Mongolia – Genghis Khan

What comes to mind when you think of Genghis Khan? Is he a notorious warlord? A misunderstood visionary? Much like a math problem, a human being is composed of many complex variables, and all must be considered to understand the whole of the equation.

The story of Genghis Khan begins in 12th century Mongolia. Originally named Temujin, he was rejected by his clan at the age of nine, and was taken by his father, Yesukhei, to live with the family of his future bride. On his voyage home, Yesukhei came across a rival Tatar tribe, who tricked him into eating a meal laced with a fatal poison. This left Temujin without a father, without his original clan, but with the plan to one day overcome it all and rule the world…

Temujin slowly developed into a brilliant military strategist. By the age of twenty, he avenged his father’s death by demolishing the Tatar army, ordering the death of every Tatar male over three feet tall. Such brutality gave Genghis Khan a reputation that left his enemies trembling with fear.

Genghis Khan went on to conquer all the land from the Asian edge of the Pacific Ocean to modern-day Hungary in Europe in what became the biggest empire to date. But, it wasn’t his savagery alone that helped him do it. Genghis Khan’s creative vision, unrivaled organizational talents, and his speedy and robust cavalry were all vital aspects of his success. Fear did play a part, however. His army of mounted archers were known to his foes as “the devil’s horsemen.”

Although it’s not possible to know exactly how many people perished at the hands of the Mongol conquests, historians believe that approximately forty million people were killed. Censuses from the Middle Ages show that China’s population dropped by tens of millions, and some estimate that up to seventy-five percent of Iran’s population disappeared as well. Under Genghis Khan, the global population was reduced by roughly eleven percent.

While it might appear that his reign was focused on bloodshed, Genghis Khan also financed advances in medicine and astronomy, as well as a number of construction projects like the extension of the Grand Canal, the palaces in Shangdu (“Xanadu”) and Takht-i-Suleiman, a network of roads and postal stations throughout the empire, and strengthened the vital east-west trade route, “The Silk Road.”

Another remarkable feat of the Mongols was their ability to transform from a nomadic tribe into the administrators of a vast empire in such a short amount of time. Their secret to effective political rule was to allow their conquered territories to operate their everyday affairs as they did before, but with Mongol leaders placed at the top of administrative hierarchies. Beyond his impact on science, infrastructure, war, and politics, Genghis Khan also influenced art and culture. The Mongol empire created a unification of divided lands, allowing artists and craftsmen to travel to different ethnic regions, creating a rich exchange of ideas betweens peoples.

After considering the variables of the human equation that is Genghis Khan, do you see him as a merciless warlord, or as a fearless trailblazer? Or, is it possible that, like in a math problem, one solution can be expressed in a number of different ways?

Europe – Mile, Furlong and Metre

Imagine it is the year 4024. You are a historian trying to learn about life in Canada two thousand years ago. Where would you start? Would you look at “ancient Canadian” art, music, and architecture? While these would all be very revealing aspects of our culture, did you know that math, and units of measurement also shine a very powerful light onto our society’s values?

Think about ancient Rome, for example. Rome was the greatest empire of the ancient world, and it should come as no surprise that one of Rome’s units of measurement was the mile. Why the mile? The word “mile” comes from the Latin phrase mille passus – “one thousand paces of a marching man.” So, since Roman culture was, in many ways, defined by their military conquests, it makes perfect sense that this unit of measurement would have been created as the by-product of the many paces taken during a soldier’s march.

Agricultural societies had units of measurement that reflected their values as well. Let’s look at Britain between the 5th and 11th centuries.  The word “acre” describes a plot of land equal to the area of land that could be farmed by one man and two oxen in a single day. Most people at that time worked on farms, so it makes sense that they used the acre as a form of measurement. The same goes for the word furlong. Derived from the Old English words furh (furrow) and lang (long), “furlong” means the length of a furrow: 201 metres, the distance a team of oxen could plough, without resting, in one day. Despite the fact that modern people have lost touch with the origins of these words, “mile,” “acre,” and “furlong” are still vital units of measurement across the English-speaking world and beyond.

