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About 11 million years ago:
 

The most recent mass extinction of animal life on Earth occurs. (Such extinctions occur every 26,000,000 years or so.) One popular theory holds that a very large chunk of space debris struck Antarctica (the resultant astrobleme, or crater, is 150 miles in diameter), thus causing a sudden change in the planet's ecology.
 

About 6 million years ago:
 

According to some anthropologists, ground-dwelling apes and humans share their last common ancestor. This was a ground-dwelling hominid called ramapithecus. Other anthropologists, however, say ramapithecus is the ancestor of orangutans, not people. Creationists, meanwhile, deny that either hominid was the ancestor of humans. So more work is required before we know the facts.
 

About 5.5 million years ago:
 

The Atlantic Ocean forms the Mediterranean Ocean by pouring through a 2,600-foot high waterfall near Gibraltar.
 

About 5 million years ago:
 

The small ground-dwelling hominids known as australopithecus afarensisappear in East Africa. According to most anthropologists, these are the oldest known ancestors of modern humans. But once again, Creationists deny the relationship.
 

About 3.5 million years ago:
 

Evolutionary changes to their inner ears and knees cause australopithecus afarensis to become habitually bipedal. This bipedalism facilitated australopithecus' conversion from primarily vegetarian gatherers into omnivorous scavengers. The increased protein then sped up their further evolution.
 

About 2.5 million years ago:
 

Population booms following the retreat of Ice Age glaciers provides another boost to the development of hominid intelligence. The improvement had its price, however, as the larger skull size of the offspring caused the deaths of females with small pelvises.
 

The ground-dwelling hominids that Louis Leakey named homo habilisafter a suggestion by Professor Raymond Dart appear in Ethiopia and Kenya. Of course, homo habilis, "the handy man," is only a modern anthropological name, and it is possible that "the handy men" were simply australopithecineswho had learned to knapp flint. Either way, flintknapping is the world's oldest known profession, popular mythology not withstanding.
 

About 1.5 million years ago:
 

Homo erectus, or "the upright man," appears in East Africa. Erectuswas the first hominid known to manufacture stone cleavers by bifacial flaking. Bifacial flaking involves knapping large flint cores into smaller, more conveniently sized pieces. These pieces are sharp as any modern surgical blade, and make excellent knives. The procedure was possibly an outgrowth of rock music. (Literally. Musical stones are the oldest percussion instruments.)

Because erectus did not make stone ax heads or arrows does not mean that he was not a hunter or a killer. Instead, it suggests that he used other methods for acquiring game. Such methods included stampeding game over cliffs, stoning or clubbing to death the young or crippled, and relentlessly pursuing game until it dropped from exhaustion. The latter method is not conjectural, either: humans routinely travel distances that would kill any other animal. For instance, in 1917, a 61-year old New Jersey pedestrian named James Hocking traveled 97 miles in just over 19 hours, and in 1988, a Greek pedestrian named Yiannis Kourous walked 1,000 miles in 150 hours. Human females are not much slower, either. In 1991, the New Zealand pedestrian Sandra Barwick walked 1,000 miles in just over 302 hours.
 

About 750,000 years ago:
 

According to some anthropologists, hominids living in East Africa discover how to control fire. Since a grass fire or a lightning strike may have caused the charred bones used as evidence, not everyone agrees with this date. Nevertheless, some hominids did learn to control fire a very long time ago. The discovery provided them with heat, light, and humankind's first weapon of mass destruction. Early fire hunters were not especially careful, and many prehistoric fire hunters intentionally set forest or grass fires for the purpose of panicking game animals into jumping over cliffs. As agricultural settlements became more common, hunters gradually hired beaters to drive game toward killing zones using flaming torches. The modern practice of using high-powered electric lights to paralyze prey is simply a variation on the theme.

