example, became a new aristocracy, enjoying the confiscated summer homes that had once belonged to Russian nobles.

Despite such failures, socialist ideas linked to Marx’s theories are still powerful influences on workers’ rights and government responsibility in virtually every developed country. Western European nations, with their national health services, generous unemployment benefits, and numerous government-run social programs, are widely understood to be socialist democracies. Even in the United States, where socialism has long been considered a dirty word, labor protection laws and programs such as Medicare and Social Security are rooted in the socialist concept of a society’s responsibility to its citizens.

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, set forth in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, underlies the way scientists ever since Darwin approach the study of living things. Modern biology, anthropology, and paleontology are all based on the idea of evolution.

In the nineteenth century, most naturalists thought that plant and animal varieties were unchanged since God created the world. Others acknowledged change but thought that a trait acquired in life could be passed on to offspring, as in a mare with a bad hoof giving birth to a limping colt. In his 20s, Darwin (1809–1892) traveled around the world as a naturalist onboard a British naval survey ship. His observations made him doubt both theories.

The idea of species evolving by natural selection is called Darwinism even though Darwin recognized at least 20 other scientists who had proposed similar ideas. What Darwin did that the others didn’t, though, was support his theory with boatloads of hard data from all over the world.

Darwin also wrote in plain enough language that anybody could read On the Origin of Species. This accessibility brought him fame but also attracted opposition. Many religious people decried any theory of life that didn’t rely on direct divine intervention. Some religious conservatives were especially shocked at the Darwinist notion that humankind evolved like other animals.

Others hijacked Darwin’s ideas and applied them incorrectly to human society in ways that led to some of the twentieth century’s most shameful episodes. Even respected scholars and government leaders in the U.S. bought into the false idea that members of certain ethnic groups and social classes are more highly evolved than other people. This belief led to state laws that allowed doctors and judges to order involuntary sterilization of citizens judged to be “unfit” to reproduce. These victims included the mentally and physically ill but also habitual criminals, alcoholics, and even the unemployed. Germany’s anti-Semitic National Socialist party used such American laws as a template when fashioning the policies that eventually led to wholesale slaughter of Jews and others deemed undesirable by dictator Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, scientists made legitimate use of Darwin’s ideas by developing such fields of study as genetics and molecular genetics. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the study of DNA led to an ever more detailed and complex understanding of how living things pass on genes to their offspring and how evolution actually works.