Classical Antiquity

By tradition, the first Olympic Games were celebrated in 776 BCE at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia in the western Peloponnese, in honour of Zeus.

In 771 BCE the Marquis of Shen, aggrieved that King You had set aside his Shen-born crown prince in favour of the son of his favourite consort Bao Si, allied with Quanrong nomadic forces and stormed the Zhou capital Haojing (part of…

Around the second half of the eighth century BCE the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, reached the monumental form that would define Greek literature.

On seizing the Assyrian throne in 745 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III reorganised the state and army in ways that turned Assyria into the ancient Near East's first true territorial empire.

Around 733 BCE settlers from Corinth founded Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily, soon after the Euboean foundation of Naxos. Syracuse became one of the most powerful Greek cities of the western Mediterranean.

The Kushite king Piye (reigned c. 743–716 BCE), ruling from Napata near the Fourth Cataract in Nubia, marched north and around 727 BCE conquered much of Egypt, defeating a coalition of Delta princes led by Tefnakht of Sais, capturing…

After a multi-year siege begun by Shalmaneser V, the Assyrian capture of Samaria around 722 BCE ended the northern Kingdom of Israel; Sargon II later claimed completion of the conquest and consolidation in 720 BCE.

In anticipation of the Assyrian invasion of Judah by Sennacherib (701 BCE), King Hezekiah's engineers cut a winding tunnel roughly 533 metres long through bedrock to channel water from the Gihon Spring outside the walls to the Pool of…

During his 701 BCE campaign against the rebellious kingdom of Judah, the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged and captured Lachish, Judah's second city, building a massive stone-and-earth siege ramp against its walls and storming it with…

Appointed chancellor of Qi around 685 BCE, Guan Zhong engineered a sweeping reorganisation that made Qi the dominant power of the early Spring and Autumn period and raised its ruler, Duke Huan, to be recognised in 651 BCE as the first…

The Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE) assembled at Nineveh the oldest known systematically organised royal library, gathering more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments through copying and the deliberate collection of texts…

In the kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia, rulers of the Mermnad dynasty began stamping small lumps of electrum, a naturally occurring gold-silver alloy sourced from the Pactolus River, with official designs around 630 BCE, creating the…

According to the Hebrew Bible, during repairs to the Jerusalem Temple in the eighteenth year of King Josiah of Judah (c.

In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonians under Nabopolassar and Medes under Cyaxares, with Scythian support, besieged and stormed Nineveh, the great capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Under Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE) Babylon was rebuilt into the largest and most splendid city of its age.

By the 6th century BCE the Indo-Gangetic plain had coalesced into sixteen large states known as the Mahajanapadas ('great realms'), listed in the Buddhist Anguttara Nikaya and the Jain Bhagavati Sutra.

The Sushruta Samhita, a foundational Sanskrit treatise traditionally attributed to the physician Sushruta and conventionally dated to around the 6th century BCE in northern India, systematically codified the surgical knowledge of the…

Around 594 BCE the Athenians appointed the statesman and poet Solon as archon with extraordinary powers to resolve a grave social and economic crisis.

After a siege of roughly 18–30 months, the army of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon breached Jerusalem and, in 587 or 586 BCE, sacked the city and burned Solomon's Temple.

After Judah's king Zedekiah rebelled against Babylonian overlordship, Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem and, in 587/586 BCE, captured and razed the city, destroying Solomon's Temple (the First Temple).

According to Herodotus, a solar eclipse that halted a battle between the Medes and Lydians had been foretold by Thales of Miletus, the figure later remembered as the first of the Ionian or Presocratic philosophers.

Confucius (Kong Qiu, c. 551–479 BCE) lived during the late Spring and Autumn period, an era of political fragmentation and conflict among Chinese states under the declining Zhou dynasty.

In 550 BCE Cyrus II of Persia overthrew his Median overlord Astyages and absorbed the Median kingdom, an event conventionally taken as the founding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

In October 539 BCE the forces of Cyrus the Great took Babylon, the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, reportedly with little fighting; the city's last king, Nabonidus, was deposed and many inhabitants are said to have welcomed Cyrus.

