the-french-artist/wikipedia_20220301.simple_sentence_split huggingface dataset:
opened 15 December 1906; closed 30 July 1934, between  and .
opened 15 December 1906; closed 21 May 1932, between  and .
Osterley & Spring Grove first served 13 March 1933; closed 24 March 1934 between  and .
It was replaced by Osterley.
opened 23 June 1903; closed 5 July 1931.
Although on the route of the current Piccadilly line, a short distance north of the present  station, it was never served by Piccadilly line trains.
It was opened by the District line, the original operator of the line between  and , and was closed and replaced by the present Park Royal station before the Piccadilly line started running trains to South Harrow in 1932.
opened 15 December 1906; closed 19 September 1932, between  and .
It has been suggested that this station may be reopened to serve new developments on the nearby Kings Cross railway lands, but this idea is not being progressed at present.
The road the station served, 'York Road', has since been renamed 'York Way'.
The Piccadilly line was to be upgraded in 2014–15 and would have had new trains as well as new signalling.
This would have increased the line's capacity by some 24%.
Bids for the rolling-stock order were submitted in 2008.
However, after the acquisition of Tube Lines by Transport for London in June 2010, this order was cancelled.
Cockfosters –
Oakwood –
Southgate –
Arnos Grove –
Bounds Green –
Wood Green –
Turnpike Lane –
Manor House –
Finsbury Park –
Arsenal –
Holloway Road –
Caledonian Road –
King's Cross St. Pancras –
Russell Square –
Holborn –
Covent Garden –
Leicester Square –
Piccadilly Circus –
Green Park –
Hyde Park Corner –
Knightsbridge –
South Kensington –
Gloucester Road –
Earl's Court –
Barons Court –
Hammersmith –
Turnham Green –
Acton Town –
South Ealing –
Northfields –
Boston Manor –
Osterley –
Hounslow East –
Hounslow Central –
Hounslow West –
Hatton Cross –
Heathrow Terminal 4 –
Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3 –
Heathrow Terminal 5 –
Ealing Common –
North Ealing –
Park Royal –
Alperton –
Sudbury Town –
Sudbury Hill –
South Harrow –
Rayners Lane –
Eastcote –
Ruislip Manor –
Ruislip –
Ickenham –
Hillingdon –
Uxbridge –
Cockfosters Depot –
Northfields Depot –
Leslie Green – architect of the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway's early stations
Vauxhall Cross tube station – fictional Piccadilly line tube station
Airport rail links in London
Transport in the London Borough of Enfield
Transport in the London Borough of Hackney
Transport in the London Borough of Haringey
Transport in the London Borough of Islington
1906 establishments in England
The Olympiastadion is a sports stadium in Berlin, Germany.
It was built for the 1936 Olympic Games.
2009 World Championships in Athletics
Hertha BSC Berlin(Bundesliga home Stadium)
Official Olympiastadion Site
1997 World Championships in Athletics
2006 Eurovision Song Contest(at Olympic Hall)
2007 UEFA Champions League Final
Sports buildings in Greece
199 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) were in the Sydney Games.
Four were in the Olympics for the first time.
These were Timor-Leste, Eritrea, Micronesia and Palau.
Returned medals
Marion Jones, winner of three gold and two bronze medals for the United States, gave back her medals in October 2007.
She said she took tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a drug that could make her run faster, from September 2000 through July 2001.
On 2 August 2008, the International Olympic Committee took the gold medal from the U.S. men's 4x400-meter relay team.
Antonio Pettigrew said he used a banned substance.
Besides Pettigrew other athletes used performance-enhancing drugs.
These are twins Alvin and Calvin Harrison, and Jerome Young.
On 28 April 2010, the IOC took China's bronze medal from Gymnastics.
This was for using an underage gymnast.
Olympic Stadium: Ceremonies (opening/closing), Athletics, Football (final)
Sydney International Aquatic Centre: Diving, Modern Pentathlon (swimming) Swimming, Synchronised Swimming, Water Polo (medal events)
State Sports Centre: Table Tennis, Taekwondo
NSW Tennis Centre: Tennis
State Hockey Centre: Field Hockey
The Dome and Exhibition Complex: Badminton, Basketball, Gymnastics (rhythmic), Handball (final), Modern Pentathlon (fencing, shooting), Volleyball (indoor)
Sydney SuperDome: Gymnastics (artistic, trampoline), Basketball (final)
Sydney Baseball Stadium: Baseball, Modern Pentathlon (riding, running)
Sydney International Archery Park: Archery
Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre: Boxing, Fencing, Judo, Weightlifting, Wrestling
Sydney Entertainment Centre: Volleyball (indoor final)
Dunc Gray Velodrome: Cycling (track)
Sydney International Shooting Centre: Shooting
Sydney International Equestrian Centre: Equestrian
Sydney International Regatta Centre: Rowing, Canoeing (sprint)
Blacktown Olympic Centre: Baseball, Softball
Fairfield City Farm: Cycling (mountain biking)
Ryde Aquatic Leisure Centre: Water Polo
Penrith Whitewater Stadium: Canoeing (slalom)
Bondi Beach: Volleyball (beach)
Sydney Football Stadium: Football
Olympic Sailing Shore Base: Sailing
Centennial Parklands: Cycling (road)
Marathon course: Athletics (marathon)
North Sydney: Athletics (marathon start)
Sydney Opera House: Triathlon
Outside Sydney
Bruce Stadium, Canberra: Football
Hindmarsh Stadium, Adelaide: Football
Melbourne Cricket Ground: Football
Brisbane Cricket Ground: Football
The 2002 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XIX Olympic Winter Games, were held in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States from February 8 2002 to February 24 2002.
