Ancient Civilizations

Around 3100 BCE the Nile Valley polities of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt were consolidated into a single kingdom, an event traditionally credited to King Narmer and marking the beginning of the First Dynasty.

Eastern North America is recognised as one of at least a handful of world regions where plant domestication arose wholly independently.

Along Peru's arid central coast, the Norte Chico (Caral–Supe) culture built the oldest known civilisation in the Americas, with large-scale communal construction clearly apparent from around 3100 BCE and the flagship city of Caral…

Beginning around 3000 BCE, Neolithic farming communities speaking early Austronesian languages set out from Taiwan in one of history's most far-reaching maritime migrations.

During the Early Dynastic period southern Mesopotamia was organised into competing city-states such as Uruk, Ur, Kish, Lagash and Umma, each centred on a walled city, its patron deity's temple and surrounding farmland.

During the Third Dynasty the pharaoh Djoser commissioned a monumental tomb at Saqqara that became the first large-scale stone building in the world and Egypt's first pyramid.

Among the public works of Mature Harappan Mohenjo-daro was the Great Bath, a watertight brick tank about 12 by 7 metres set atop the citadel mound, sealed with a thick layer of bitumen and fed and drained by carefully engineered channels.

Around 2600 BCE the Indus Valley Civilisation entered its Mature Harappan phase, marked by the deliberate construction of large, pre-planned cities, most famously Mohenjo-daro on the lower Indus and Harappa in the Punjab.

The Mature Harappan civilisation adopted a remarkably precise and uniform system of weights and measures across its vast territory.

The Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) commissioned the Great Pyramid on the Giza plateau, completed around 2560 BCE after roughly two to three decades of labour.

The Great Sphinx, a recumbent lion with a human head carved from a single mass of bedrock on the Giza plateau, is generally attributed to the reign of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khafre around 2500 BCE and is thought to depict his face.

From around 2500 BCE the settlement of Kerma, near the Third Cataract of the Nile in Upper Nubia (modern Sudan), grew into the first major urban centre and state south of Egypt.

King Eannatum of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash defeated neighbouring Umma in a long-running dispute over fertile border farmland and commemorated his victory on a carved limestone monument known as the Stele of the Vultures.

By the late third millennium BCE the Indus Valley conducted flourishing long-distance maritime trade with Mesopotamia, where it is generally identified as the land of 'Meluhha'. Sargon of Akkad (c.

Toward the end of the Fifth Dynasty, the burial chamber of the pharaoh Unas at Saqqara was inscribed with a corpus of about 283 spells now known as the Pyramid Texts, the earliest version of a tradition that would appear in nine late Old…

Around 2350 BCE, Urukagina (also read Uruinimgina), the last ruler of the First Dynasty of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, promulgated a body of administrative and social reforms that are among the earliest recorded measures of legal…

Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, served as 'entu' (high priestess) of the moon god Nanna at the city of Ur, a post her father created in part to bind the Akkadian and Sumerian religious traditions of his new empire.

Sargon of Akkad rose from obscure origins to overthrow Lugalzagesi of Uruk and the system of independent Sumerian and Akkadian city-states, forging a centralised state that stretched from the Persian Gulf across Mesopotamia toward the…

Harappan engineering reached its peak in Gujarat. At Lothal, founded around 2300 BCE near an old course of the Sabarmati, the people built a large baked-brick basin connected by channels to the river and sea, widely regarded as the…

Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon and fourth king of Akkad, took the Akkadian Empire to its height and broke with Mesopotamian tradition by having himself deified during his own lifetime, adopting the title 'king of the four quarters (of the…

Around 2200 BCE a severe, century-long aridification known as the 4.2-kiloyear event spread across the Mediterranean, West Asia, North Africa and South Asia, ranking among the most abrupt climate shocks of the Holocene.

Issued in the name of Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, or possibly promulgated by his son Shulgi, the Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest extant written law code known, predating the Code of Hammurabi by roughly three centuries.

King Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty of Ur ordered the construction of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, a massive stepped temple platform dedicated to Nanna (Sin), the moon god and patron deity of the city.

In the steppe of the Southern Trans-Urals (modern Chelyabinsk and Orenburg oblasts of Russia and northern Kazakhstan), the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta-Petrovka culture (c.

Later Chinese historiography (notably Sima Qian's 'Records of the Grand Historian') credits Yu the Great with founding the Xia, regarded as China's first hereditary dynasty, after he tamed the Yellow River floods by dredging channels…

After the political fragmentation of the First Intermediate Period, the Eleventh Dynasty ruler Mentuhotep II, based at Thebes in Upper Egypt, defeated the rival Herakleopolitan (Tenth Dynasty) kings of the north and reunited Egypt under a…

Merchants from the city-state of Assur built one of the earliest documented long-distance commercial networks, linking Mesopotamia with central Anatolia by donkey caravan.

In late 1924 a fossilised skull of a young hominin was recovered from the Buxton lime works near Taung, South Africa, and brought to anatomist Raymond Dart.

At the start of the Middle Minoan period, the inhabitants of Knossos in north-central Crete raised the first monumental palace complex on a hill that had been occupied since the Neolithic.

From around 1900 BCE the Mature Harappan urban order unravelled in a gradual process of de-urbanisation rather than sudden catastrophe.

The Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Senusret III (reigned c. 1878-1839 BCE) brought the Middle Kingdom to its political and military peak.

Under the Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Senusret III (c. 1872–1853 BCE), Egypt completed a chain of massive mudbrick fortresses along the Nile around the Second Cataract, fixing its southern frontier at Semna.

At the Egyptian turquoise-mining settlement of Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai, and at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt, Semitic-speaking workers adapted a small number of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs into a radically simpler system in which each symbol…

The Minoans developed Linear A, a syllabic writing system used across Crete and on several Aegean islands roughly between 1850 and 1450 BCE, primarily on clay tablets, sealings and a range of votive and everyday objects.

Scribes of the Old Babylonian period developed a sophisticated place-value mathematics built on a sexagesimal (base-60) system, a choice whose highly divisible base (with factors 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.) simplified work with fractions and…

Near the end of his reign, the Babylonian king Hammurabi had a collection of some 282 legal judgements engraved on a 2.25-metre basalt stele, topped by a relief showing the king receiving the rod and ring of authority from the sun-god…

During the Classic Kerma period (c. 1750–1500 BCE), the Kushite kingdom at Kerma reached its political height while Egypt was fragmented during its Second Intermediate Period.

During the Neopalatial period (c. 1700–1450 BCE) Minoan Crete reached the peak of its prosperity and projected its influence across the eastern Mediterranean through seaborne trade.

Around 1650 BCE the scribe Ahmes copied the document now known as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, stating that he was reproducing an older text that may date to roughly 2000 BCE during the Middle Kingdom.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, a copy dating to roughly 1600 BCE, is the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma and a milestone in the history of medicine.

The Mesoamerican ballgame, played with a solid rubber ball on a formal masonry or earthen court, is one of the world's oldest organised team sports and a ritual institution that endured for over three thousand years.

The volcano on the Aegean island of Thera (modern Santorini) erupted in one of the largest volcanic events of the Holocene, ejecting tens of cubic kilometres of material and burying the prosperous Minoan town of Akrotiri under ash and…

According to tradition, the Shang leader Cheng Tang defeated the last Xia king, the tyrant Jie, at the Battle of Mingtiao, sending Jie into exile and establishing the Shang dynasty (c.

At Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese, an emergent warrior elite was buried around 1600–1500 BCE in deep shaft graves later enclosed within the precinct known as Grave Circle A.

The Hittite king Mursili I led a long-range raid down the Euphrates, defeated Aleppo, and sacked Babylon, overthrowing Samsu-ditana, the last king of Hammurabi's First Dynasty, and carrying off the statue of the city-god Marduk.