Tradition records that the playwright-actor Thespis presented the first tragedy at the newly instituted dramatic competition of the City Dionysia in Athens around 534 BCE, and won its inaugural prize.

Around 530 BCE the Ionian sage Pythagoras emigrated from Samos to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a religious and philosophical brotherhood that combined ascetic communal life with intensive study of number…

Cyrus II (the Great), founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, died around 530 BCE while campaigning against the Massagetae, a nomadic Scythian confederation inhabiting the steppes of Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea, near the…

According to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-483 BCE), a prince of the Shakya clan who had renounced worldly life, attained enlightenment while meditating beneath a pipal tree (the 'Bodhi tree') at Uruvela, present-day Bodh…

Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the current Jain cosmic cycle, died (attained moksha) according to Svetambara tradition at Pava in modern Bihar around 527 BCE.

After Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) seized the Achaemenid throne and suppressed a wave of revolts, he had a monumental relief and inscription carved high on a cliff at Mount Behistun (Bisotun) in western Iran, around 520 BCE.

Around 513 BCE the Achaemenid king Darius I led a large army from Persia across the Bosphorus on a pontoon bridge of boats, marched through Thrace, and crossed the Danube over a second bridge built by his Ionian Greek vassals to invade the…

Around 500 BCE Heraclitus of Ephesus composed his enigmatic prose work 'On Nature,' surviving only in fragments, which advanced one of the boldest visions of early Greek thought.

According to Roman tradition, the citizens of Rome expelled their seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus ('the Proud'), and replaced the monarchy with a republic in which sovereign power (res publica, 'the public thing') was…

In 508/507 BCE, after a struggle against rival aristocrats and a brief Spartan intervention, the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes carried through reforms that are widely regarded as the birth of democracy.

Around 500 BCE Darius I completed the Royal Road, an arterial highway running roughly 2,400 km from Sardis in western Anatolia to Susa in the Persian heartland, partly along routes first laid by Assyrian kings.

The Dong Son culture of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam produced large ceremonial bronze drums (classified as Heger Type I) from roughly 600 BCE onward, with their floruit around 500 BCE and continuing into the early first…

By around the 5th century BCE, during the late Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Chinese metalworkers became the first in the world to produce cast iron on a significant scale, with the earliest securely dated cast-iron…

From around the 5th century BCE, the Nok culture of the Jos Plateau region in what is now central Nigeria began producing the earliest known large-scale figurative sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa.

In September 490 BCE an Athenian army, supported by a small Plataean contingent, defeated the first Persian invasion of mainland Greece on the plain of Marathon in north-eastern Attica.

Around 483 BC a rich new vein of silver was discovered in the state-owned mines of Laurion (Laurium) in southern Attica, particularly in the district of Maroneia, yielding an exceptional surplus to the Athenian treasury (a hundred talents…

In 480 BCE Xerxes I launched a vast second Persian invasion of Greece by land and sea.

A board of ten magistrates (the decemviri), appointed at the insistence of the plebeians, produced Rome's first written legal code.

By the mid-fifth century BCE the silver tetradrachm of Athens, struck from the rich Laurion mines of southern Attica and bearing the helmeted head of Athena on the obverse and her owl with an olive sprig and the letters ATHE on the…

Work on the Parthenon, the marble temple of Athena Parthenos on the Athenian Acropolis, began in 447 BCE under the political leadership of Pericles, part of an ambitious building programme that proclaimed Athens' wealth and pre-eminence at…

In the later fifth century BCE, the school associated with Hippocrates of Cos produced the earliest texts of the Hippocratic Corpus, foundational works of rational medicine.

From 431 to 404 BCE the Greek world was convulsed by the Peloponnesian War, a struggle for hegemony between the Athenian-led Delian League and the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League.

