Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

I have introduced many ‘little’ ideas that I found fascinating but are rarely included in more conventional histories, despite being indispensable. Who had the idea to divide time into BC and AD and when? Why do we divide a circle into 360 degrees? When and where were the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs (+ and –) introduced into mathematics? We live in an age of suicide bombers, who do what they do because they believe they will earn an honoured place in paradise – where does this strange notion, paradise, come from? Who discovered the Ice Age and how and why did it come about? My aim throughout has been to identify and discuss those ideas and inventions that have had a long-term influence on the way we live or have lived and think. I do not expect everyone to agree with my choice, but this is a long book and I urge any reader who thinks I have made serious omissions to write to me. I also urge the reader to consult the notes at the back of the book. Many aspects of the past are the subject of fascinating dispute among scholars. To have laid out these disagreements fully in the main text would have held up the narrative unreasonably, but I do make space for the more important intellectual sword-fights in the notes.

Prologue

The Discovery of Time

On the evening of Wednesday, 1 May 1859, John Evans, a British archaeologist, crossed the English Channel by steamer from Folkestone to Boulogne. He took the train to Abbeville where he was met by Joseph Prestwich, a renowned British geologist. Next morning they were collected at seven o’clock by Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, chief customs officer in the town but also an amateur archaeologist. Evans and Prestwich were in France to investigate certain discoveries of their host.

Since 1835 workmen quarrying gravel from the river on the outskirts of Abbeville had been turning up ancient animal bones alongside different types of stone implements. These stone tools had convinced Boucher de Perthes that mankind was much more ancient than it said in the Bible. According to a number of ecclesiastical authorities, basing their calculations on the genealogies in Genesis, mankind was created between 6,000 and 4,000 years before Christ. Boucher de Perthes had been confirmed in his very different view when, in the course of excavations made for a new hospital in the Abbeville area, three stone hand-axes had been found alongside the molar tooth of a species of elephant long since extinct in France.