About 700,000 years ago:
 

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis appears in Central Europe and the Balkans. Anthropologists debate whether the Neanderthals were a different species from homo sapiens sapiens or just a Eurasian sapienscommunity mistaken for a separate species by nineteenth century anthropologists. Nevertheless there remains a strong suspicion that Neanderthals were a different hominid species evolved to function in Ice Age mountain ranges.
 

Tool-using hominid bands spread through Southeast Asia.
 

About 500,000 years ago:
 

Hominid skulls are turned into drums, drinking cups, and bowls. It is not known whether these skulls belonged to war enemies whose spirits were being mocked or proteins were needed, or whether they were the skulls of deceased relatives whose spiritual protection were needed by the still-living.
 

About 400,000 years ago:
 

Digging sticks and spears are fire-hardened. The process involved burying wet sticks near fires, then allowing them to slowly temper into strong, springy rods. While throwing sticks doubtless preceded such weapons, these are the oldest wooden weapons to have survived 400,000 years in the ground. While curved sticks have been found in Eastern Europe gravesites, these were probably drumsticks rather than throwing sticks. Only the Australian Aborigines are known to have hunted using boomerangs, and people do not normally expend a great deal of effort making things to be thrown at birds.
 

Huts with palisaded walls are built in France. It is not known if the palisades were meant to keep wild animals and human enemies out, or children and domestic animals in.
 

About 300,000 years ago:
 

Homo sapiens sapiens, the self-proclaimed "intelligent man," appears at various locations in East Africa and the Middle East. The biggest difference between homo sapiens sapiens and other hominids was that homo sapiens sapiens had a vocal tract that allowed sophisticated speech.
 

About 140,000 years ago:
 

Humans become the first large placental mammals in Australia. (Dingoes don't arrive until around 6000 BCE.) While most prehistorians think that these immigrants walked there from Indonesia or New Guinea via Ice Age land bridges, there is nothing saying that they didn't ride rafts. Either way, their migration makes Australia modern humankind's first New World. Mass animal extinctions soon follow, some probably caused by human fire hunting.
 

About 100,000 years ago:
 

Some Neanderthals living in Northern Iraq become the first hominids known to have buried their dead. Because the graves contained flowers, many prehistorians have claimed that the Neanderthals had therefore invented spiritual concepts, if not religion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris, meanwhile, has suggested that the burials may have been no more than a way of getting stinking, rotting bodies out of the house. And ethnobotanists such as Gordon Wasson and Terence McKenna have argued that modern religions are more concretely dated to the Neolithic discovery of psychotropic mushrooms and fermented drinks. So, as with most prehistoric matters, the answer to the question of who created religion remains speculative rather than certain.
 

About 90,000 years ago:
 

People living along coastal regions begin consuming large amounts of salmon gathered from spawning streams and shellfish stranded by receding tides. The shells of the latter were also made into cooking pots, musical instruments, and jewelry, and may have been used as a form of money.
 

About 80,000 years ago:
 

Stone lamps fueled by animal fats are manufactured in Iraq and China.
 

About 70,000 years ago:
 

Human populations become large enough that family groups find themselves skirmishing for territory. While modern research has found that the aggressor gains additional space during most band-and-village wars, there is little evidence to support the Victorian belief that the skirmishing males ranged widely while the gathering females stayed at home to raise the babies. Instead, the females probably stayed up with their males, gathering, cooking, sewing, and setting up and taking down the tents as they went.
 

About 50,000 years ago:
 

The African hominid known today as homo sapiens sapiens starts spreading into South Asia and Eastern Europe.
 

About 40,000 years ago:
 

Stone spearheads and hafted axes are developed in North-Central Africa. (At the time, the Sahara was a well-watered savanna and Lake Chad was larger than Greece and connected to the Nile.) When medieval Bantu and Berber immigrants subsequently discovered these stone weapons, they reportedly believed them to be thunderbolts left by the gods.
 

Iron-rich clays are mined in Southern Africa, probably for use as cosmetics.
 

