Glossary

How this glossary is made

From "Absolute dating" to "Cuneiform"

The first thirteen entries, in alphabetical order.

Absolute dating

A dating that attributes a number of years, with a margin of uncertainty, from a physical property of the material analysed. It requires a laboratory, and it applies only to certain materials.

Antiquity

The second period of the French convention, running from the appearance of writing, in the fourth millennium BCE, to 395 or 476 CE. It is the first period for which texts are available.

Archaeology

The study of the past through what it has left materially: objects, buildings, bones, seeds, layers of earth. It is the only source for Prehistory, and it completes the texts for all other periods.

Before the Common Era

Said of a year earlier than the starting point of the count used today, abbreviated BCE. It is exactly equivalent to "before Christ": only the name changes, no date changes. Before that point, numbers grow towards the past.

Boundary date

A dated landmark used to separate two periods. Every boundary date is a landmark, but the reverse is false. A boundary date is always a choice: somebody decided that this fact marked a change.

Carbon 14

An isotope of carbon, produced in the upper atmosphere and taken in by every living thing. Its quantity decreases after death according to a known law, which makes it possible to date what has lived up to about fifty thousand years.

Century

One hundred consecutive years, numbered in Roman numerals in the French convention. The first century contains the years 1 to 100. A year that does not end in two zeros belongs to the century whose number is its number of hundreds plus one.

Chronology

The order in which facts happened, and the set of methods that make it possible to establish that order. A relative chronology gives the order without the dates; an absolute chronology gives the dates.

City-state

A city that governs itself, with its farming territory, its laws, its gods and its army, obeying no higher capital. It is the political form of the Greek world before the great conquests.

Conquest

The taking of control of a territory by force. The word is used by the French official history syllabus alongside exploration, in the title of one and the same theme, which avoids telling one without the other.

Contemporary Era

The fifth period of the French convention, opened at 1789 or 1815 and never closed: it runs up to the moment it is read. It is the only one of the five that keeps growing, and the only one whose closing boundary will be set by people who are not born.

Convention

An agreement of language or of method, adopted because it is convenient and not because it would be true. The division of time into five periods is a convention, and the French official syllabus writes it so.

Cuneiform

The writing made of wedge-shaped signs, pressed into fresh clay with a cut reed. Invented in Lower Mesopotamia between 3500 and 3300 BCE, it was in use for close to three thousand five hundred years.

From "Decade" to "Julian calendar"

Eleven entries, in alphabetical order.

Decade

Ten consecutive years. Unlike the century, it is counted from the year ending in zero: "the 1960s" designates the decade running from 1960 to 1969.

Domestication

The passage from a wild species to a species raised or cultivated by humans, who choose how it reproduces. It transforms the species concerned as lastingly as the society that practises it.

Empire

A set of different territories and peoples subject to a single authority. An empire does not ask its subjects to resemble one another: it asks them to pay, to obey and to supply soldiers.

Era

A run of years counted from a chosen starting point. The word says nothing about duration: it says from what the counting starts. Several eras coexist in the world today.

Excavation

The operation by which the buried remains of a place are methodically uncovered, recording the position of every element. An excavation destroys what it explores: only the record survives.

Exploration

A voyage undertaken to survey a space that those who set out do not know. The word describes the intention of those who set out, never the state of the space reached, which may be inhabited and organised.

First-hand source

A source produced at the time of the facts, or by somebody who took part in them: a letter written on the day itself, a signed contract, a tool abandoned on the spot.

Gregorian calendar

The calendar used today in the greater part of the world. In 1582 it corrects the shift built up by the Julian calendar, by suppressing ten days and modifying the rule for secular leap years.

Half-life

The time at the end of which half of a quantity of radioactive material has been transformed. That of carbon 14 is 5,730 years. It is also called the radioactive period.

High Middle Ages and low Middle Ages

The two ends of the Middle Ages, in French haut Moyen Âge and bas Moyen Âge. The HIGH is the OLDEST, from the fifth to the tenth century; the LOW is the most RECENT, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is the opposite of what intuition suggests, English usually saying early and late instead, and the words pass no judgement on the period.

