Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari

Chapters

1. CHAPTER 1 — An Animal of No Significance — 1 min
   Long before kingdoms and scriptures, there were only physics, chemistry, and biology: matter forming, life emerging, species mutating,…
2. CHAPTER 2 — The Tree of Knowledge — 1 min
   Sapiens did not win because its muscles were stronger or its tools were sharper. The advantage was cognitive:…
3. CHAPTER 3 — A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve — 1 min
   After the cognitive leap, there was never a single “natural” way to be human. Foragers lived in many…
4. CHAPTER 4 — The Flood — 1 min
   When sapiens expanded into new regions, the landscape did not merely gain a clever ape. It lost creatures…
5. CHAPTER 5 — History’s Biggest Fraud — 1 min
   The agricultural shift is often praised as progress, but it can be read as a trap. Sapiens gained…
6. CHAPTER 6 — Building Pyramids — 1 min
   Large societies require a shared order, and the shared order is imagined. Not imaginary in the sense of…
7. CHAPTER 7 — Memory Overload — 1 min
   As villages became towns and towns became empires, human memory hit a ceiling. No one mind could track…
8. CHAPTER 8 — There Is No Justice in History — 1 min
   If imagined orders are powerful, they also produce imagined hierarchies. Class, gender, and race can be treated as…
9. CHAPTER 9 — The Arrow of History — 1 min
   Cultures change, collide, and sometimes fuse, yet there is a direction to the long arc: increasing complexity and…
10. CHAPTER 10 — The Scent of Money — 1 min
    Money is not metal or paper. It is trust at scale: a shared belief that a token accepted…
11. CHAPTER 11 — Imperial Visions — 1 min
    Empires unify huge territories by force and administration. They collect taxes, build roads, standardize laws, and create a…
12. CHAPTER 12 — The Law of Religion — 1 min
    Religions operate as engines of order, cooperation, and meaning. They bind strangers by offering a shared moral map…
13. CHAPTER 13 — The Secret of Success — 1 min
    Why did some cultures spread and others shrink? There is no single “best” blueprint. Expansion often rewards adaptability…
14. CHAPTER 14 — The Discovery of Ignorance — 1 min
    Many societies assumed the core truths were already known: handed down by gods, ancestors, or ancient authorities. The…
15. CHAPTER 15 — The Marriage of Science and Empire — 1 min
    Exploration is not only curiosity. It becomes a political project. Empires fund voyages, surveys, and scholars because ignorance…
16. CHAPTER 16 — The Capitalist Creed — 1 min
    Capitalism runs on faith in growth. Credit is its central ritual: trusting that future production will expand, so…
17. CHAPTER 17 — The Wheels of Industry — 1 min
    Industrialization was a revolution in energy conversion. For most of history, human work depended on muscle, and muscle…
18. CHAPTER 18 — A Permanent Revolution — 1 min
    Modernity arrives as instability made normal. Institutions that once lasted for centuries become temporary, and change turns into…
19. CHAPTER 19 — And They Lived Happily Ever After — 1 min
    Does the long march of history translate into happiness? The question is harder than it sounds, because happiness…
20. CHAPTER 20 — The End of Homo Sapiens — 1 min
    For most of the story, sapiens looks like the final winner. Certainty then turns into a question: what…
21. AFTERWORD — The Animal that Became a God — 1 min
    In a brief span of history, an ordinary primate became a force that reshaped continents, extinguished species, and…