About 35,000 years ago:
 

Twisted-fiber thread, jewelry, clay fertility figurines, and corrals are developed. If modern ethnographic data can be read backward, then the manufacturers of thread, jewelry, and clay figurines were probably female, while the herders were probably male. Still, this supposition remains conjectural, not proven.
 

Tally sticks appear at various locations around Eurasia and Africa. These are notched sticks or antlers, and are used to track how many animals one has. (The English word "score" originally referred to the notches cut into such sticks.) They are also used during religious rituals in which participants are called upon in a specific order. This may explain why most cultures divide their integers into odd and even numbers. Early counting systems included base-two, base-four, base-five, base-ten, and base-twenty. Modern ethnographers found that about 70% of North American Indian cultures counted using either base-ten or base-five. About 20% used base-two, and just 9% used base-twenty. (Base-four was used in less than one percent of the cultures sampled.) Alternative counting systems are described because reading history backwards suggests that other people could have used numbers similarly.
 

About 33,000 years ago:
 

Small settlements of homo sapiens sapiens appear along the Pacific coast of South America. This date is not universally accepted. The argument against it is that the stone artifacts used to claim the greater antiquity are crude rather than finely engineered, as are the fluted arrowheads used to prove human inhabitation in the Chilean Andes 20,000 years later. Racism may be an issue, too, as the earlier date suggests Australoid populations rather than Mongoloid, and there are still many people who do not want to admit the possibility that dark-skinned humans might have beaten light-skinned humans into the Americas.
 

Homo erectus and homo sapiens neanderthalensis become extinct. While theories include inbreeding with homo sapiens sapiens, reduced resistance to disease, and intraspecies violence, no one really knows. Therefore the solution that the prehistorian picks tends to say more about the prehistorian than the event.
 

About 30,000 years ago:
 

The ancestors of the San, or !Kung Bushman, peoples settle the Kalahari regions of Southern Africa. This migration was hardly as bold as it sounds, as the great salt pans of modern Botswana were well-watered lakes at the time.
 

Slings (or perhaps spear-throwers) appear in Iberia. Whichever they were the two surviving artifacts are simply stag antlers carved in the shape of horses' heads -- were probably hominids' earliest known compound weapon.
 

Flint arrowheads appear in Northwest Africa and Iberia. This implies but does not prove the development of self-bows. (As the oldest surviving self-bow only dates to around 8000 CE, the arrowheads might have been fitted to hand-thrown darts.) A self-bow is a bow made using a single piece of wood. While saying this may sound otiose, most subsequent bows have been made from a variety of materials laminated together using animal glues. Maximum range of a modern self-bow is about 150 yards, while maximum effective range is about 30 yards. Because they are not very powerful, hunters usually dip their arrowheads into animal or vegetable toxins. These toxins are probably humankind's oldest biological weapons. Sources of inspiration for the invention of self-bows may have included stringed musical instruments. Regardless of use and date of invention, self-bows are the first human machines capable of accumulating, storing, and releasing energy in a controlled fashion.
 

About 25,000 years ago:

Cave paintings found in France, Spain, and Southern Africa show stars, planets, animals, and people in various poses. The best guesses concerning these paintings is that the caves were schools or churches into which youths were taken so that they could be reborn into adulthood. (While older art exists in Australia, no one is quite as willing to speculate about what it means.) A few of the surviving cave paintings show men wearing antlered helmets and animal skins. If modern ethnographic data can be safely read backward, then the artists were more likely apologizing to the spirits of the animals that their hunters killed. Either that or they showed the mask dances that their hunters used to acquire divine assistance while stalking game. Of course, all the preceding remarks are ultimately speculative, as no one knows why these pictures were painted, or what the artists intended them to mean.
 

About 22,000 years ago:
 

Humans appear in Japan. These early settlers were probably Australoid or Melanesian rather than Mongoloid.
 