Toward the end of his life, around 430–425 BCE, Herodotus of Halicarnassus completed the Histories, the first large-scale narrative history in the Western tradition and the reason Cicero later called him the 'Father of History.' Ostensibly…

The Plague of Athens was a devastating epidemic that struck the city-state of Athens in 430 BCE, during the second year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, with major recurrences in 429 BCE and the winter of 427/426 BCE.

In ancient Gandhara, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini composed the Ashtadhyayi ("Eight Chapters"), a treatise of roughly 3,959 aphoristic rules, or sutras, that gives an exhaustive generative description of Sanskrit morphology, syntax, and…

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury convicted the seventy-year-old philosopher Socrates on charges of impiety (failing to honour the city's gods) and corrupting the youth, brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.

Around 387 BCE, after travels in southern Italy and Sicily, Plato established a school in a grove sacred to the hero Academus outside Athens — the Academy, often regarded as the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

The Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of philosophical Daoism, was traditionally attributed to the sage Laozi (Lao Tzu), said to be a contemporary of Confucius in the 6th century BCE.

At Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip II of Macedon defeated a coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes.

Around 335 BCE Aristotle, former pupil of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great, returned to Athens and founded his own school at the Lyceum, a gymnasium in a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceius.

In spring 334 BCE Alexander III of Macedon crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor with an army of roughly 40,000–50,000 men, launching the campaign that would dismantle the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

On 1 October 331 BCE, Alexander the Great decisively defeated Darius III on the plain of Gaugamela, near modern Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After taking Egypt from Persian control, Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast at the western edge of the Nile delta, traditionally in spring 331 BCE.

Alexander the Great died at Babylon on roughly 10–11 June 323 BCE, aged 32, with no competent heir.

Around 321 BCE Chandragupta Maurya, advised by the strategist Chanakya (Kautilya), overthrew the Nanda dynasty of Magadha and installed himself as king at Pataliputra, founding the Maurya Empire.

Around 320 BCE, under the newly founded Mauryan Empire of Chandragupta Maurya, the silver punch-marked karshapana became the standardised currency underpinning one of the ancient world's earliest centrally regulated monetary economies.

The censor Appius Claudius Caecus began Rome's first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, in 312 BCE (the same magistracy in which he started the Via Appia).

When Seleucus I Nicator crossed the Indus to recover the easternmost provinces once held by Alexander, he confronted Chandragupta Maurya, founder of India's first great empire.

Around 300 BCE, working in Alexandria under the early Ptolemies, the mathematician Euclid composed the Elements, a treatise in thirteen books that organised the geometry and number theory of the Greek world into a single deductive system.

At San Bartolo in the Petén lowlands of Guatemala, archaeologists led by William Saturno uncovered exquisitely painted murals inside a buried pyramid, carbon-dated to around 100 BCE and ranking among the oldest known Maya paintings.

By around the mid-first millennium BCE, ironworkers in South India and Sri Lanka developed wootz, the world's first true high-carbon crucible steel, with the technique well established by roughly 300 BCE.

Around 300 BCE the kings of the Kingdom of Kush completed the southward relocation of their political and ceremonial centre from Napata to Meroe, near the Nile's Sixth Cataract, inaugurating what scholars call the Meroitic period.

Around 300 BC the philosopher Zeno of Citium (c. 334-262 BC), a Phoenician-Greek merchant from Citium on Cyprus who had turned to philosophy after a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, began teaching publicly in the Stoa Poikile, the…

The Lex Hortensia capped roughly two centuries of struggle between Rome's patrician aristocracy and the plebeian majority, the so-called Conflict of the Orders.

The First Punic War, fought between Rome and Carthage largely over control of Sicily, was the longest continuous conflict and greatest naval war of antiquity, lasting twenty-three years.

Around 261 BCE the Mauryan emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga (coastal Odisha), a war his own thirteenth Major Rock Edict records as causing some 100,000 deaths, many more from disease and famine, and 150,000 deportations.

Archimedes of Syracuse, the foremost mathematician and engineer of antiquity, set out the law of buoyancy in his treatise On Floating Bodies (3rd century BCE): a body wholly or partly immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to…

Around the middle of the 3rd century BCE, the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Koine Greek at Alexandria, the first portion of what became the Septuagint.