There were about 2,400 athletes from 77 nations.
They were in 78 events.
Utah was the fifth state in the United States to host the Olympic Games.
78 National Olympic Committees sent athletes to the Salt Lake City games.
Cameroon, Hong Kong (China), Nepal, Tajikistan, and Thailand were in their first Winter Olympic games.
The Olympic Flame was lit by the members of the gold medal-winning US Hockey Team of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY.
These Olympics were the first time a United States president opened an Olympic Winter Games.
These were the first Games to be held under IOC president Jacques Rogge.
Janica Kostelić won three golds and a silver which were the first Winter Olympic medals ever for Croatia It was the first three-gold performance by a female.
Skeleton returned as a medal sport in the 2002 Games for the first time since 1948.
2002 was the first time with the Women's Bobsled Event.
China won its first and second Winter Olympic gold medals, both by women's short-track speed skater Yang Yang (A).
One of the most memorable stories of the event was at the men's short track.
Australian skater Steven Bradbury was behind in the semi-final.
The winning skaters crashed into each other, letting him finish second and go through to the final.
Bradbury was again behind in the final.
Again all four other skaters crashed out in the final turn.
He won the gold medal.
This was the first gold for Australia—or any other country of the Southern Hemisphere—in the Olympic Winter Games.
Australia won their second gold medal when Alisa Camplin won in Women's Aerials.
This was the first ever Winter Games gold won by a woman from the Southern Hemisphere.
The Canadian men's ice hockey team defeated the American team 5–2 to claim the gold medal.
This ended 50 years without the hockey gold.
The Canadian women's team also defeated the American team 3–2.
2002 in the United States
A Stradivarius is a string instrument (such as a violin) built by the 17th century  Italian luthier Stradivari family (especially by Antonio Stradivari) that was famous for making them.
Stradivarii are known for their high quality sound and ability to last a long time without tuning.
Most of these instruments survive to this day, though few have been stolen.
They are some of the best and most expensive instruments, and even each string instrument created has a name.
So many people have wanted Stradivarii, and some have sold for more than a million dollars.
Famous violinists, such as Midori Goto or Joshua Bell have Stradivarii.
de:Antonio Stradivari#Stradivaris Instrumente
Gadolinium is a chemical element.
It has the chemical symbol Gd.
It has the atomic number 64.
It is part of a group of chemical elements in the periodic table named the Lanthanides.
It is a rare earth element.
It is silvery white, malleable and ductile.
Its main uses are as chemical compounds in color televisions and nuclear magnetic resonance radio contrast agents.
In color cathode ray tube televisions (the type first produced, not flat televisions) some of the pixels are dots gadolinium compounds.
When the electrons from the cathode ray tube hit the  pixels and transfer energy to the gadolinium compounds they give out light as energy.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging is used in medicine where it is named MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging).
It is used to take picture of inside the body.
How the pictures look is changed by the gadolinium compounds and how much water is around.
It makes the images clearer because it makes the difference in the concentration of water in different parts of the body look more clear (more contrast) in the picture that is made.
WebElements.com - Gadolinium
It's Elemental – Gadolinium
Persephone (, Persephonē) is the goddess of the dead and queen of the underworld in ancient Greek religion and myth.
She is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter and is married to the god Hades, with whom she rules over the souls of the dead.
As a vegetation goddess, she presided over the bounty of the harvest as it emerged during the season of spring.
Persephone and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised initiates a reward in the afterlife.
The tale of her being abducted by Hades, during which she was tricked into eating seeds from a pomegranate (the food of the dead), served to explain the cause of the seasons, and is one prominently featured in ancient Greek literature.
Her symbols included the pomegranate, flowers and seeds of grain.
During the summer she would rise up from the underworld to be with her mother demeter.
The goddess Proserpina is her Roman counterpart.
The German Bundestag (commonly referred to as Bundestag) is the legislature of Germany.
It meets in Berlin, in the Reichstag building, which was specially rebuilt ready for the Bundestag to move from Bonn.
The Bundestag has at least 598 members.
Every 4 years the German people vote.
After the 2017 election there were 709 members.
In the election of 26 September 2021, 735 members were assigned - the base 598 seats plus 137 overhang and leveling seats.
The next elections are in 2025.
A party gets seats when it gets at least 5% of the votes.
Every voter has two votes, one for a person and one for a party.
299 members each represent a constituency, just as in the British House of Commons or the US House of Representatives.
The other half are elected from a party list in each Land.
The total number of seats a party gets depends on the number of the second "party votes" it gets.
But if a party wins more constituency seats than its share of the party votes, then it keeps those extra seats.
These extra seats, or extra mandates, are the reason the Bundestag sometimes has more than 598 members.
If a party gets extra mandates, the other parties get some extra seats too to make sure every party gets exactly its share of party seats.
This system of giving extra mandates was changed in 2013.
Before 2013, if a party won extra mandates, then it got to put more members in the Bundestag, which gave the party more influence over the Bundestag than it won in the elections.
The Bundestag president is named Bärbel Bas.
She oversees the sessions of the body.
