Rome becomes dominant | World History | Khan Academy

Last video, we end with the conquests of Alexander the Great. How he's able to conquer most of the map that we see right up here, especially from Greece all the way through the Middle East, through Persia and getting to the borders of India, co-conquering North, covering conquering Egypt as well.

We mentioned that he had a very short life, and after his death, his Empire was split. But coincident with that time, we have other powers in other parts of the Mediterranean that are growing, namely the Romans. Rome was established several hundred years before the time of Alexander the Great, but by that time, they're starting to conquer more and more of the Italian Peninsula right over here, what we would now consider the Italian Peninsula.

You also have a power in Carthage, in Carthage forming right over here on the North African Coast. Carthage was initially a Phoenician settlement. The Phoenicians, famous for our phonetic alphabet, were based in what is now modern-day Lebanon and Syria. They were traders, and they settled throughout the Mediterranean, and Carthage and the Carthaginian power or civilization was a fairly significant one at this time.

You could imagine when there are two powers that are close to each other, and they might want to be going after the same interest or conquest the same land, or they might view each other as a threat. They tend to start fighting each other, and that is true of Rome and Carthage and the wars that they fought. They were called the Punic Wars, and they occurred between 264 BCE and 146 BCE.

You have the Punic Wars, and once again, we will do many videos on the Punic Wars. But these are the wars that involved Hannibal, famously taking elephants across the Alps in order to attack Rome. We see it right over here on our little timeline—the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome.

Just to be clear, this little purple shaded in on our timeline represents Carthage and the Carthaginian civilization, I guess you would say power, and this is Rome. But eventually, Rome wins decisively and is actually able to wipe out Carthage—literally wipe it out.

So Rome, more and more, is becoming the dominant power in the Mediterranean, and as we will see shortly, well beyond the Mediterranean. In this period, Rome is a republic, and when we talk about a republic, we're talking about some type of representation. Although it's not the same form of representation that we would think today, we would be talking about some form of preserving rights.

Once again, not exactly as what we would do today, but as we get to the middle of the first century BCE, we have a very successful Roman general. You might have heard his name—Julius Caesar—who is able to take power of Rome, who is able to be the dictator of Rome.

In power, he starts to end the Republic, and he does many other things. He starts rearranging the calendar, gets a month named after him—July—and then he gets assassinated, and his adopted son Augustus takes power. Augustus is often considered to be the first true emperor of Rome, that the Republic is now over, and he too gets a month named after him—August.

Now, at around the same time, you have another very significant figure that shows up. Obviously, Jesus is a significant figure in religion, but that has effect on history. His teachings are the basis of a religion that's going to have profound consequences for the rest of history for the world.

Even though we might have this—we could say the secular timeline of BCE refers to Before the Common Era or CE, the Common Era—right now, the year I'm making this video is 2016 CE. Those are secular versions of a calendar, which is essentially centered on Jesus's birth, or pretty close to Jesus's birth. Instead of BC, if it would be Before Christ, instead of CE we would say AD—in the year of Our Lord in Latin.

It's important to note because sometimes people might learn about the life of Jesus, and they might think about the Holy Land and Nazareth and Jerusalem and whatever else. But it's important to realize that at that time, Jesus was born and raised and grew up and died as part of the Roman Empire. In fact, when he was born—which wasn't actually 0 BCE, or let’s just say year zero—we now think that it's pretty close to 4 BCE or 4 BC.

So he was born in the reign of Augustus, and he died in the reign of Tiberius, so some of the first Roman emperors. So with that, we have our overview of especially an ancient civilization. In the next few videos, or many videos, we will go deeper and drill deep into each of these topics that we referred to.

But hopefully, the last videos give you a high-level view of what was happening in the world, both in terms of time and space.