Julian calendar

The calendar used in Europe until the Gregorian reform, adopted in 1582 in several countries and only in 1752 in Great Britain. It counts 365.25 days per year, which makes it fall behind the Sun: the dates of the seasons shift in it by about three days every four hundred years.

From "Landmark" to "Period"

Nine entries, in alphabetical order.

Landmark

A dated fact placed on a timeline. A landmark is not necessarily an important fact: it is a fact whose date is known and which serves to get one's bearings, like a milestone at the side of a road.

Middle Ages

The third period of the French convention, of about a thousand years, from 395 or 476 to 1453 or 1492. Its name, Moyen Âge in French, was coined afterwards by learned men who saw in it only an interval between two other ages.

Migration

The lasting movement of a human group from one region to another. Prehistoric migrations are read in the distribution of tools and bones and in genetic analyses.

Millennium

One thousand consecutive years, that is ten centuries. The first millennium CE contains the years 1 to 1000. It is used above all for ancient periods, where the exact year is unknown.

Modern Times

The fourth period of the French convention, of about three centuries, from 1453 or 1492 to 1789 or 1815. Its French name is Temps modernes, and the word modern has in it the meaning the learned men of those centuries gave it: not ancient.

Necropolis

A place set aside for the dead, used repeatedly. Its appearance is one of the clearest signs of a population settled in the same place over several generations.

Neolithic

The age of polished stone, when agriculture and stock-raising appear and when groups settle. It begins in the Near East around ten thousand years BCE, and far later elsewhere.

Palaeolithic

The age of chipped stone, when tools are obtained by striking a block to detach cutting flakes from it. Groups move about, hunt and gather. It is the longest phase of Prehistory.

Period

The interval between two boundary dates. A period has a duration, a name, and features judged common to what it contains. That last point is the one that is argued over.

From "Periodisation" to "Stratigraphy"

Nine entries, in alphabetical order.

Periodisation

The operation of dividing the past into periods, and the result of that operation. Every periodisation is a choice, made afterwards, according to what one wants to bring out.

Prehistory

The first period of the convention, the one for which no text is available. It does not end everywhere at the same moment: it ends, for each region, when texts appear there.

Printing

The set of techniques that make it possible to reproduce a text in many copies from a form set only once. It does not create reading, it multiplies the occasions for reading and a text's chances of survival.

Relative dating

A dating that ranks facts against one another, without attributing a year to them. It rests on the position of things, in particular on the superposition of layers of earth.

Roman numerals

A notation system using letters. Three are enough for every century known: I is one, V is five, X is ten. Letters are added from left to right, and a smaller letter placed before a larger one is subtracted.

Scale

The ratio between a distance on a timeline and a real duration. On a constant-scale timeline, one centimetre is always worth the same number of years, from the beginning to the end of the line.

Second-hand source

A piece of work that speaks about sources without being one: a textbook, an article, a museum label. It is useful, it is not proof, and it must always state what it rests on.

Source

Everything left of the past that makes it possible to know something about it: an object, a text, a building, a bone, a layer of earth, an image, a recording.

Stratigraphy

The study of the superposition of layers and of their relations, stated in the seventeenth century and become in the nineteenth the basis of relative dating in archaeology. It gives an order, never a year.

From "Stratum" to "Writing"

The last five entries, in alphabetical order.

Stratum

A layer of earth or sediment laid on those before it. The pile of strata at a site reproduces the order of time, as long as nothing has disturbed it.

Testimony

An account given by somebody who claims to have seen. It brings what no object gives, and it brings at the same time the point of view, the memory and the interest of whoever is speaking.

Timeline

A representation of time as a line, where the order is read from left to right and where distance represents duration. In this book the timelines are rendered as tables, with the durations written out in plain figures.

Trace

What survives without having been left on purpose: waste, footprints, remains of meals, wear on a tool. A trace has no intention, which makes it hard to read and hard to fake.

Writing

A system of agreed signs that notes a language and makes it possible to read it back. Its appearance serves as the boundary between Prehistory and Antiquity, because it changes the nature of the traces available.