According to Theravada tradition, around 250 BCE the emperor Ashoka convened the Third Buddhist Council at his capital Pataliputra under the presidency of the elder Moggaliputta Tissa, to purge heterodox doctrines and standardise the…

Around the mid-3rd century BCE the Mauryan emperor Ashoka commissioned the original Great Stupa at Sanchi, in present-day Madhya Pradesh, marking one of the earliest surviving monuments of Buddhist architecture in India.

Around 247 BCE Arsaces I, leader of the nomadic Parni of the Dahae confederation, exploited the weakening grip of the Seleucid kings to establish an independent power in the satrapy of Parthia, in what is now northeastern Iran and…

Beginning around 246 BCE, shortly after the young king of Qin took the throne, work began on a colossal funerary complex near Mount Li (modern Lintong, Shaanxi).

Around 240 BCE, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, chief librarian at Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the Earth using only geometry and shadows.

After a campaign of conquest begun in 230 BCE, King Zheng of Qin defeated the last of the rival Warring States in 221 BCE, ending centuries of fragmentation and creating the first unified Chinese empire.

During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who had invaded Italy by crossing the Alps, inflicted on Rome one of the worst defeats in its history near the village of Cannae in Apulia.

Around 215 BCE the First Emperor dispatched General Meng Tian with a large army northward against the Xiongnu, driving the nomads from the Ordos region.

After the Qin collapse, the warlords Liu Bang and Xiang Yu fought the four-year Chu–Han Contention for mastery of China.

At Zama in North Africa the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio (later 'Africanus') decisively defeated Hannibal, ending the Second Punic War and Carthage's status as a great power.

In 198 BC the Han dynasty concluded its first heqin ("harmonious kinship") treaty with the Xiongnu confederation, establishing a durable framework of appeasement through marriage alliance and tribute.

Around 176 BCE the nomadic Yuezhi confederation, then dominant in the Gansu (Hexi) Corridor of northwestern China, was crushed by the rising Xiongnu under Modu Chanyu, whose forces overran their pastures and broke their power.

In a single year Rome obliterated two of the Mediterranean's most storied cities, announcing its supremacy over both the western and eastern halves of the sea.

In 138 BCE Emperor Wu of Han sent the envoy Zhang Qian westward to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu nomads.

Under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), and guided by the scholar Dong Zhongshu, the Han court adopted Confucianism as the empire's official ideology.

Elected tribune of the plebs in 133 BCE, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus proposed an agrarian law to redistribute Roman public land, enforcing a long-ignored limit on how much state land any individual could hold and resettling impoverished…

The Antikythera mechanism is a geared bronze device, dated to roughly 100 BCE (give or take a few decades), recovered in 1901 from a Roman-era shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera.

In the Fezzan region of southwestern Libya, the Garamantes — a Berber-speaking people centred on the capital Garama (modern Germa) — engineered an extensive system of underground irrigation tunnels known as foggaras (qanats).

On the arid coastal plateau of southern Peru, the Nazca culture produced one of the world's most extraordinary bodies of large-scale art: hundreds of geoglyphs scraped into the desert pavement by removing dark surface stones to expose the…

During the Sangam age, the three crowned Tamil dynasties of the far south—the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas—presided over a flourishing maritime economy linking peninsular India to Rome, Arabia, and Southeast Asia.

In 81 BCE, the court of the boy-emperor Zhao of Han, under the regent Huo Guang, convened a formal debate over the state monopolies on salt, iron, and liquor that Emperor Wu had instituted to finance his campaigns against the Xiongnu.

Between 58 and 50 BCE the proconsul Gaius Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (roughly modern France and Belgium), bringing a vast new territory and its peoples under Roman control and dramatically extending Roman power to the Atlantic and the…

In 53 BCE the Roman triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus invaded Parthian Mesopotamia with seven legions, seeking wealth and military glory to rival Pompey and Caesar.

Having defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BCE and won the civil war, Julius Caesar accumulated unprecedented power, and in early 44 BCE he was made dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity.