Sometimes, units of measurements can also change as the result of cultural revolutions. Did you know that the metric system would never have existed without the French Revolution of 1789? The French revolutionaries made many historic changes: abolishing slavery, giving civil rights to Jews and Muslims, allowing men and women to divorce, and making education available to people of all socioeconomic classes. They even changed their calendar, renamed their months, and made a week ten days instead of seven!

As profound as these changes were, many argue that the most globally significant was the birth of the metric system. In 1790, the French revolutionaries sought to create a new system that was simple, scientific, and a universal constant that would never change. They appointed a commission that invented “the metre,” adapting the name from the Greek word metron, meaning “a measure.” They defined one metre a measurement equal to one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In order to figure out this distance, they set out on an expedition in 1792 to determine the “arc” that the earth made in a line between Dunkirk and Barcelona, and after seven long years, finally produced the “metre.”

Human cultures cannot resist the temptation to instill their values into every feature of their civilizations. As a result, we manage to conceive new creations that lead to greater prosperity for all mankind. Only time will tell how the cultural values of the future will innovate the world as we know it. The question remains, do superior forms of mathematical measurement lie ahead?

Babylon – The Code of Hammurabi

The Babylonian empire was founded over four thousand years ago. It had many inventions in many fields. It included advanced geometry and astronomy, innovations in irrigation and warfare. The Babylonians built some of the most complex and visually stunning canal systems in the ancient world and their engineers knew to the shovelful how much earth was required to build the ramps that packed dirt to the top of a sieged city’s walls.  It influenced many elements of the ancient world, and continues to influence modern civilization as well. Many of our beliefs about right and wrong stem from the laws created by the Babylonians. One man, in particular, is credited as the grandfather of the modern legal system. His name is Hammurabi, and he reigned as the king of Babylon from 1792 B.C. to 1750 B.C.

In his forty-two years as king, Hammurabi achieved many notable successes including the transformation of Babylon from a small city-state into an empire. However, none of his military achievements were as important as his ultimate gift to civilization, Hammurabi’s Law Code: a system of two hundred and eighty-two laws carved into a massive finger-shaped black stone pillar called a stele. For the first time, laws were written into stone, suggesting they were unchangeable, even by the king himself!

The gigantic stele was on display for all Babylonians to see so that no one could commit a crime and use ignorance as a defense from punishment.

Here are some examples of laws from Hammurabi’s Law Code:

• “If a man brings an accusation against another man, charging him with murder, but cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death.”
• “If a man bears false witness in a case, or does not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case is a case involving life, that man shall be put to death.”
• “If a man bears false witness concerning grain or money, he shall himself bear the penalty imposed in the case.”

Notice how Hammurabi’s laws were the first to include this fundamental legal principle of our current system: the presumption of innocence. A person is presumed innocent of a crime until proven guilty in a court of law. Can you imagine living in a world where you were considered guilty of a crime and had to prove your innocence? We have Hammurabi to thank that it doesn’t work that way. And, we’re not alone. 6th century Roman law, and 15th century Islamic law both adopted the same principle.

On top of protecting the rights of innocent citizens, Hammurabi’s law code also built in safeguards to ensure judges oversaw court cases fairly. Considering the following law:

• “If a judge pronounces judgment, renders a decision, delivers a verdict      duly signed and sealed, and afterward alters his judgment , they shall call that judge to account for the alteration of           the judgment which he has pronounced, and he shall pay twelve-fold          the penalty in that judgment; and, in the assembly, they shall expel       him from his judgment seat.”
  

With artwork of Hammurabi decorating the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Capitol building, it’s obvious that he’s had a profound influence on the past and present. And, although other legal texts written before Hammurabi’s Law Code have been discovered, none have had the same lasting impact on global civilization. Like his law code, forever carved in stone, Hammurabi’s legacy stands firmly as one of a pioneering lawmaker who aspired to – in the words of his monument – “prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to see that justice is done…”