The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [12]
These large stone circles may have had ritual purposes or may have been solar calendars; however, it is very hard to discern the reasons for the construction because of the lack of written records. There is a wide “road” connecting Stonehenge to a nearby site; thus, these two sites may have a complex ritualistic connection. It is fair to say that whatever the purpose for the construction the effort involved was gigantic, and required an organization of community talent and creativity that was remarkable for the time.
Africa spent nearly all of its existence in the pre-writing or prehistoric “era,” with the notable exceptions of Egypt and Carthage in North Africa. This is difficult to imagine, since humanity itself is said to have originated in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa seems locked in the moment without the need to develop writing. Our history will largely ignore Africa, South America, the Pacific Ocean areas, and Central Asia (Siberia and the lands east of the Ural Mountains). No one recorded what happened in these vast areas; thus, there is no “history.” The final analysis involves impact on history, and the high civilizations developed in the Middle East, Egypt, India, China, Greece, Rome, and the nearby surrounding areas had the real historic impact. Africa, northern Europe, the interior of Asia from Mongolia to the Urals, the Pacific Ocean areas, and all of the Americas have little or no impact on history before AD 1000, and many of these areas (Africa, South America, the Pacific) had little impact right up to the modern era.
Differing Views of History
Before we get too far in our story, we need to point out that we can view history in at least three fundamentally different ways. We will start with the cyclic view. Modern historians and many great civilizations, such as India, support this idea. In the cyclic view history moves like a great wheel, constantly repeating itself. The cycles are not exactly the same each time, but much like the seasons they repeat consistently even though the details may differ. The second great idea is history moves like an ascending line. In this view history is advancing somewhere, even though that somewhere may be unknown. Thus, history has a purpose. Christian theology sees history this way, as do the Jews, Muslims, and several philosophers such as Karl Marx. Under this way of thinking, history will reach a climactic moment after which all will stabilize or completely end. The Mayans of Central America also saw history this way, and thought it would all end in disaster in December of 2012. Many of these concepts about history purposefully advancing somewhere revolve around an end of the world scenario, such as the return of Jesus Christ or a cataclysmic end of everything like the Maya. Under the theories of Marx, the world was advancing to a worker’s utopia. Of course, there is also the Chaos (Post-modern) view shared by overburdened, coerced, history students and the indefatigable Homer Simpson who imagine history as a stack of irrelevant, unconnected, and meaningless events unworthy of notice—much less a grade. To quote Homer Simpson, “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” While Homer is making it sound funny, in fact the Post-modern view is quite prevalent. In this view, history has no turning points, shows no purpose, displays no repeating patterns, and there is really no such thing as progress. This is the Post-modernist view of no mega-narratives, that is,