Politics of Germany#Bundestag (election results of 2013)
German federal election, 2017
Parliaments
The 1..F.C Nürnberg is a football club from Nuremberg, Germany.
It was founded on May 4, 1900.
The manager are Andreas Bornemann (Sports) and Michael Meeske (Finance).
The coach is Michael Köllner.
Bundesliga : 9
1920, 1921, 1924, 1925, 1927, 1936, 1948, 1961, 1968
Winners of the DFB-Pokal : 4
Heinrich Stuhlfauth
Dieter Eckstein
Ferdinand Wenauer
Franz Brungs
Robert Vittek
07.01.1963 - 10.30.1963 Herbert Widmayer
11.01.1963 - 06.30.1964 Jeno Csaknady
07.01.1964 - 06.30.1965 Gunter Baumann
07.01.1965 - 11.07.1966 Jeno Csaknady
11.08.1966 - 12.31.1966 Jenő Vincze
01.03.1967 - 03.24.1969 Max Merkel
03.25.1969 - 04.12.1969 Robert Körner
04.13.1969 - 06.30.1970 Kuno Klötzer
07.01.1970 - 06.30.1971 Thomas Barthel
07.01.1971 - 08.01.1971 Slobodan Mihajlovic
08.02.1971 - 12.05.1971 Fritz Langner
12.06.1971 - 06.30.1973 Zlatko Čajkovski
07.01.1973 - 06.30.1976 Hans Tilkowski
07.01.1976 - 05.19.1978 Horst Buhtz
05.20.1978 - 12.20.1978 Werner Kern
12.21.1978 - 06.30.1979 Robert Gebhardt
07.01.1979 - 08.18.1979 Jeff Vliers
08.19.1979 - 06.30.1980 Robert Gebhardt
07.01.1980 - 03.03.1981 Horst Heese
03.04.1981 - 05.26.1981 Fritz Popp
05.27.1981 - 06.30.1981 Fred Hoffmann
07.01.1981 - 09.08.1981 Heinz Elzner
09.09.1981 - 10.25.1983 Udo Klug
10.26.1983 - 12.06.1983 Rudi Kröner
12.07.1983 - 12.31.1983 Fritz Popp
01.01.1984 - 06.30.1988 Heinz Höher
07.01.1988 - 04.09.1990 Hermann Gerland
04.10.1990 - 06.30.1990 Dieter Lieberwirth
07.01.1990 - 06.30.1991 Arie Haan
07.01.1991 - 11.09.1993 Willi Entenmann
11.10.1993 - 01.02.1994 Dieter Renner
01.03.1994 - 12.31.1994 Rainer Zobel
01.01.1995 - 06.30.1995 Günter Sebert
07.01.1995 - 04.30.1996 Hermann Gerland
05.01.1996 - 08.30.1997 Willi Entenmann
09.01.1997 - 06.30.1998 Felix Magath
07.01.1998 - 11.30.1998 Willi Reimann
12.01.1998 - 12.31.1998 Thomas Brunner
01.01.1999 - 02.18.2000 Friedel Rausch
02.19.2000 - 03.02.2000 Thomas Brunner
03.03.2000 - 04.29.2003 Klaus Augenthaler
04.30.2003 - 10.31.2005 Wolfgang Wolf
11.01.2005 - 11.08.2005 Dieter Lieberwirth
11.09.2005 - 02.11.2008 Hans Meyer
02.12.2008 - 08.28.2008 Thomas von Heesen
08.02.2008 - 21.12.2009 Michael Oenning
22.12.2009 - 31.12.2012 Dieter Hecking
01.01.2013 - Michael Wiesinger
The players in the season 2012/13
Raphael Schäfer (2001-2007, since 2008)
Patrick Rakovsky (since 2011)
Samuel Radlinger (since 2014)
Even Hovland (since 2014)
Dave Bulthuis (since 2014)
Özgür Özdemir (since 2014)
Javier Horacio Pinola (since 2005)
Ondřej Čelůstka (since 2014)
Cristian Ramírez (since 2014)
Ondřej Petrák (since 2014)
Tobias Pachonik (since 2010)
Manuel Bihr (since 2012)
Jürgen Mössmer (since 2014)
Danny Blum (since 2014)
Jan Polák (since 2014)
Timo Gebhart (since 2012)
Robert Koch (since 2014)
Niklas Stark (since 2004)
Willi Evseev (since 2014)
Mike Ott (since 2014)
Daniel Candeias (since 2014)
Markus Mendler (since 2010)
Alessandro Schöpf (since 2014)
Jakub Sylvestr (since 2014)
Niclas Füllkrug (since 2014)
Peniel Mlapa (since 2014)
Maximilian Dittgen (since 2013)
The history of the world (also called human history) is the study of what the entire human race did in the past.
It includes the time from prehistory to the present day.
It is different from natural history.
Development of the human species
Modern human beings are called Homo sapiens ('wise man').
They have existed for about 250,000 years.
Biologists believe that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.
Homo sapiens, lived at the same time as  other species of human.
These included Homo erectus ('standing man') and Homo neanderthalensis ('man from Neanderthal').
The theory of human evolution says that modern humans, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus slowly developed from other earlier species of human-like creatures.
Homo neanderthalensis are the first humans scientists discovered which were not Homo sapiens.
Homo neanderthalensis are usually called Neanderthal Man.
They were discovered when the cranium of a skull was found in the Neanderthal Valley in 1856.
