- What are the ages of history?
- Why is the story divided into ages?
- Prehistory (2,500,000 BC - 3,300 BC)
- Ancient Age (3,300 BC - AD 476)
- Middle Ages (476-1492)
- Modern Age (1492-1789)
- Contemporary Age (1789 - today)
We explain what the ages of history are, the characteristics of each one and the events that mark their beginnings and ends.
What are the ages of history?
The ages of history are the different epochs or segments of time into which the history of the humanity, with the purpose of facilitating its study and being able to understand its movements and main patterns. These are conventional, relatively arbitrary divisions, continually elaborated and revised by scholars of the subject for centuries.
Narrowing down and organizing the history of humanity is not a simple matter. On the one hand, the origins of our species are prior to those of an organized civilization and much prior to the invention of a method of writing that would allow the recording of events and human thoughts.
On the other hand, the human species is immensely diverse, and attempts to define unique criteria to think about its particular evolution up to the present tend to leave out the particularities of other species. cultures, since it is not easy to decide what is "normal" or "usual".
Every human civilization has arisen in a context specific: a place, a time and specific conditions, which defined their way of being and their challenges and opportunities. For this reason, it is not easy to judge a distant civilization with the criteria of another.
Even so, historians have tried to find a model that allows more or less to take into account the majority of human cultures throughout their historical journey, and although it is not a perfect model or devoid of exceptions, it is up to now the most accepted and popular: the four ages of history.
Why is the story divided into ages?
The currently accepted division of history was not always in effect, and is more of a recent invention. Throughout many centuries, humanity divided its own history according to mythological, religious or imaginary criteria, going to what they had more at hand to define what were the great historical milestones of the species and what, probably, its future.
Thus, the great religions proposed their models of history based on their sacred texts, such as the Bible, which were used in search of ancient stories to organize the past.
In fact, the traditional way of organizing historical time in the West has as its central element the birth of the prophet of Christianity, Jesus Christ, and there is still talk of events located “before Christ” (BC) and “after Christ” (AD), a trend that modern historians try to rethink in less culturally biased terms.
The current division of history into four ages (five, with the prehistory) arose thanks to the proposals of numerous historians and scholars. Thus, the terms "Old age”, “Middle Ages" Y "Modern age"Were proposed in 1685 by the German historian Cristobal Cellarius (1638-1707), in a school manual of his authorship, and were so successful that they were soon copied in later studies.
Until that moment, the prevailing model was based on the Bible and the Old Testament, and proposed six ages of the world, the last of which had begun with Jesus Christ and was prior to the Apocalypse or Final Judgment to come.
Instead, the term "Contemporary Age" appeared in the 19th century, as a way of making sense of the profound rupture that the French Revolution had meant in modern history.
Logically, any model of periodization of history requires milestones or key events that mark the beginning and end of an era, and that is also subject to debate among specialists, since an event of vital importance in a region was not necessarily one. for other distant cultures. In any case, we must understand that the current model is a vision that is constantly being reviewed and criticized.
Prehistory (2,500,000 BC - 3,300 BC)
Prehistory, in strict terms, is not part of human history, but encompasses all time and all the events that were prior to the invention of writing, that is, prior to the invention of some form of record that allows us Obtain reliable sources of what happened.
Without them, we have nothing but myths, legends and stories transmitted orally from generation to generation. These accounts are for the most part removed from any notion of historical objectivity, and are rather prone to fable and the allegory.
So that of prehistory, and especially of remote prehistory, there is little that we can know directly, other than by studying archaeological remains obtained throughout the world. The paradox is that prehistory is the longest period and the most significant changes that humanity has experienced.
In fact, it extends from the appearance of the first hominids, our evolutionary ancestors, around 10 million years ago, through the emergence and triumph of the Homo sapiens over the rest of the human species (2,500,000 years ago) and its expansion throughout the world, until the invention of the first writing system in the Middle East around 3,300 BC. C.
