World history is both very new and very old: new
because it entered high school and college classrooms
only in the last fifty years, and old because it
dates back to the first historians’ attempts to answer an
age-old question,“How did the world get to be the way
it is?” in a different, more adequate way.The most obvious
answer was a creation story, and creation stories
were probably universal among our remotest ancestors
since they sufficed to explain everything—as long as
people believed that the world continued as it began,
with only seasonal and other cyclical repetitions, such
as birth and death.
But in the second half of the first millennium BCE, in
three different parts of the world, social and political
changes became so swift and unmistakable that a few
individuals in Israel, Greece, and China pioneered what
we call historical writing.The historical books of the Jewish
scriptures, as edited after the return from exile in
Babylonia (subsequent to 539 BCE) recorded God’s universal
jurisdiction over history in some detail from the
time of Abraham—and more generally from the moment
of creation in the Garden of Eden. Soon afterward, the
Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) set out to
award “a due meed of glory” to the deeds of Greeks and
barbarians within a wide circle extending from Egypt in
the south to Scythia (modem Ukraine) in the north,
touching on India to the east, and extending throughout
the Mediterranean coastlands to the west. About
three centuries later, the Chinese historian Sima Qian
(c. 145–85 BCE) brought Chinese historical records,
already voluminous, into comprehensible order by writing
a comparably far-ranging account of China’s ruling
dynasties from their beginnings, including their relations
with a wide circle of adjacent barbarians. Faint traces of
contact between the Chinese and Mediterranean worlds
have been detected in Herodotus’s remarks about mythical
peoples living somewhere beyond Scythia, but for all
practical purposes the historiographical traditions of
China, Greece, and the Biblical scriptures remained
independent of one another for many centuries.
By the fifth century CE St. Augustine (354–430) and
others gave the Christian version of world history an
enduring form, building on Jewish precedent, modified
by faith in human redemption through Jesus Christ’s
sacrifice and anticipating a Day of Judgment when
God would bring the world to an end. This remained
standard among Christians through succeeding centuries
and soon was matched by a Muslim version of
the same story, starting with creation and ending in the
Day of Judgment as freshly set forth in Muhammad’s
revelations

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