It was different from a modern human skull so scientists believed it was from a new species.
Entire Neanderthal skeletons have been found in other places since then.
When ancient stone tools are found, their style often shows whether they were made by Homo sapiens or Neanderthals (see Palaeolithic).
Neanderthals existed before modern humans.
They knew how to use tools and fire.
Scientists believe that Homo sapiens spread from Africa to all other parts of the world, replacing Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia.
By the end of the Stone Age, it is believed that Homo sapiens were the only type of humans left.
Influence of climate
Climate is the normal weather in a place.
It changes from one part of the world to another.
Some areas are hot all year, and some are cold all year.
Some areas are dry all year, and others are wet all year.
Most areas have climates that are warmer in the summer and cooler in the winter.
Most parts of the world get rain at some times of the year and do not get rain at other times of the year.
Some parts of the world have oceanic climates and others have alpine climates.
Climate affects what food people eat.
This is because climate affects what foods can grow.
If one food is easier to grow, people usually eat that food more often than other foods.
Foods that people eat more of than other foods are called staple foods.
Staple foods are usually grains or vegetables because they are easy to grow.
Wheat, maize, millet, rice, oats, rye, potatoes, yams, breadfruit and beans are examples of different staple foods from around the world.
Climate can affect the way people live in many other ways.
It affects the types of animals that can live in any area, which affect the types of meats that are available to eat.
The climate on earth has not stayed the same through human history.
There are long periods of time when it is generally warmer, and there are long periods of time when it is generally colder.
When it is generally colder, there is more ice on the poles of the planet.
A cold period is called an ice age.
There have been many ice ages in the history of the earth.
Two have affected humans.
From 70,000 to around 10,000 years ago there was a big ice age which affected humans and the way that they lived.
Between 1600 AD and 1900 AD there was a period called the Little Ice Age when the climate was a little bit colder than usual.
The word "Prehistory" means "before history".
It is used for the long period of time before humans began to write about their lives.
This time is divided into two main ages: the Paleolithic Age (or Early Stone Age) and the Neolithic Age  (or late Stone Age).
The two ages did not start and end at the same time everywhere.
A place moved from one age to another depending on when people changed their technology.
The end of prehistory varies from one place to another.
It depends on the date when that place began to use writing.
In Egypt the first written documents date from around 3200 BC.
In Australia the first written records date from 1788 and in New Guinea from about 1900.
Paleolithic Era
The Paleolithic Era is by far the longest age of humanity's time, about 99% of human history.
The Paleolithic Age started about 2.6  million years ago and ended around 10,000 BC.
The age began when hominids (early humans) started to use stones as tools for bashing, cutting and scraping.
The age ended when humans began to plant crops and have other types of agriculture.
In some areas, such as Western Europe, the way that people lived was affected by the Ice age.
In these places, people moved towards agriculture quicker than in warmer places where there was always lots of food to gather.
Their culture is sometimes called the Mesolithic Era (Middle Stone Age).
During the Paleolithic Era humans grouped together in small bands.
They lived by gathering plants and hunting wild animals.
This way of living is called a "hunter-gatherer society".
People hunted small burrowing animals like rabbits, as well as birds and herds of animals like deer and cattle.
They also gathered plants to eat, including grains.
Grain often grows on grasslands where herds of grass-eating animals are found.
People also gathered root vegetables, green vegetables, beans, fruit, seeds, berries, nuts, eggs, insects and small reptiles.
Many Paleolithic bands were nomadic.
They moved from place to place as the weather changed.
They followed herds of animals that they hunted from their winter feeding places to their summer feeding places.
If there was a drought,flood, or some other disaster, the herds and the people might haved moved a long distance, looking for food.
During the "Ice Age" a lot of the water on Earth turned to ice.
This made sea much lower than it is now.
People were able to walk through Beringia from Siberia to Alaska.
Bands of Homo sapiens ( another word for people) travelled to that area from Asia.
At that time there were rich grasslands with many large animals that are now extinct.
It is believed that many groups of people travelled there over a long time and later spread to other parts of America, as the weather changed.
Paleolithic people used stone tools.
Sometimes a stone tool was just a rock.
It might have been useful for smashing a shell or an animal's skull, or for grinding grain on another rock.
Other tools were made by breaking rocks to make a sharp edge.
The next development in stone tool making was to chip all the edges of a rock so that it made a pointed shape, useful for a spearhead, or arrow tip.
Some stone tools are carefully "flaked" at the edges to make them sharp, and symmetrically shaped.
Paleolithic people also used tools of wood and bone.
They probably also used leather and vegetable fibers but these have not lasted from that time.
Paleolithic people also knew how to make fire which they used for warmth and cooking.
The Neolithic
Settling down
In the Paleolithic Era there were many different human species.
According to current research, only the modern human reached the Neolithic Era.
The Neolithic era was marked by changes in society.
During the Neolithic era, people started to settle down.
They developed agriculture and domesticated animals, both of which took a very long time.
Because of these two things, people did not have to migrate as much any more.
Villages could grow to much larger sizes than before.
Over time, villages fought and spread their control over larger areas and some became civilisations.
During this time, humankind also developed further intellectually, militarily and spiritually.
When humans started to grow crops and domesticate certain animals such as dogs, goats, sheep, and cattle;  their societies changed.
Because people now grew crops and raised livestock, they started to stay in the same place and build permanent settlements.
