Submitted by Sean Williams on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 12:52
404 years ago a group of Catholic rebels were caught trying to blow up Parliament. Their failure, subsequent torture and gruesome deaths, have become the focus for one of the year's highlights, when millions of Brits will venture outside to light bonfires, burn effigies and set off around 30,000 tons of gunpowder in firework displays great and small.
Yet while most of those marvelling at rockets, firecrackers and Catherine Wheels will know about Guy Fawkes and his ill-advised plotters, not many will know fireworks go back thousands of years before, in ancient China.
Genghis Khan was the founder of the Mongol Empire - a massive conglomeratation of Central Asian and Chinese states that became the longest continually running empire in human history. He was born Temüjin in 1162 in a Mongol tribe near Burkhan Khaldun.
He rose to power in the Mongol tribe, founded the Mongol Empire and expanded it by leading successful raids on many regions and power centres, including the Kara-Khitan Khanate, Caucasus, Khwarezmid Empire and Western Xia and Jin dynasties of China. It was the beginning of what would be a long and bloody sequence of invasions by the Mongols stretching throughout the 13th century and into the 14th century. They resulted in an estimated death-toll of some 60 million people - the third largest death-toll by warfare in history.
He died in 1227 after defeating the Tanguts. His unmarked grave lies at an unknown spot somewhere in Mongolia. His kingdom was passed onto various sons and grandsons, who went on to stretch the Mongol Empire across most of Eurasia. Analysis of Y-chromosomal lineage suggests that at around 8% of the men in a large region of Asia - and about 0.5% of the men in the world - descend from Khan and his offspring, as a consequence of social selection.
Merv, an oasis city in modern-day Turkmenistan, is one of the most important historical cities on the renowned Silk Road, near the modern city of Mary. Its location in the middle of Central Asia has made it a melting pot for world cultures, politics and conflict; it is even estimated to have once been the largest city in the world in the 12th century AD.
Merv has been inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC, and it was ruled intermittently by Persian tribes until its re-founding at the hands of Cyrus the Great; the first Persian emperor at around 550 BC. According to legend, Alexander the Great visited Merv, and the city was renamed Alexandria in his honour, following his death. Under Ardashir I, the Sassanids took control of Merv at around 230 AD - yet their stranglehold on the city was broken by an Arab invasion following the death of the last Sassanid ruler Yazdegard, in 651. Merv then became an Islamic city.
In 1037 a group of Turks seized Merv peacefully. Thus followed an era of prosperity for the city, which became the capital of the eastern Islamic world with a great library and, most importantly, a huge marketplace. It is during this epoch, between 1145 to 1153 that Merv, with a population of around 200,000, was possibly the largest city in the world.