About 20,000 years ago:
 

People, probably female, grind barley and einkorn wheat into gruel and flour. The oldest known sites are in the mountains of Turkey and Iraq. The same people also made skirts using twisted fiber strings. These are the first clothes known to be worn for symbolic rather than utilitarian purposes. That is, while string skirts do little for warmth and accentuate rather than hide the pubic region, they do swish and swirl sensuously when worn by dancers. While the twisted fibers suggest the beginnings of cloth manufacture, archaeologists usually date the development of mats, baskets, looms, and other artifacts to the eighth millennium BCE.
 

About 18,000 years ago:
 

People living in the Sudan and Chad process barley and einkorn wheat into food products. (Again, the Sahara was still well watered at the time.)
 

About 13,000 years ago:
 

Large numbers of Siberian hunters cross an Ice Age land bridge into North America. These Siberians were the ancestors of most modern American Indians, the chief exceptions being the Aleuts and Eskimos who arrived from Asia via skin boats some five thousand years later.
 

People living in Iraq begin tooling leather, and making it into belts and pouches. (Previously, they had carried things using dried animal stomachs.) If ethnography may be read backward, then men were associated with leather working, while women were associated with felting.
 

Southeast Asians domesticate zebu cattle.
 

About 12,000 years ago:
 

Bone-tipped harpoons appear in Newfoundland, Iberia, and Central Equatorial Africa.
 

The aboriginal inhabitants of Japan manufacture ceramic pottery. These pots were not used for cooking, but for holding cosmetics and perfumes.
 

The most recent major Ice Age ends. In its wake, new grasslands spring up while many animal species become extinct. These ecological changes cause the people living along the banks of the world's rivers to establish the first permanent horticultural (literally, "hand-farming") settlements. According to one popular theory, these early villages provided homes for the young, infirm, and elderly. The rebuttal to that theory is that hand-farming is more time-consuming and at higher risk from ecological or military disaster than either hunting or gathering. Regardless of why horticulture happened, its impact on the human race was profound, as over the next 7,000 years, the Earth's human population grew from four million to 100 million.
 

About 11,000 years ago:
 

Arrow-using human hunters begin visiting the high Andes. Judging by the animal remains found at their sites, these people lived by killing Pleistocene horses, sloths, and guanaco. The shape of their arrowheads suggests either a major technological innovation or the arrival of a second wave of Paleo-Indians.
 

About 10,000 years ago:
 

Spear-marks on its ribs make an Ohio mastodon the oldest animal known to have been butchered by North Americans. This dating is fairly exact due to some still-living bacteria found in the mastodon's remains.
 

About 9500 BCE:
 

Metal ornaments are manufactured in Iraq and Turkey.
 

About 9000 BCE:
 

Goats and sheep are domesticated in Iran and Iraq. As wool was not made into cloth for another four thousand years, and as milk is an acquired taste, the domestication was probably for the purpose of providing a steady supply of meat and hides.
 

Dogs are domesticated in North America.
 

Oats and lentils are domesticated in Europe and the Middle East.
 

About 8000 BCE:
 

Male bodies are buried in Europe with horned helmets nearby. While some prehistorians conjecture that the helmets gave wearers the powers of the animals that they hunted, it seems equally plausible that the wearers simply liked the look. Either way, hats decorated with horns remained popular with European men for the next ten thousand years, as any fan of American football can attest.
 

Ceramic pots are used for soaking grains and legumes in the Libyan Sahara. Similar pots subsequently appear in Syria. This suggests that the technology spread from Africa into the Middle East rather than the other way around.
 

About 7500 BCE:
 

Cattle are domesticated in Southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and Northern India.
 

Beans are domesticated in Central America and Southeast Asia.
 

About 7250 BCE:
 

Walled towns appear in Turkey and Jordan. While their builders are unknown, it is possible that they were Sudanese refugees fleeing the desiccation of the Sahara. There is much scholarly debate concerning whether these walls protected inhabitants from mudslides, wild animals, evil spirits, or armed humans. In general, the nineteenth century Europeans liked the military solution, modern ethnographers liked the wild animal solution, and post-modern feminists preferred the evil spirit solution. Myself, I suspect that there is truth in all these claims. Also, let's not forget that walls keep small children and animals from straying and help customs agents make their collections.
 