In most places, this happened between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Their diet also changed.
People ate more cereals and vegetables.
They started to keep extra foods and seeds for later.
In some years there were surpluses (extras) that could be traded for other goods.
These changes happened independently in many parts of the world.
They did not happen in the same order though.
For example, the earliest farming societies in the Near East did not use pottery.
No one is sure if Britain had agriculture, or if permanent villages existed there at all.
Early Japanese societies used pottery before developing agriculture.
Vere Gordon Childe gave the name Neolithic Revolution to this process in the 1920s.
He thought that it was as important as the Industrial Revolution (which happened in the 18th and 19th century).
Ancient history – the early civilizations
Ancient history was the time from the development of writing to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The fall of the Roman Empire caused chaos in Europe, leading to the Middle Ages (also called the Dark Ages or the Age of Faith).
The first civilizations were built along major river systems.
These civilizations are called river valley civilizations.
River valley civilizations were the most powerful civilizations in this time period because water was needed to have an agricultural society.
These civilizations were similar in that:
They developed along river systems
They had polytheistic religions
They used writing systems
Middle East and North Africa
Sumer was the world's first known ancient civilization.
The Sumerians took over the fertile crescent region of Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE.
They grew crops on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
By 3000 BCE, many cities had been built in parts of Sumerian Mesopotamia.
They formed independently and each had their own government.
They were called city-states and often fought with each other.
A surplus in food led to a Division of labour.
This means that some people were able to stop growing crops and do other jobs, since enough crops were already grown.
This brought a split in society.
Today, such a split is called social pyramid.
In a social pyramid, people are grouped into social classes based on their wealth and power.
In Sumer, the king, priests, and government officials were at the top of the social pyramid.
Below them were the artisans, merchants, farmers, and fishers.
At the bottom of the pyramid were slaves.
Slaves were often prisoners of war, criminals, or people working to pay off debt.
The Sumerians created the world's first system of writing; it was called cuneiform.
The oldest versions of one of the world's first literary works, the Epic of Gilgamesh, go back to this time.
In Sumer, only the sons of the rich and powerful learned how to read and write.
They went to a school called edubba.
Only the boys who went to edubba could become scribes.
The Sumerians also invented sun-dried bricks, the wheel, the ox plow, and were skilled at making pottery.
They are also thought to have invented the sailboat.
After the Sumerians, the civilizations of Babylonia and then Assyria rose to power in Mesopotamia.
Babylonia had a king named Hammurabi.
He is famous for the Codex Hammurabi.
Just to the east was the long-lasting civilization of Elam.
Ancient Egypt grew along the Nile river.
It was created around 3500 BC.
It was most powerful in the second millennium BC.
When it was its biggest, it went all the way from the Nile delta to a mountain called Jebel Barkal in Sudan.
It probably ended at about 30 BC when the country was invaded by the Roman Empire.
The society of ancient Egypt depended on a balance of natural and human resources, especially the irrigation of the Nile Valley so that Egyptians could grow crops.
There was a great difference between classes in this society.
Most of the people were farmers but they did not own the agricultural products they produced.
These were property of the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land.
There was slavery, but it is not clear how it was practiced.
The Religion of Ancient Egypt encouraged people to respect their rulers and their past.
The Egyptians are known for writing in hieroglyphs, building the famous pyramids, and building other sorts of tombs and big temples and for their military.
The religion of Judaism formed about 1500 BCE around the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations.
Mid and Eastern Asia
China began as city-states in the Yellow River valley.
The Shang Dynasty (商朝) was the first dynasty of Ancient China.
Turtle shells with writing on them have been carbon dated to about 1500 BC.
The Zhou Dynasty came after the Shang Dynasty.
Kong Fuzi and Laozi lived at the end of the Zhou Dynasty.
They were the greatest Chinese philosophers.
They founded new philosophies, or ways of thinking.
Confucius founded Confucianism and Laozi founded Daoism.
After the Zhou Dynasty came the Warring States Period.
The Qin (秦) dynasty came after the Warring States Period.
The Qin emperor Qin Shi Huang created the first centralized state in China in 221 BC.
It was based on his based on his political philosophy of legalism.
He made everyone write the same way.
He fought against Confucianism.
He also started building what would later become the Great Wall.
In 202 BC the Han Dynasty took over.
It was about as strong as the Roman Empire.
Towards the end of the Han Dynasty,  Buddhism became influential in China.
Ancient India/Pakistan
The Indus Valley Civilization lasted from about 2600 BC to 1900 BC.
It was the first urban civilization on the subcontinent.
It was centered on the Indus River and its tributaries.
The civilization is famous for its brick cities that had road-side drainage systems and multi-storied houses.
The Maurya dynasty started in 321 BCE.
This was the first time most of the Indian subcontinent was united under a single government.
Ashoka the Great was a famous Mauryan emperor.
When he started ruling, he sought to expand his empire, but then followed a policy of ahimsa (non-violence) after converting to Buddhism.
He wrote about this in the Edicts of Ashoka.
The Edicts of Ashoka are the oldest historical documents from India that still exist.
While Ashoka ruled, Buddhist ideals spread across all of East Asia and South-East Asia.
The Gupta dynasty ruled from around 320 to 550 AD.
The Gupta Empire included only Central India, and the area east of current day Bangladesh.
This empire never included present-day Pakistan to the west.