A carved monument known as Stela 2 from Chiapa de Corzo in Chiapas, Mexico, bears a Long Count date corresponding to December 36 BCE (7.16.3.2.13), the earliest unambiguous Long Count inscription yet found.

On 2 September 31 BCE, the fleet of Octavian, commanded by Agrippa, defeated the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt in a naval battle off Actium on the western coast of Greece.

In the 1st century BCE, Greek and Roman navigators—tradition credits the pilot Hippalus—learned to exploit the seasonal reversal of the Indian Ocean monsoon, sailing east on the southwest monsoon in summer and returning west on the…

During the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya (Valagamba) of Anuradhapura, Buddhist monks of the Mahavihara tradition convened what Theravada tradition calls the Fourth Buddhist Council and, for the first time, committed the Pali Canon…

In January 27 BCE, Octavian formally 'restored the Republic' to the Senate and people of Rome, only to receive back overarching powers in a carefully staged settlement.

The Ara Pacis Augustae ('Altar of Augustan Peace') was consecrated in Rome on 30 January 9 BCE, after being commissioned by the Senate in 13 BCE to mark Augustus's safe return from campaigns in Gaul and Hispania.

In the Valley of Mexico, the planned metropolis of Teotihuacan grew explosively in the first two centuries CE into one of the largest cities in the world, eventually housing perhaps 100,000–125,000 people.

In the year 2 CE, the Western Han dynasty conducted a household and population census during the reign of Emperor Ping, when the court was dominated by the regent Wang Mang.

Over several days in September 9 CE, a coalition of Germanic peoples led by Arminius — a chieftain who had served as a Roman auxiliary officer and held Roman citizenship — ambushed and annihilated three legions (XVII, XVIII and XIX) under…

In AD 9, having usurped the Han throne and founded the Xin dynasty, Wang Mang issued an edict nationalising all agricultural land, declaring it wangtian (王田, 'royal fields') belonging to the state and forbidding its private sale or…

Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher and healer in Roman Judaea, was crucified in Jerusalem under the prefect Pontius Pilate around 30 CE (some scholars argue for 33 CE), during the festival of Passover.

The Pont du Gard, a three-tiered arched bridge rising about 47 metres above the Gardon river in southern Gaul, was built around the middle of the first century CE to carry an aqueduct supplying water to the Roman city of Nemausus (Nîmes).

Around 49-50 CE, leaders of the early Christian movement met in Jerusalem to resolve a fundamental dispute: whether non-Jewish (Gentile) converts had to be circumcised and keep the full Mosaic Law.

In the mid-first century CE, Greco-Roman mariners operating from Egypt mastered the seasonal monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, enabling direct open-water voyages from the Red Sea ports of Berenike and Myos Hormos to the markets of India…

Tradition holds that Buddhism entered China during the reign of Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han dynasty, prompted by a dream in which the emperor saw a radiant golden figure later identified as the Buddha.

During the First Jewish–Roman War, the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem from spring to late summer 70 CE.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE buried the Campanian towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under metres of ash, pumice and pyroclastic surges, killing thousands and freezing daily Roman life in place.

The emperor Titus inaugurated the Flavian Amphitheatre — later known as the Colosseum — in 80 CE with some 100 days of games, completing a project begun under his father Vespasian around 70 CE on the site of the artificial lake of Nero's…

Across the river valleys of present-day southern and central Ohio, communities of the Hopewell tradition constructed vast geometric earthen enclosures — perfect circles, squares and octagons joined by long avenues — that rank among the…

The Manusmriti, or Manava-Dharmashastra (Laws of Manu), is the most influential of the Hindu Dharmashastra legal-religious treatises, with its received metrical text generally dated by scholars to between 200 BCE and 200 CE and often…

From around the turn of the Common Era, the maritime and continental polities of Southeast Asia entered the cultural orbit of the Indian subcontinent in a process that the French scholar George Coedes termed "Indianisation." Carried…