In this long period of time the human being learned to master fire, to communicate with a language oral articulated, to make and use increasingly complex lithic and then metal tools, and finally to master the revolutionary art of farming, which forever changed their wandering way of life, thus giving rise to the first human settlements, which later were the first cities.
Prehistory is commonly divided into six distinct stages, grouped into two different eras. It is difficult to locate these lapses in a specific date, since they did not occur uniformly and simultaneously in all prehistoric human civilizations, but rather depended largely on what was in their surroundings.
The Stone Age or Lithic Stage, so called because most of the utensils obtained from archaeological finds are made of various types of stone and bone. This stage is also marked by the invention of the wheel, the domestication of fire and the invention of clothing, as well as by the global human expansion and its partial abandonment of the primitive hunter-gatherer model, in favor of an agricultural model. sedentary. This stage would be divided, in turn, into two eras:
- It was paleolithic, whose name means "ancient stone" and covers the events prior to the discovery and adoption of agriculture.
- Neolithic era, whose name means "new stone" and covers the events of the new model of agricultural existence, until the invention of metal handling.
Age of metals, whose name evidences the appearance in the prehistoric finds of forged elements of metals different, which shows the appearance of metallurgy and foundry. This age is traditionally divided into three different segments, defined by the appearance of a specific and more complex handling metal, as follows:
- Copper age, the first of all, in which this metal makes its appearance, along with gold and silver, perhaps because they appear naturally as nuggets of native metal. The oldest copper object in the world is an oval pendant from ancient Iran, dated to 9,500 BC. However, copper begins to be widely used 3,000 years later, around 6,500 BC. C.
- Bronze age, especially in the peoples of Eurasia, it is evidence of a greater degree of metallurgical knowledge, since bronze is obtained through the alloy copper and tin. It is known that this metal began to be used in Mesopotamia, and it was ideal for the manufacture of utensils, idols, statues and weapons (spears, shields, etc.).
- Iron age, the last of prehistory, in which the human being finally knew iron and some of its various alloys. The first traces of iron probably had a meteoric origin, and it took humans centuries to understand its value as a raw material, becoming the most coveted metal in the world. The iron forge gave way to more resistant implements and weapons, and made the military difference of some peoples over others.
Ancient Age (3,300 BC - AD 476)
The historical period that began with the invention of writing in the Middle East, around the 3rd millennium BC, is known as the Ancient Age or Antiquity. C., in which the first great human civilizations (known as ancient civilizations), mostly of imperial and dynastic court, whose knowledge, products and compositions are to a great extent still in force.
In ancient times the first cities arose, as part of a formal urbanization process. Was also born Condition, the right and the law, the can political and social classes, in addition to the first texts religious, mythological and artistic of humanity.
It was also the time of origin of the great religions current: the buddhism, the Christianity, the Judaism, the Islam, Taoism, etc. It is, as will be seen, the era in which the cultural and social foundations of the world we know were established.
Some of the most prominent ancient civilizations were Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian), Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Phoenician, Hebrew and Roman, among others.
Among the multiple states that were founded, the periodization of history stands out Roman empire, an institution to which the West owes directly or indirectly most of its cultural tradition. So much so, that the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. C., is considered the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the European Middle Ages.
Antiquity is usually divided into two different stages:
- Classical antiquity, period of flourishing of the great ancient empires throughout the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BC. C., and especially the expansion of Greco-Roman culture, whose peak is the emergence of the Roman Republic (500-27 BC) and its subsequent transformation into the Roman Empire (27 BC).
- Late antiquity, started around the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. C., is a stage of crisis that will lead to the decline of the Roman Empire and its increasingly common wars intestines (such as the Spartacus uprising) and foreign invasions (such as the Germanic invasions). In addition, it was the time of expansion of Christianity by the Empire, becoming its official religion.
Middle Ages (476-1492)
The Middle Ages or Middle Ages is the stage following the Ancient Ages, but it is a division that for many reflects only the history of Western civilization, that is, of Europe and its surrounding regions.
It is supposed to begin with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. C. and extends for almost a thousand years until the discovery of America in 1492 or the fall of the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) to the Ottoman troops in 1453.