Historians place the Gupta dynasty alongside with the Han Dynasty, Tang Dynasty and Roman Empire as a model of a classical civilization.
The Maya civilization is a civilization that started in Central America.
They lived mostly on the Yucatán Peninsula in what is now known as Mexico, but also Honduras, Belize and Guatemala.
They were the only known civilization of pre-Columbian America to have a fully developed written language.
They also made great achievements in art and architecture and had a very advanced system of mathematics and astronomy.
The area where the Maya civilization developed was inhabited from around the 10th millennium BC.
The first Maya settlements were built there in about 1800 BC, in the Soconusco region.
This is in the modern-day state of Chiapas in Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean.
Today, this is called the Early Preclassic period.
At the time, humans began to settle down permanently.
They started to grow livestock.
Pottery and small clay figures were made.
They constructed simple burial mounds.
Later they developed these mounds into step pyramids.
There were other civilizations around, especially in the north, such as the Olmec, the Mixe-Zoque, and Zapotec civilizations.
These people mostly lived in the area of the modern-day state Oaxaca.
The exact borders of the Maya empire in the north are unclear.
There were probably areas where Maya culture overlapped with other cultures.
Many of the earliest significant inscriptions and buildings appeared in this overlapping zone.
These cultures and the Maya probably influenced one another.
There has been a long history of contact between Papuan peoples of the Papua New Guinea and the Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal people seem to have lived a long time in the same environment as the now extinct Australian megafauna.
Stories about that are told in the oral culture of many Aboriginal groups.
The Hallstatt era is named after the city Hallstatt in Austria, where the first artifacts were found.
It lasted from about 1200 BC to about 275 BC.
There were different periods, which today are mainly told apart by the kinds of brooches used at the time.
These brooches changed rather rapidly, and can therefore give us good guesses at to what time they came from.
Hallstatt culture sites have been found in the east of France, in Switzerland, in the south of Germany, in Austria, in Slovenia and Croatia, northwestern Hungary, southwestern Slovakia and southern Moravia.
The culture can be divided into an eastern and a western one quite easily; the dividing line runs through the Czech Republic, and Austria, between longitudes 14 and 15 degrees east.
In this time, the social structure developed into a hierarchy.
This can be documented by various things that were added to graves.
In the Bronze Age, people used to live in big settlements.
As iron became available, trade routes changed.
A new richer class evolved.
Unlike before, these richer class people liked to live in big houses in the countryside, as a demonstration of their wealth.
Funerals also changed, from cremation burials, to burials with stone coffins.
The new upper class used their wealth for import goods, mostly from the Mediterranean.
The La Tène culture is a culture that lasted from about 500 BC to about 100 AD.
It is named after the city of La Tène (today, Marin-Epagnier, next to Neuchâtel).
It was influenced a lot by the Roman and Greek cultures.
There are two sources for this:
Objects found there
Romans and Greeks came in contact with the culture.
They called them Celts, usually.
They wrote about them.
The most important work about them was written by Julius Caesar.
It is called On the Gallic War (De bello gallico).
The Celts basically lived in clans.
Each clan was headed by a leader, which came from the  Druids or the Bards.
Women were much better off than with the Romans, they were almost equal to men.
There was polygamy and polyandry (A man could have several women, a woman could have several men).
Illyria  is the part of west-south Balkan Peninsula populated by Illyrians whose descendants are Albanians.
What is known today as Ancient Greece is a very important period in history.
Most people agree that it came after the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
It ended when the Romans invaded Greece, in 146 BC.
Greek culture had a very powerful influence on later civilizations, especially the Romans.
The Greeks developed what is now called a city-state, or a polis.
There were many polises.
Some of the more important ones were Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes.
The word politics comes from there.
It literally means: things that are about the polis.
Greek cities did not have much contact with each other, because of the mountains and many islands Greece is made up of.
When a city no longer had enough food to care for all its citizens, some people were sent out to set up a new city.
This was called a colony.
Each city was independent, and ruled by someone within that city.
Colonies also looked to the city where they originally came from for guidance.
When Greece went to war (for example against the Persian Empire), there was an alliance of such city states, against the Persians.
There were also many wars between different city states.
There were many artists and philosophers who lived in that period.
Most of them are still important for philosophy today.
A well-known artist was Homer.
He wrote epics about the war against the Trojans, and the early history of Greece.
Other well-known artists were Aristophanes and Sappho.
Well-known philosophers include Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
A well known mathematician of the time was Euclid.
Statesmen of the time were Pericles and Alexander the Great.
Ancient Rome was a civilization that started in modern-day Italy, in the 8th Century before Christ.
The civilization lasted for 12 centuries.
It ended, when Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, on May 29, 1453.
According to legend, the Roman civilization was founded by Romulus and Remus, in the year 753 BC.
The Roman Empire developed in wars against Carthage and the Seleucid Empire.
Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, modern France, and Augustus ended the Roman republic by becoming emperor.
At its biggest extent, the empire covered all of the Mediterranean.
Rome became so big, because it led war against other nations and then assimilated their culture.
Split of the Empire into East and West
In 293, Diocletian organized a separate administration of the western and the eastern part of the empire.
The capital of the western part was Rome, the capital of the eastern part was Constantinople.
Constantine I was the first to stop discrimination against Christians (313).
Christianity became state religion under the reign of Theodosius I.
The western part of the empire had many problems with barbarians.
