Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A Chronology of Ideas

Some dates, especially the early ones, are approximate

60,000–40,000 years ago: ‘Creative explosion’: cave art and carvings in abundance

14,000–6,000 years ago: domestication of plants and animals

11,000 BC: first use of clay

5500 BC: first writing, in India

after 2900 BC: Gilgamesh – first imaginative epic

2100 BC: first legal code

2000 BC: invention of the wheel

before 1200 BC: first alphabet

640 BC: invention of money

600 BC: first evidence for written Latin

585 BC: Thales of Miletus predicts solar eclipse: for Aristotle this was the moment when science and philosophy began

538 BC: Buddha begins his travels

507 BC: democracy introduced in Athens by Cleisthenes

after 336 BC: Aristotle classifies the world

mid-third century BC: Aristarchus proposes that the earth goes around the sun

second century BC: paper in use in China

160 BC: concepts of Resurrection and the Messiah gain wide currency in Israel

120 BC: the term ‘Judaism’ first used in Second Book of Maccabees

First century AD: wheelbarrow invented in China

33 AD: Paul converted

80 AD: compass in use in China

170s AD: four Christian Gospels emerge

before 242 AD: Neoplatonism flourishes in Alexandria

431 AD: Mary beatified as the Mother of God

570 AD: birth of Muhammad

633 AD: Qu’ran collated

eighth century AD: crop rotation system introduced

751 AD: paper reaches the West from China

904–906 AD: gunpowder first used in anger in China

after 1001 AD: Leif Eriksson explores Vinland

1087 AD: Irnerius teaches law at Bologna University

1094/1117 AD: first named teachers at Oxford

late thirteenth/early fourteenth century AD: origins of capitalism and banking in Italy

early fourteenth century AD: explosion of universities in Europe, first hints of perspective in Western art

late fourteenth century AD: double entry bookkeeping in use

1403 AD: movable type in use in Korea

1440 AD: invention of printing

after 1450 AD: rediscovery of Plato in Europe

1506 AD: first printed map to show America

1517 AD: Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church: the Reformation

1519 AD: Magellan discovers southern route to Pacific and his assistant Sebastián del Cano circumnavigates the earth

1525 AD: Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, led by Anabaptists

1543 AD: Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs; Vesalius, The Structure of the Human Body

1605 AD: Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; William Shakespeare, King Lear and Macbeth; Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 1 (part 2, 1615)

1619 AD: René Descartes conceives the significance of doubt, and the mind-body dualism

after 1625 AD: rise of the novel

1669 AD: fossils first recognised as residue of living creatures

1670 AD: Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus

1675–1683 AD: Van Leeuwenhoek discovers protozoa, spermatoza, bacteria

early eighteenth century AD: rise of newspapers; learned journals and concert halls proliferate – emergence of the ‘public sphere’; Index of Prohibited Books in China

1721 AD: first factory, in Derby

1729 AD: electricity transmitted over distance

1740s AD: David Hume attacks Christianity

after 1750 AD: the Great Awakening in America

1760 AD: Industrial Revolution begins

1789 AD: French Revolution, Declaration of the Rights of Man, in France; Bentham, ‘felicific calculus’

1790 AD: the term ‘middle classes’ first used

late eighteenth century AD: textual criticism of the Bible begins at Göttingen; vulcanism and neptunism – rival theories of the history of the earth

1805 AD: Beethoven, Eroica symphony

1816 AD: first functioning telegraph; the term ‘Hindoo’ first used (hitherto ‘Gentoo’)

1831 AD: British Association for the Advancement of Science formed

after 1833AD: the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’ introduced

1838 AD: Comte coins the term ‘sociology’, the term ‘palaeontology’ first used

1840 AD: Louis Agassiz identifies the ice age

1848 AD: revolution in several European cities; Robert Owen shows vertebrates have a similar structure

1856 AD: Neanderthal skull discovered in Germany

1859 AD: Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, identifies natural selection as the mechanism by means of which evolution proceeds; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

1864, 1879, 1893 and 1899 AD: papal edicts against modernism, biblical criticism and science

1874 AD: Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, opened

1880 AD: Jacob Breuer treats Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O’)

1885 AD: Pasteur discovers rabies vaccine

1897 AD: discovery of the electron – founding of particle physics; Emile Durkheim, Suicide

1899–1900 AD: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, lays the foundations of psychoanalysis