History of the world

The history of the world is the recorded memory of the experience of Homo sapiens. Ancient human historybegins with the invention, independently at several sites on Earth, of writing, which created the infrastructure for lasting, accurately transmitted memories and thus for the diffusion and growth of knowledge.Nevertheless, an appreciation of the roots of civilization requires at least cursory consideration to humanity's prehistory.

During the Agricultural Revolution between 8,500 and 7,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent humans began the systematic husbandry of plants and animals — agriculture. It spread to neighboring regions, and also developed independently elsewhere, until most humans lived sedentary lives as farmers in permanent settlements centered about life-sustaining bodies of water. The relative security and increased productivity provided by farming allowed these communities to expand. They grew over time into increasingly larger units in parallel with the evolution of ever more efficient means of transport.

Surplus food made possible an increasing division of labor, the rise of a leisured upper class, and the development of cities and thus of civilization. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting. Beginning in the Bronze Age this led to writing.

Civilizations developed on the banks of rivers. By 3,000 BCE they had arisen in the Middle East's Mesopotamia (the "land between the Rivers" Euphrates and Tigris),[9] on the banks of Egypt's River Nile, in India's Indus River valley,[13][14][15] and along the great rivers of China.

The history of the Old World is commonly divided into Antiquity (in the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean basin of classical antiquity, ancient China, and ancient India, up to about the 6th century); the Middle Ages, from the 6th through the 15th centuries; the Early Modern period,] including the European Renaissance, from the 16th century to about 1750; and the Modern period, from the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, beginning about 1750, to the present. In Europe, the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE) is commonly taken as signaling the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

A thousand years later, in the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of modern printing, employing movable type, revolutionized communication, helping end the Middle Ages and usher in modern times, the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.

By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology, especially in Europe, had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Over the quarter-millennium since, the growth of knowledge, technology, commerce, and of the potential destructiveness of war has accelerated, creating the opportunities and perils that now confront the human communities that inhabit the planet.