Ahmose I, ruler of Thebes, completed the reunification of Egypt by driving out the Hyksos, a Levantine dynasty that had controlled the Nile Delta during the Second Intermediate Period.

Early in the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Thutmose I (reigned c.

Around 1500–1300 BCE the distinctive Lapita cultural complex crystallised in the Bismarck Archipelago, off the northeast coast of New Guinea, as the easternmost frontier of the Austronesian expansion met the older populations of Near…

In the early Vedic period the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest religious texts in any Indo-European language, were composed in archaic Sanskrit.

During the early-to-mid second millennium BCE, speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are widely held to have entered the northwestern Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, descendants of pastoralist populations originating on the Eurasian…

The Phoenician cities, above all Tyre, developed large-scale production of a colourfast crimson-to-violet dye extracted from the glands of murex sea-snails (Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris).

Around 1500 BCE, Austronesian voyagers departing from the northern or central Philippines reached the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, becoming the first humans to settle in Remote Oceania.

Hatshepsut, one of the few women to rule Egypt as pharaoh, dispatched a major sea-borne trading expedition to the Land of Punt, a region probably on the southern Red Sea coast (near modern Eritrea/Somalia).

Thutmose III defeated a coalition of Canaanite and Syrian city-states, led by the king of Kadesh, at Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley.

Around 1450 BCE many Minoan sites on Crete suffered destruction, and Knossos came under the control of Mycenaean Greeks, who administered the palace until its final destruction (conventionally c.

The Amarna archive—several hundred clay tablets found at Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), Akhenaten's short-lived Egyptian capital—preserves the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian court with the great powers and vassals of the Late…

The pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, overturned Egypt's traditional polytheism in favour of the exclusive worship of the Aten, the visible sun-disk.

The boy-king Tutankhaten, who took the throne as a child around 1332 BCE, reversed the Atenist revolution of his predecessor Akhenaten.

A merchant ship that sank off Uluburun, near Kas on the southern coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), around 1320–1300 BCE preserved the richest assemblage of Late Bronze-Age trade goods ever recovered.

Around the end of the second millennium BCE, ironworking shifted from a rare, prestige craft to a widespread technology, marking the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age across the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

Across the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, the temple complex of Amun-Ra at Karnak grew into the largest religious structure of the ancient world.

Ramesses II led an Egyptian army of around 20,000 men, organised into four divisions (Amun, Ra, Ptah, Seth), against the Hittite king Muwatalli II near Kadesh on the Orontes River in Syria.

Some sixteen years after Kadesh, Ramesses II of Egypt and Hattusili III of the Hittite Empire concluded a formal peace agreement, known as the 'Eternal Treaty' or 'Silver Treaty'.

Around 1250 BCE, during a great phase of fortification building across Mycenaean Greece, the citadel of Mycenae was enclosed by massive 'Cyclopean' walls — ramparts up to about 12 metres high and several metres thick, built of unworked…

Excavated intact in 1976 at Yinxu (Anyang), the tomb of Fu Hao — a consort and military commander of King Wu Ding — is the only undisturbed royal burial of the Shang period yet found, and one of the most important archaeological…

From the reign of King Wu Ding onward, Shang diviners at the capital Yin (modern Anyang) inscribed questions to ancestors and deities on ox scapulae and turtle plastrons, applied heat to crack them, and read the cracks as answers —…

A victory stele erected by the pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses II, celebrates his campaigns in Libya and Canaan and contains the line 'Israel is laid waste; its seed is no more.' Dated to about 1208 BCE, this is the earliest known…

The Houmuwu ding (formerly read Simuwu), a rectangular four-legged ritual cauldron unearthed near Anyang in 1939, is the heaviest piece of ancient bronze to survive anywhere in the world, standing 1.33 m tall and weighing about 833 kg.

