I Used to Know That

The Creation of Israel
In 1947, UN leaders voted that Palestine should be divided up into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under UN governance. Palestine had been under a British mandate since the end of the First World War and Britain formally established the Zionist Jewish Agency to represent Jewish interests in the region in 1929. However, the Arab states rejected partition and the newly formed Zionist government declared an independent state of Israel. Arab-Israeli wars over territories continued over the following decades, as Israel enlarged its territories, and conflict in the region continues to the present day.

as thousands of individual volunteers from Europe and the US. Picasso’s painting Guernica famously depicts the bombing of the town of the same name by Nationalist forces in 1937, but both sides were guilty of brutality

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536): The Dutch scholar Erasmus formed the new Christian humanism, studying the original Greek New Testament, questioning the Church and rejecting the notion of predestination. In 1509 he wrote In Praise of Folly, criticizing the abuses of the Church and raising questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation (see here

barons duly drew up Magna Carta (the Great Charter), a document limiting the king’s powers, and the first of its kind to be forced on an English monarch

Magna Carta is arguably Britain’s most famous legal document.

THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY

In the fifth century, Athens successfully repulsed a Spartan invasion; then, in a bid to avoid tyrannical rule by local rich landowners, the people of Athens established the world’s first democracy (from the Greek demokratia ‘rule of the people’). All citizens had equal privileges, although non-citizens – slaves, females or foreigners – had no rights at all

the vast pyramids at Giza (the only surviving Wonders of the World)

Monotheism – the worship of one God – is thought to have emerged when the herdsman Abram, or Abraham, had a vision of the ‘one true God’ in the early half of the second millennium BC. The figure of Abraham is a shared spiritual forebear in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: in the Torah, Abraham is named as the ancestor of all Jews, in the Bible Jesus is descended from Abraham, the ‘father of faith’ and in Muslim tradition Abraham (Ibrahim) was the ‘Father of the Prophets’ and the ancestor of both the Jewish and Arabic peoples

The first signs of civilization developed in the fertile land of Mesopotamia at around 5000 BC. Thereafter civilizations grew along the banks of the Nile, culminating in Ancient Egypt, and along the Indus River and in China.

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