Around the 1st century CE, Buddhist art in northwestern and northern India broke decisively with its earlier aniconic tradition, in which the Buddha had been evoked only through symbols such as the empty throne, footprints, the Bodhi tree…

Around the turn of the 1st-2nd century CE, the physician-redactor Charaka revised and systematised an older medical compendium attributed to the teacher Atreya and his pupil Agnivesha, producing the Charaka Samhita, one of the two…

In 105 CE the eunuch court official Cai Lun reported to the Eastern Han emperor a refined method for making paper from cheap, abundant materials — macerated tree bark, hemp ends, old rags and fishing nets — pulped and dried into thin…

At the death of the emperor Trajan in 117 CE, the Roman Empire reached its maximum territorial extent, spanning roughly 5 million square kilometres from the Atlantic and Britain to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine and Danube to the…

Around 127 CE Kanishka I acceded to the throne of the Kushan Empire, which at its zenith stretched from Central Asia and Bactria across Gandhara to the Gangetic plain, with capitals at Purushapura (Peshawar) and Mathura.

In 132 CE the Han polymath Zhang Heng — astronomer, mathematician and court official at Luoyang — presented the houfeng didong yi, the world's first known seismoscope.

The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE) was the last and most devastating of the three great Jewish uprisings against Rome.

In 142 CE, the Daoist adept Zhang Daoling proclaimed that the deified Laozi (Taishang Laojun) had descended to him atop Mount Heming in present-day Sichuan, establishing a new covenant between the true gods of the Dao and humanity and…

Around 150 CE, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria completed the Mathematike Syntaxis, known later by its Arabic-derived title the Almagest ('the greatest').

Around the middle of the second century CE, the South Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 150 – c.

The Antonine Plague was a devastating pandemic that swept the Roman Empire from approximately 165 to 180 CE, during the joint reign of emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, after whose dynasty it is named.

In 166 CE, according to the Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han), envoys claiming to represent 'Andun, king of Da Qin' — Da Qin being the Chinese name for the Roman world, and Andun almost certainly Antoninus (the emperor Marcus Aurelius…

In 184 CE the religious leader Zhang Jue launched a massive uprising against the Eastern Han, drawing on a Daoist healing movement (the Way of Great Peace) and hundreds of thousands of followers across several provinces.

Around 200 CE, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince), the leading sage and patriarch of Jewish Palestine, redacted and compiled the Mishnah, the first authoritative written codification of the Oral Torah.

The emperor Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, extending full Roman citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the empire, with the partial exception of a group termed the dediticii.

On 25 November 220 CE the warlord Cao Pi, son of Cao Cao, compelled the powerless Emperor Xian — long a puppet in the hands of the Cao family — to abdicate, and weeks later took the throne himself, founding the state of Cao Wei with its…

On 28 April 224 CE Ardashir I, a ruler from Persis (Fars) descended from the line of Sasan, defeated and killed Artabanus IV, the last Arsacid king of kings, on the plain of Hormozdgan.

The Bakhshali manuscript, a birch-bark arithmetical treatise discovered in 1881 near Peshawar, contains what radiocarbon dating at the University of Oxford (2017) identified as the world's oldest recorded use of the symbol for zero: a dot…

The Crisis of the Third Century (235–285 AD) was a near-fatal period of military, political, and economic disintegration in the Roman Empire, conventionally dated from the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander in 235 to the accession…

Around 240-241 CE the Parthian-Iranian prophet Mani (216-274 CE) began publicly proclaiming a new universal religion in the Sasanian Empire of Persia.

The Plague of Cyprian was a devastating pandemic that swept the Roman Empire from approximately 249 CE, reaching Rome by 251 and persisting in waves until around 262-270 CE.

The Moche (Mochica) civilisation dominated the desert river valleys of Peru's north coast from roughly 100 to 800 CE, sustaining cities and monumental adobe pyramids — the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna — through sophisticated canal…

Near Edessa in northern Mesopotamia, the Sasanian king Shapur I decisively defeated a Roman army under the emperor Valerian and captured the emperor himself, along with much of his staff.