Before 7000 BCE:
 

Ceramic pottery appears in Northern Malaya.
 

Gourds are used to carry water and store grains throughout South Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.
 

Maize is domesticated. There is considerable scholarly debate concerning whether this occurred first in Guatemala or the Peruvian Andes. Either way, the domestication represents the first human-engineered crop, as the crop does not exist in the wild.
 

About 7000 BCE:
 

Chickens are domesticated in Southeast Asia.
 

Organized religions appear throughout India, China, and the Middle East. While the exact beliefs and nature of these early religions are unknown, speculation on the subject has provided much amusement for generations of polemicists and prehistorians.
 

6508 BCE:
 

According to the Byzantine calendar used in Russia until 1699, the Greek and Russian Orthodox God creates the world.
 

About 6500 BCE:
 

Dice are manufactured in Egypt and the Middle East. The surviving bones -- for that is what they are, sheep anklebones -- are invariably shaved. In other words, they were made for cheaters. Which is hardly surprising, since men have wagered women, goods, kingdoms, and their lives on their throws throughout history.
 

About 6400 BCE:
 

Ceramic pottery appears in Greece.
 

The betel chewing habit appears in Malaya.
 

Before 6000 BCE:
 

Millet is cultivated in Northern China along the Yellow River Valley. Since the Chinese do not begin growing wheat for another five thousand years, the development was probably an independent invention instead of diffusion from Mesopotamia or India.
 

About 6000 BCE:
 

Cherry wine is produced in Turkey and Iraq. Post-modern feminists conjecture that the wine provided priestesses with a blood-like offering to the Great Goddess in her role as the Crone, or Destroyer of Life. Menstrual blood, which used to be comparatively rare -- adult females were generally pregnant before the development of effective birth control pills during the 1950s -- is often believed to have magical powers. So the intoxicating effects of the wine would have been a man-made imitation of those powers. Of course, this is only speculation, as the Great Goddess is as much a Victorian creation as historical fact. So the actual reason may be mundane rather than sacred.
 

The Tibetans domesticate cannabis sativa, and use it for making hemp string and cloth. As the development is virtually simultaneous with the invention of heddles (the parallel cords used to guide warp threads in a loom), the development may be owed to females.
 

Pinewood canoes are built in Holland. Wooden boats are also shown in rock art found in Norway and Russia.
 

Mud and straw bricks are manufactured in Anatolia.
 

Gelding male animals becomes common throughout Eurasia. In the case of cattle (horses weren't domesticated yet), it made herding safer, while in the case of goats and sheep, it improved wool production.
 

5502 BCE:
 

According to the Egyptian Copts, the Lord creates the world. The Egyptians arrived at this conclusion in 284 CE.
 

About 5500 BCE:
 

Copper tools replace stone tools in the Balkans, Moldavia, and the Ukraine.
 

Flax, which provides the base for both linen and linseed oil, is domesticated in Eastern Iraq. Archaeological data shows that wild flax was used for at least 2,000 years prior to its domestication.
 

5500 BCE:
 

According to the Byzantines, the Lord creates the world. The Patriarch Nicephorous arrived at this conclusion around 800 CE.
 

5493 BCE:
 

According to the Ethiopian Copts, the Lord creates the world. The Ethiopian churchmen reached this conclusion in 7 CE.
 

About 5300 BCE:
 

Religious graffiti is carved into rocks in Transylvania and the Balkans. The scripts used include Minoan Linear A and Classical Cypriot.
 

5199 BCE:
 

According to the Roman Catholics, the Lord creates the world.
 

About 5000 BCE:
 

Horse-like animals are domesticated in Central Asia. As the development of fermented milk products such as butter, cheese, ghee, and yogurt also date to this era the domestication was probably related to milk production and meat rather than transportation.
 