Initially, those who conceived the Middle Ages thought of it as a period without much value, a dark corridor between the great civilizations of Classical Antiquity (especially the Greco-Roman) and the Renaissance and the era of reason typical of the modern age.
For a long time it was thought that the Middle Ages had been a period of obscurantism and little or no artistic and philosophical production, under the rule of the Christian religion that extended for centuries in the West. Today we know that this is not so.
The Middle Ages was, without a doubt, an era of religious fanaticism and abandonment of the social models of antiquity, in favor of a feudal model which assigned the aristocracy control of the numerous Christian kingdoms of the West, all under the spiritual rule of the Pope in Rome.
However, in the regions neighboring Europe, new political forms emerged according to their own tradition, such as the Islamic Caliphates, eternal rivals of Christianity.
Christian and Muslim civilizations starred in the so-called “clash of civilizations” that spawned numerous wars of conquest and reconquest, such as the Crusades, and that broke the Mediterranean cultural unity forever.
The Middle Ages is usually divided into two great periods:
- The High Middle Ages or Early Middle Ages, which spans between the 5th and 10th centuries, although for many scholars part of it could be better understood as part of Late Antiquity. There is no concrete limit between one stage and the other.
- The Low Middle Ages or Late Middle Ages, which extends between the 11th and 15th centuries, and is characterized by an initial moment of plenitude (11th to 13th centuries) and then a stage of deep crisis of the feudal model, which would set the conditions for the arrival of the Modern Age.
Modern Age (1492-1789)
Understood between the 15th and 18th centuries, the Modern Age is a brief but significant period in Universal History, characterized by the Renaissance of the classical culture of Europe and the beginning of the so-called Age of Reason, in which the foundations were laid. for him scientific thought and the religious, superstitious and fanatical values of the Middle Ages were combated.
The Modern Age is understood as an artistic and philosophical flowering in the West, whose peak is the birth of the science. Furthermore, the separation between religion and state put an end to the feudal model of the Middle Ages and increasingly granted power to a new social class: the bourgeoisie.
This new social class, made up of merchants and businessmen, whose management of capital gave them more and more power and prestige, came to displace the aristocracy as the dominant social class. The most representative event of this was the French Revolution of 1789, or the Independence of the United States from the British Empire in 1776. Both events are considered to be the end of the Modern Age.
During the Modern Age there was the exploration and colonization of the American continent by the Empires of Europe, as well as their first explorations of Oceania. In fact, this period is considered the beginning of Europe's colonial relationship with the rest of the world.
In fact, powers European policies and economies competed with each other for control of trade routes and raw Materials of the entire world. The Mercantilism was the spirit of the age, and absolutist monarchies the dominant political regime in Europe.
Contemporary Age (1789 - today)
The last of the divisions of history is the one that culminates with the present, and is considered a stage of accelerated and sudden changes marked by the hand of science and technology. The foundations of this era emerged throughout the nineteenth century, when the Illustration The French promoted the values of the French Revolution in the West and in the world, thus giving rise to the beginning of the wars of independence and decolonization in America, Asia Y Africa.
These events marked the end of European rule over the entire world, and this in turn led to two major world wars, in which the inventiveness and scientific dominance of humanity was put to the test in the worst possible way: massacring their fellow men. Behold, the 20th century, in particular, has been a time of profound pessimism and depression in Western culture.
On the other hand, the modernization of most aspects of human life led to the emergence of a world civilization guided by the values of the world. liberalism, materialism and production, thus engendering the so-called consumer society.
What was formerly the conflict between religions or civilizations, occurred then in terms of political ideology, especially in the confrontation between the collectivist ideas of the socialism or the communism, and the freedoms individual defended by the capitalism liberal.
In fact, the collapse of the European empires allowed the rise of two new world powers: the United States and the Soviet Union, each one at the head of these two new world blocs.
The exploration of outer space, the explosion of the first atomic bombs, the globalization and the creation of the first institutions multilateral international holocaust Jew during the WWII and the invention of pills contraceptives, which in turn led to a sexual revolution in the mid-20th century.