Around 270 CE, King Endubis of the Kingdom of Aksum, centred in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, began striking the first indigenous coinage of any sub-Saharan African state.

Proclaimed emperor in 284 CE, Diocletian ended the half-century Crisis of the Third Century through a sweeping reorganisation of imperial power.

Stela 29 from Tikal, in the Guatemalan Petén, bears a Long Count date corresponding to 292 CE — the earliest securely dated monument in the Maya lowlands and a conventional marker for the opening of the Classic period.

In 301 CE the Roman emperor Diocletian issued the Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium, an empire-wide decree setting legal maximum prices for well over a thousand goods, services, and wages in an attempt to halt runaway inflation.

On 28 October 312 CE Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, where Maxentius drowned in the Tiber; the victory left Constantine master of the western empire.

Around 319–320 CE Chandragupta I assumed the imperial title Maharajadhiraja ('great king of kings') and inaugurated the Gupta calendar era, conventionally marking the foundation of the Gupta Empire in Magadha.

In the early-to-mid 4th century the Aksumite king Ezana, ruler of a powerful trading state centred on the Ethiopian highlands and astride the Red Sea routes between Rome and India, converted to Christianity — making Aksum one of the first…

The emperor Constantine summoned and presided over the opening of the First Council of Nicaea, gathering roughly 220 to 300 bishops from across the empire at Nicaea in Bithynia (modern Iznik, Turkey).

On 11 May 330 CE Constantine formally dedicated the rebuilt Greek city of Byzantium as Constantinople, his 'New Rome', after years of construction on a strategic site commanding the Bosporus between Europe and Asia.

Around the mid-4th century CE the Gupta emperor Samudragupta had his military and political achievements memorialised in a Sanskrit panegyric (prashasti) composed by his court poet Harishena and engraved on an existing Ashokan pillar at…

On 9 August 378 CE, near Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), the eastern emperor Valens led the Roman field army against Gothic forces under Fritigern, a coalition of Therving and Greuthung Goths together with Alans and others…

Maya inscriptions record that on a day corresponding to 16 January 378 CE, a figure named Siyaj K'ak' ('Fire is Born') arrived at Tikal, apparently as the emissary or general of a powerful lord called Spearthrower Owl, widely identified…

On 27 February 380 CE the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica (Cunctos populos), commanding all peoples of the empire to follow the Nicene faith professed by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria.

From their oasis homeland in Sogdiana, centred on Samarkand and Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the Iranian-speaking Sogdians came to dominate overland trade across Eurasia, reaching a peak of wealth and influence from…

On 24 August 410 CE the Visigoths under their king Alaric entered Rome and plundered the city for three days, the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy in nearly 800 years.

Around 427 CE, the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I (titled Shakraditya) founded Nalanda Mahavihara in the kingdom of Magadha, in present-day Bihar, India, near Rajgir.

The Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council, convened from 8 October to 1 November 451 at Chalcedon in Bithynia (modern Kadikoy, Istanbul), summoned by the Eastern Roman emperor Marcian and attended by roughly 520 bishops, the…

On 20 June 451 CE, a coalition of the Western Roman Empire and the Visigoths, jointly led by the Roman general Flavius Aetius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I, confronted the Huns and their subject peoples under Attila on the…

During the second half of the 5th century CE a burst of excavation and mural painting transformed the rock-cut Buddhist caves of Ajanta in the Deccan into one of the supreme achievements of world art.

On 4 September 476 CE the Germanic commander Odoacer, leading barbarian foederati in Italy, deposed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna after defeating and executing the boy's father, the general Orestes, who had refused his…

Clovis I, king of the Salian Franks, was baptised into Nicene (Catholic) Christianity by Bishop Remigius at Reims, traditionally dated to Christmas Day 496 though some scholars place the event around 508.

In 499 CE the astronomer-mathematician Aryabhata, working at Kusumapura (near Pataliputra) during the Gupta era, completed the Aryabhatiya, a concise verse treatise of 121 stanzas that became a foundation of classical Indian mathematics…