Marvellous Century

In this fascinating and scholarly overview, George Woodcock, author and poet, allows us to experience the beauty, the savagery and the all-encompassing impact of The Marvellous Century.

It was an era of personalities and uprisings.

• It was the time of Xenophanes, Cyrus, Solon the lawmaker, Sappho, the Buddha, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Lao-tzu and Nebuchadnezzar.
• It was an era of prose reawakenings, the exploration of rational thought, the central Asian silk trade, and the writing of the Upanishads.
• For the Chinese, it was the period of Spring and Autumn under the Chou Kingdom.
• Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Modern Judaism had their roots in the sixth century.
• The Greek philosopher, Thales, studied astronomy and geometry;
  - passing on knowledge picked up from the Egyptians, and
  - he was the one that first postulated the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle to be equal.
• In India, atomic theories emerged, and geography, geology and physics all developed as disciplines.

"History never arranges itself in neat capsules of a hundred years each, and what I am writing about when I name the sixth century is a period of between 120 and 130 years, characterized by a cluster of events that changed irrevocably the way men looked upon the universe and even upon themselves."
- George Woodcock