Periodisation, the splitting of history into neat ’n’ discrete temporal chunks, is a time-honoured
matter of debate among historians. Where are the boundaries? Why are they where they are? Can
periodisation even work in a global context?
Today, i will answer none of these questions, nor even attempt to seriously tackle the subject. For
this is not a post about where the ages of man truly start and end. It is a post about how my brain
reacts when it sees a year number and thinks “oh, yeah, that’s in… uh, that part of history”. What’s
ancient? What’s mediæval? I dunno, but my subconscious sure does!
Left to right: the
Palace of Minos, King
Ur-Pabilsag, the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro
The invention of writing is as good a time to start the clock on “history” as any, so
circa 3500 BCE it is. It’s probably unfair to have a giant chunk
of nearly three thousand years — as long as the entire rest of history — all by itself, split into
nothing else, but when was the last time you saw an exact date in the negative four-figure
range?
This is the good stuff. I’ve chosen to start the clock not at the founding of Rome but at the
(probably semi-mythical) date of the first Olympics, because Ancient Greece has always been cooler
than Ancient Rome. (I can’t take a language where ⟨v⟩ is pronounced /w/ seriously.)
Left to right: the Vienna Dioscurides, Emperor Justinian, the Arch of Ctesiphon
I think most people generally have a decent idea of where the boundary between the Middle Ages and
the modern day lies — somewhere around the end of the fifteenth century — but the line between
antiquity and mediæval times has always been fuzzier, and i’ve never been sure where to draw it.
After Julian died in 363, his successor was the last to rule over the empire undivided, the
classical pagan relative tolerance of “anything but” giving way to the mediæval Christian doctrine
of “nothing except”. It’s hard for me to fully accept what historians call “late antiquity” as
firmly set in either era, so here it sits as its own weird little thing.
Left to right: an Aztec tlacochcalcatl, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Baghdad House of Wisdom
The rise of Islam as a conquering force cements in stone the end of any vestiges of the classical
era; where Christians start their calendar at the birth of Jesus, Muslims have their epoch at the
year that Muhammad and his followers fled Mecca for Medina, which seems a useful line in the sand.
Left to right: Columbus arrives in the Americas, The Night Watch, Akbar’s court
If ever there was a single date that parts The World Before and The World After, a horrible
axis mundi on which history turns, Columbus’ arrival in America was it. Two parts of the
world which had been isolated for millennia1
were suddenly, irreversibly welded together, bringing untold riches and untold destruction. So much
was gained, and so much more was lost. Entire cultures were snuffed out in the pursuit of sugar, and
from their ashes new ones grew. It’s hard to imagine what world we would live in without the
Santa María.
Left to right: the industrial revolution, Napoleon returns from Elba, the Meiji restoration
That’s not “1776” as in the American revolution, or even “1776” as in Adam Smith, but “1776” as in
the year James Watt sold his first steam engine. At the start of this era, Manchester was a modest
town of perhaps no more than fifty thousand people. By its end, it had ballooned to a heaving
industrial city of seven hundred thousand. That about sums it up: for all the wealth made
by colonial plunder, this was the age where humanity truly began to prosper.
My natural impulse was to start our current age of history at 1945: the end of the war, the start of
decolonisation, the thundering beginning of the atomic age… but, thinking about it, it’s all about
what feels like history. I’m not sure me and someone from ancient Greece would have much in
common to talk about — nor someone from mediæval France, or even Victorian London. But around the
1920s, a switch flips. They have cars. They have fridges. They have films, and radios, and fascists.
I get the sense that a Paris cabaret girl and i share a society, a common world and ethos, in a way
that people from before the war just didn’t. You could pluck her out of history and place her down
in 2025 and, though she may be shocked at first, she’d adjust within the week. The interwar period
is, to me, the beginning of “now”.
I found out from
a chain of comments
on the venerable Language Hat that the Jewish surnames Katz, Matz, and
Schatz were all originally acronyms.
Katz comes from כוהן צדקkohen tsedek “righteous priest” —
you’ll of course recognise kohen as the origin of the surname Cohen, denoting
Judaism’s paternal priestly lineage.1
Matz is similarly derived from מורה צדקmore tsedek, meaning
“teacher of righteousness”, and Schatz, the odd one out, comes from
שליח ציבורshaliaẖ tsibur, referring to a
cantor, though more literally translated as
“emissary of the congregation”.
Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, bastard children would often have their surnames
symbolically clipped just so
noöne went around thinking they had anything to do with their aristocratic fathers. Thus
Ivan Pnin was the son of Nikolaj
Repnin, and
Elizabeta Tëmkina was the
daughter of Grigorij Potëmkin.
This isn’t a surname, but by all accounts it isn’t a given name either, and once you’ve noticed it,
you’ll never be able to unsee it. The name Jebediah does not exist.
Jedediah was a very real Biblical figure after whom many a son has been named, but
there’s no variant of any real-life person being named Jebediah with a
B. (I know what you’re thinking — but, nope, Jeb Bush’s name is… an
acronym, again, for John Ellis Bush.)
There’s this weird inconsistency in English in how we treat the names of people from cultures where
the surname comes first. Chinese and Korean people usually keep the original order:
Qian Xuesen and Bong Joon-ho are indeed from the families Qian and Bong, and it would
be quite the faux pas to refer to “Mr Joon-ho”.
Japanese names are less consistent — traditionally they’ve been flipped to conform to the English
order, so Hayao Miyazaki was born to a Mr and Mrs Miyazaki, but the trend in recent times has
been to restore them to the original order, such that the former foreign secretary officially styles
himself as Kōno Tarō, born to Kōno Yōhei.
Then, at the bottom of the ladder, there sits Hungary, whose names are so European-sounding and so
universally reordered that most people don’t even realise that, in his home country, the prime
minister is called Orbán Viktor. (This gets even more confusing with middle names — the mayor
of Budapest, known elsewhere as Gergely Szilveszter Karácsony, is natively
Karácsony Gergely Szilveszter, his given name nestled squarely in the middle!)
One last onomastic oddity. In olden days, the capital letter F was
written as if double struck, looking like two lowercase f’s put side-by-side. This was copied
and copied and misread over and over again until it became the case that some particularly snooty
English surnames were properly spelt to begin in lowercase — such as in the cases of
Gonville ffrench-Beytagh
and Charles ffoulkes. Truly, the irregularities of our language’s orthography know no bounds.
