DEGREES OF SEPARATION

It has been noted that there are only six degrees of separation between any given person alive right now to any other person. With in our own time, it is quite clear that there is a wide range of human customs, traditions, and cultures that have different assumptions about the nature of reality or different narratives if you will. In the scales of time, however, we are lucky to have a living third or forth generational of separation. As such, temporal separation can sometimes be as jarring or more so than contemporary travel can be. Looking into the distant past, we have scraps of paper and discarded objects, which true experts may be able to conjecture an educated approximation of the story of objects, kings, or empires. There are whole civilizations that archeologists have discovered which having left no written documents, or oral traditions that we can ascertain, are but ghosts to us, a depression where a body once lay, who they were as people, what they thought and felt are lost to us. Even in civilizations as established as Rome was, some of the most prominent individuals and emperors, such as the Emperor Trajan, have only a few sources that help us understand what it was they did that was significant. Trajan was the emperor who expanded the Roman empire to its greatest extent in 117 CE, and some of the only significant information about this particular campaign is a column of reliefs that was erected to commemorate his success.

We are not really accustomed to thinking about historic time. It has been made more difficult by bland education systems. In the United states we also do not have much history that is explored by the general public that is much older than the American War for Independence, or the settling of the first colonies in the early 17th century. There are of course ruins of ancient first peoples in the Americas which are truly ancient in the same sense as the classical world is ancient to the western mind but they are unfortunately not well known to the general public. It is difficult to imagine the whole size of the history of human civilization, like it is difficult for us to imagine the true size of our own solar system. We are not wired to think about the scales involved. Let’s imagine we think about everything that we are likely to experience in a generation or a lifetime.
All of the good.
All of the bad.
All of the lessons learned and passed on.
All of the work and play.
All of this is significant.
Let us zoom out a bit. Writing forms started arising around 3200 BCE, 5200 years ago. Now imagine all of the changes that have happened in your generational cohort. now expand to all that has changed over the last 75 years. Over the last 100 years.

The scope of human history is

• 52 centuries.
• 70 lifetimes.
• 347 generational cohorts.
• Which is almost 21 times as old as the United States.

Now clearly, the 75 years for life does not factor in the much shorter life expectancy in recent centuries or geographical variations, so this is only for the sake of the exercise.  If it is helpful, one can get a sense of what this means by taking a paperclip or a line on a piece of lined paper for one of the units of measurements above and lining them up 1 unit for each century, lifetime, or generation.

CHUNKING INFORMATION

This is a truly mind-boggling amount of time from our general temporal experience. To begin wrapping our minds around this scope of recorded time, there are a few methods of meal sorting that we can do to break this down into more manageable chunks. It has been demonstrated that there is a limit to what we can generally hold in a sequence of numbers, and that often if there are more than three numbers that many often remember a sequence in chunks 98372 becomes 98-372 or 983-72. This is perhaps why we think of certain eras of history to help us remember the order of operations. For engineers, this often is translated to breaking a complex problem down into smaller pieces. This method is called chuncking.

For the study of history, there are several different tools available to help with this. First, one could note in the dominant empires in a given a certain set of centuries. This may look something like this for many in the west:

• Egypt
• Persia
• Greece
• Rome
• The Middle Ages generally lumped together here
• England
• America

This, of course, is a very poor reflection of what happened in history. History contains all peoples at all times, and the rise of one power does not exclude the existence of other nations and peoples outside of these dominant civilizations. Additionally, there are several very prominent civilizations that are excluded from this short hand in Western history classrooms, not to mention the exclusion of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. However, as far as world history is concerned, this and a few bullet points and important names are all that most of us ever learn about the major cultures on which we are built, be it inheritance or conquest. It is also important to note that cultural elements of a culture often imbue the neighboring and next civilizations. There was more than one Persian Empire after the conquest of Alexander. Roman civilization survived for a thousand years after the fall of Rome and greatly influenced Western thought. The lines are not as clearly drawn as we might think.

You can imagine a digital picture of history, but the amount of information or “pixels” you have will determine how clearly you will be able to see both the big picture and the details of particular moments in time. but the harder you look at the details, the harder it is to determine how to put specific events into neat categories.

I would be remiss if I did not comment that almost all historians find that the term dark ages, middle ages, or medieval period to be anachronistic, and frustrating as what is commonly called the middle ages spans such a vast amount of cultures, time and conditions that it erases much of the change that occurred between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. This is generally why this period is broken into sections Early (500-1000), High (1000-1300), Late (1300-1500). Keep in mind that these techniques for remembering information are helpful but arbitrary.

To get a sense for how we can use these methods to better see how and why historical events happened, it is always best to seek the context. Let’s zoom in then on long-lived civilizations as an exercise. It is often helpful to find large-scale periods and break these into subordinate parts. For instance, one way Roman history can be broken up is into three sections, exactly where you draw the line can be fuzzy and arbitrary but for the sake of example: Republican (500s-27 BCE), Imperial (27 BCE-475 CE), and Byzantine (330-1453 CE). The Republican era can be divided into early, middle, and late eras with distinct feelings to the political order. The Imperial era can be roughly divided by dynasties and intermediate periods until the end of dynastic rule in the 400s, for example:

Dynasties & Bookends	Time	Years	Number of Emperors	Exceptions & Things to Note
Julio-Claudian	27BC – 68 CE	95	5
Yot 4 Emp.	68/69	1	4
Flavian	69-96	27	3	The Sack of Jerusalem 70AD, The Colosseum
Senate Coup	69	n/a	n/a
Antonine	96-192	96	7	“The Five Good Emperors” + Two
Yot 5 Emp.	192	1	5
Severan	193-235	42	5	Macrinus’ brief coup 217-218
Yot 6 Emp. & Crisis of the 3rd Century	235-284	49	>20	Its complicated
Tetrarchy	284-324	40	10	*Plus Constantine **Originally pairs of four
Constantinian	306*, 324-363	39	5	Edict of Milan, Council of Nicaea
Jovian	363-364	1	1	Non-dynastic stop-gap after death of Julian
Valantinian/Theodosian	364-457	93	10	*Several usurpers with various levels of success **Rome sacked in 410, & 455
The Last Western Emperors	457-476	19	9	Eastern Empire continues on for 977 more years

As such, there are now only seven dynasties, most with a bookend period, which becomes easier than trying to memorize 503 individual years. Say we want to know about the reign of a specific emperor, such as Constantine. One could then look at the relevant era that came before him the Tetrarchy. What was that period like, how did it influence him? Who were the important players? What made them prominent? It may even be nessecary to explore farther back than you might expect to begin to understand the whole course of events and motivations. There are often unexpected elements and many perspectives to parse. As I have mentioned, the best approaches are humility, intentionality, and curiosity.

Here is where we can begin to look into periods more thoroughly and begin to truly understand the web of events leading into and out of each other. Linking this groundwork together, we begin to form a more comprehensive approximation of what has happened. In seeking, we can begin to see more clearly why our world looks the way it does today and perhaps how we can learn from the wisdom and folly of our collective pasts and build a better future.