In the 5th century, the Huns migrated westwards.
This meant that the Visigoths moved into the empire, to seek protection.
Rome was sacked by barbarians multiple times.
On September 4, 476, the Germanic chief Odoacer forced the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus, to quit.
After about 1200 years, the rule of Rome in the West came to an end.
The eastern part had similar problems.
Justinian I managed to conquer parts of North Africa and Italy.
Shortly after he died, all that was left were parts of Southern Italy, and Sicily.
In the east, the empire was threatened by the Sassanid Empire.
New departures and continuity
After the fall of Western Rome, the Germanic tribes that took over tried to learn from Roman civilization, but much was forgotten and up to the Renaissance not many achievements happened in Europe.
But with the rise of Islam, many changes happened during the Islamic Golden Age.
The Greek and Roman traditions were kept and further development took place.
The Chinese civilization had a Golden Age during the Tang period, when their capital was the biggest in the world.
During the Renaissance, Europe developed and made great advancements in many areas as well.
Middle East – Islamic rise, Byzantine decline
In Arabia, Muhammad founded Islam in 632.
His followers rapidly conquered territories in Syria and Egypt.
They soon were a danger to the Byzantine Empire.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Byzantine Empire stopped Islamic expansion and reconquered some lost territories.
In 1000 A.D. the eastern Empire was at its height: Basileios II reconquered Bulgaria and Armenia.
Culture and trade flourished.
In 1071 the Battle of Manzikert led the empire into a dramatic decline.
For the Byzantine Empire this meant centuries of civil wars and Turkic invasions.
The Muslim caliphate had an Golden Age under the Abbasids.
Their power forced Emperor Alexius I Comnenus of the Byzantine Empire to send a call for help to the West in 1095.
The West sent the Crusades.
These eventually led to the Sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Because of this, what was left of the Empire broke into successor states.
The winner of these disputes was that of Nicaea.
After Constantinople was again conquered by imperial forces, the empire was little more than a Greek state on the Aegean coast.
The Eastern Empire came to an end when Mehmed II conquered Constantinople on May 29, 1453.
The Ottoman Empire took its place and from 1400 to 1600 was the most powerful empire in the Middle East and ruled at the southern and eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
The Tang Dynasty (618–907), with its capital at Chang'an (today Xi'an), was the biggest city in the world at the time and is considered by historians as a high point in Chinese civilization as well as a golden age of cosmopolitan culture.
The Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644.
The Ming built a vast army and navy.
From around the 6th–7th century.
They had trading relationships with the Roman Empire to the west and Southeast Asia to the east.
In 1336, two brothers named Harihara I and Bukka founded the Vijayanagara Empire in an area which is now in the Karnataka state of India.
But the empire continued for about the next one hundred years.
The Heian Period in Japan is famous for its art, poetry and literature.
The writing system, Kana, was developed.
It was followed by the feudal period (1185–1853) during which samurai and daimyos were the leading figures and the shogun the real monarch whereas the tennō had only a role as religious head.
Between the years 1272 and 1281 the Mongols tried to invade but were driven out by the Japanese.
In 1542, a Portuguese ship reached Japan.
Japanese learned about guns and firearms from them.
Genghis Khan in 1209 brought together the Mongol tribes and founded the Mongol Empire, one of the largest land empires in history.
Later Kublai Khan would go on to expand the empire and found the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty of China.
The empire later broke into several empires, all of which were later destroyed.
European Middle Ages
The Middle Ages was the time from the fall of the Roman empire until the middle of the 15th century.
From 500 to about 800 there was some decline compared with the Roman civilization.
European villages were often destroyed and looted by barbarians such as the Vikings.
During the High Middle Ages magnificent castles and large churches called cathedrals were built and important works of literature were written.
In the later Middle Ages, there was a plague called the Black Death.
The Black Death killed one-third to one-half of Europe's population.
A system called feudalism was a very important part of the Middle Ages.
In this system, the king was at the top of the social pyramid.
The king gave land to the lord in exchange for loyalty.
The lords were the next in the pyramid.
The lords gave land (called a fief) to knights in exchange for loyalty and protection.
The knights came next in the pyramid.
Peasants were not part of the feudal system because they did not give or receive land.
They worked on a lord's manor in exchange for protection.
The Crusades were also fought during the Middle Ages.
There is a theory that says the Crusades helped end the Middle Ages along with the Black Death, increased trade and better farming technology.
The Renaissance started in Italy.
Renaissance is a French word meaning "rebirth".
The Renaissance meant that people learned from the ancient Greek and Roman or "classical" cultures that had been forgotten for some time.
Artists learned from classical paintings and sculptures.
So they reinvented perspective and the art of free standing realistic sculptures that had been characteristic in Greek and Roman art.
Some famous Renaissance artists are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
The Gutenberg printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg, was also developed during this time.
Maya civilization (classical period)
What is known as the classical period lasted from about 250 to about 900.
During this time, many monuments were constructed.
There are also many big inscriptions from then.
In this period, the Maya moved to building large cities.
This is known as urbanism.
Many important intellectual and artistic developments happened in an area that is known as the southern lowlands.
Like the Ancient Greek, the Maya civilization was made of many independent city-states.
Agriculture was important around these city states like Tikal and Copán.
The most important monuments are the pyramids they built in their religious centers and the palaces of their rulers.
The palace at Cancuén is the largest in the Maya area.
There are no pyramids in the area of the palace.