Across roughly 1200–1150 BCE the interconnected civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed in a few decades: Mycenaean palaces in Greece were destroyed and abandoned, the Hittite Empire fell, the great Syrian port of Ugarit was…

The Enuma Elish ('When on high'), a creation epic of roughly a thousand lines on seven cuneiform tablets, narrates how the world arose from primordial waters, how generational conflict among the gods culminated in the young storm-god…

From about 1200 BCE the Gulf Coast site of San Lorenzo became the first great centre of the Olmec, the earliest elaborate civilisation of Mesoamerica and a 'mother culture' whose art, religion and political forms influenced all later…

The Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) preached a reformed religion centred on a single supreme creator god, Ahura Mazda, and an ethical-cosmic dualism between Asha (truth and right order) and Druj (the lie and chaos), in which human…

Around the start of the first millennium BCE, communities speaking early Bantu languages, originating in the grassland highlands along the modern Cameroon–Nigeria border, accelerated a centuries-long migration that would carry their…

By around 1050 BCE the linear Canaanite letter-forms had stabilised into the 22-consonant Phoenician alphabet, written right-to-left with fixed letter names, shapes and order.

At Muye, near the Shang capital, the western state of Zhou under King Wu decisively defeated the army of the last Shang king Di Xin (Zhou Xin), ending more than five centuries of Shang rule and inaugurating the Zhou dynasty, the…

When King Wu died only a few years after the conquest, his brother the Duke of Zhou (Zhou Gong) served as regent for the boy-king Cheng.

Between roughly 1100 and 900 BCE, Lapita seafarers became the first humans ever to reach the islands of Remote Oceania beyond the Solomon Islands, crossing wide ocean gaps to settle Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and then West Polynesia.

By around 1000 BCE Babylonian scholars had compiled the astronomical compendium known as MUL.APIN ('the Plough Star'), the earliest surviving comprehensive treatise on Mesopotamian astronomy, written in cuneiform on clay tablets.

According to the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon built the First Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, traditionally completing it around 957 BCE (Josephus and the conventional regnal chronology place construction c. 966–957 BCE).

The Cascajal Block is a serpentine slab incised with 62 glyph-like signs, recovered from a gravel quarry in the Olmec heartland near San Lorenzo, Veracruz, and dated by associated ceramics and figurine fragments to about 900 BCE.

The oldest layer of the I Ching — the Zhouyi or 'Changes of Zhou' — took shape in the Western Zhou as a divination manual: sixty-four hexagrams, each built from six broken or unbroken lines, paired with terse oracular statements used to…

High in the Peruvian Andes at about 3,150 metres, between the Cordillera Blanca and Cordillera Negra, the ceremonial centre of Chavín de Huántar was founded around 900 BCE and grew into the focal sanctuary of the Chavín culture, the first…

As San Lorenzo declined, the Olmec centre of La Venta rose to prominence around 900 BCE on an island amid the swamps of the Gulf Coast lowlands of Tabasco, remaining the dominant Olmec city until its abandonment about 400 BCE.

King Mesha of Moab erected a black basalt stele at Dibon (modern Dhiban, Jordan) commemorating his rebellion and recovery of territory from the Kingdom of Israel. Written c.

A fragmentary basalt victory stele in Old Aramaic, erected most probably by Hazael of Aram-Damascus and discovered in reuse at Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993–94, commemorates an Aramean king's defeat of the kings of Israel and of the…

Phoenician settlers from Tyre founded Carthage (Phoenician 'Qart-hadasht', 'New City') on the coast of modern Tunisia, traditionally in 814 BCE under Queen Elissa (Dido).

The earliest Upanishads, including the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya, were composed in northern India during the later Vedic period, roughly between 800 and 500 BCE.

In the region of present-day central and northern Nigeria, east of the Niger River and north of the Benue, the Nok culture became one of the earliest iron-using societies in sub-Saharan Africa.