Other important things the archaeologists found include the carved stone slabs usually called stelae (the Maya called them tetun, or "tree-stones").
These slabs show rulers along with hieroglyphic texts describing their genealogy, military victories, and other accomplishments.
In North America, they made Mississipian culture with the largest land field from around 800 CE to 1600.
Trade with other civilizations
The Maya also had trade routes that ran over long distances.
They traded with many of the other Mesoamerican cultures, such as Teotihuacan, the Zapotec, and other groups in central and gulf-coast Mexico.
They also traded with non-Mesoamerican groups, that were farther away.
Archaeologists have found gold from Panama in the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza.
Sudden collapse
In the 8th and 9th century, the cities in the southern lowlands had problems, and declined.
At the same time, the Maya stopped making big monuments and inscriptions.
Shortly afterwards, these cities were abandoned.
Currently, archaeologists are not sure why this happened.
There are different theories.
Either ecological factors played a role in this, or the cause of this abandonment was not related to the environment.
Post-classical period and decline
In the north, development went on, form the 10th to about the 16th century.
The influences from the outside left more traces in the Maya culture at that time.
Some of the important sites in this era were Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba.
At some point, the ruling dynasties of Chichen and Uxmal declined.
Afterwards, Mayapan ruled all of Yucatán until a revolt in 1450.
The area then degenerated into competing city-states until the Yucatán was conquered by the Spanish.
By 1250, there developed other city-states.
The Itza maintained their capital at Tayasal.
It ruled over an area extending across the Peten Lakes region, including the community of Ekckixil on Lake Quexil.
Postclassic Maya states also survived in the southern highlands.
One of the Maya kingdoms in this area is responsible for the best-known Maya work of historiography and mythology, the Popol Vuh.
The Spanish started to conquer Maya lands.
This took them much longer than with the Inca or Aztecs, because there was no capital city.
This meant that when they had conquered one city, this had little influence on the whole empire.
The last Maya states were finally subdued in 1697.
The Maya people did not disappear though.
There are still about 6 million of them.
Some are well-integrated, others continue speak one of the Maya languages and uphold their cultural heritage.
The Aztecs built an empire in Central America, mainly in Mexico.
The empire lasted from the 14th to the 16th century.
They spoke the Nahuatl language.
Their capital was Tenochtitlan.
It was built on islands in a lake.
The Aztecs believed in polytheism.
Quetzalcoatl (feathered snake), Huitzilopochtli (hummingbird of the south) and Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror) were the most important Gods.
Sometimes the Aztecs killed humans to please their gods.
Between 1519 and 1521 the Spanish leader Hernán Cortés defeated the Aztecs and took their empire.
Some Aztecs did not want to fight against the soldiers of Cortés, because they thought they were Gods.
On the Mexican flag there is a picture of an eagle on a cactus with a snake in its mouth.
Also the name Mexico is an Aztec word.
The Aztecs ate a lot of plants and vegetables that could be grown easily in the Mexico area.
The main food that they ate was corn, which they called maize.
Another food that they ate was squash.
Aztecs also had a lot of harsh punishments for certain crimes.
For the following crimes the punishment was death: adultery, wearing cotton clothes (cotton clothes were only for the nobles), cutting down a living tree, moving a field boundary making your land bigger, making someone else's smaller, major theft and treason.
The Incas were a civilized empire in western South America.
The Incas are called a "pre-Columbian" empire.
This means that their country was here before Christopher Columbus.
They ruled parts of South America around what is now Peru for a little over 100 years, until the Spanish invasion in the 16th century.
The Incan empire or , meaning four regions in Quechua, only lasted for about 100 years as the arrival of the Spaniards in 1532 conquered them.
Their main language was Quechua, but as the Incas were basically made up of many different groups there were probably many other different languages.
Manco Capac founded the first Inca state around 1200.
It covered the area around Cusco.
In the 1400s, Pachacuti began to absorb other people in the Andes.
The expansion of the Inca Empire had started.
The Inca Empire would become the biggest empire in the Americas before Columbus.
In 1532, the civil war ended.
The brothers Huascar and Atahualpa, fought for who would succeed their father.
During this time, the Spanish conquerors took possession of the Inca territory.
They were led by Francisco Pizarro.
In the following years the conquistadors managed to extend their power over the whole Andean region.
They suppressed successive Inca rebellions until the establishment of the Viceroyalty of Perú in 1542 and the fall of the resistance of the last Incas of Vilcabamba in 1572.
The Inca civilization ends at that time, but many cultural traditions remain in some ethnic groups as Quechuas and Aymara people.
Ancient Egypt and Carthage are well known civilizations of ancient Africa.
But because there are not many written sources in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the history of Africa is not easy to write about.
But with new techniques such as the recording of oral history, historical linguistics and archeology knowledge has improved, not only for the empires and kingdoms of Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Nubia, Kush and Kerma.
From colonialization to imperialism
The rise of Europe
Colonization happened after Christopher Columbus came to the Americas.
European countries such as England, France, and Spain built colonies in the Americas.
These settlers fought the Native Americans to take over their land.
The colonisation of the Americas was the beginning of modern times.
An important part about contact with the Americas was the Columbian Exchange The Columbian Exchange brought new foods, ideas, and diseases to the Old World and New World, changing the way people lived.
Historians believe that almost everyone as far as Asia was affected in some way by the Columbian Exchange.