The embalmers of the Chinchoros culture of northern Chile start mummifying bodies, and by the third millennium BCE, their techniques were as sophisticated as anything done by the Egyptians. Prehistorians speculate that the purpose of the mummification was a belief that human bodies needed to be intact for their owners to enter the afterlife.
 

4713 BCE:
 

According to the Julian calendar created in the sixteenth century by a Frenchman named Joseph Justus Scaligier, the Lord creates the world on January 1.
 

About 4500 BCE:
 

Gold nuggets are turned into jewelry in the Ukraine.
 

Ceramic pottery appears in the British Isles.
 

About 4350 BCE:
 

Giant mud-brick ziggurats are built at Sumer. These constructions are claimed as the source of inspiration for the Biblical tower of Babel.
 

4241 BCE:
 

According to a Hellenistic scholar of the third century CE named Censorinus, the Egyptian solar calendar begins. Since this pronouncement assumed that the Egyptian calendar was in line with the seasons in 139 CE, a more plausible starting point for the 365-day long Egyptian calendar is around 2773 BCE. Either way, the Egyptian calendar was not solar, but riverine: its premise was that the Nile always flooded after the star Sirius started rising in the east before instead of after sunrise.
 

4004 BCE:
 

According to a Biblical commentary published by the Anglo-Irish Bishop James Ussher in 1650, the Protestant God creates the Universe. Ussher's discovery became even more precise four years later, when the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor John Lightfoot reported that Creation coincided with the beginning of the British academic year, which was nine A.M. on October 26. Ussher and Lightfoot's chronology has been widely disputed. For example, the seventeenth century German astronomer Johannes Hevelius dated Creation to 6:00 p.m. on October 24, 3963 BCE, while in 1925, wags at the Scopes Monkey Trial would ask if that hour was calculated using Eastern Standard or solar time. No matter: 4004 BCE remains the commonly accepted date of Creation for most Protestant Fundamentalists.
 

About 4000 BCE:
 

The process for manufacturing ale spreads through China, Iraq, Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa. As the development appears to have been a spin-off of bread-making technology, it is more affirmatively linked to women than most early social developments.
 

Citrons are domesticated in China and the Middle East. As these fruits were also the sacred fruit of the Sumerian snake-god Enlil, they are a good candidate for being the fruit offered to Eve in the Garden of Eden. (Jews used citrons as part of their ritual Feast of Booths, and the story about the fruit being an apple only dates to 405 CE.)
 

People living near Lake Baykal in Siberia develop methods for making composite bows. A composite bow is one whose staves are made using a laminated construction. The procedure involves gluing the long ligaments from an animal spine to the outside of an elm or birch core, and then bellying the inside of that same core with a layer of animal horn. The result was a bow that was far less likely to "slither," which means to fracture under pressure. Because it was a difficult procedure, there was great ritual associated with it. As described by Chinese chroniclers 4,000 years later, trees were cut during the winter, horns were melted in the spring, glues were extracted during the summer, and bows were made during the fall. Then, after a three-year wait for the glues to cure, the bows were adorned with cow horn, wrapped with sinew, and covered with red varnish and green silk. The weight of such bows, meaning the strength required to pull its string the full length of a 24-25 inch arrow, ranged between 60 and 160 pounds. The smaller recurved ("Cupid") bows were popular with mounted hunters and warriors, while the immensely powerful longbows were used by strength athletes competing to see who could shoot an arrow the farthest. Maximum range of the shorter weapons was around 100 yards, with an effective range of around 30, while the maximum range of the longer weapons was around 900 yards, with an effective range of around 300.
 

Sumerian and Indian merchants and aristocrats mark their personal possessions using seals made from fired clay. These seals probably inspired royal priests and clerks to begin keeping records using pictograms drawn on clay tablets.
 

Iraqi farmers begin digging irrigation canals.
 

About 3800 BCE:
 

Weaving, net fishing, and horticulture develop at various points along Peruvian and Ecuadorian coasts of South America. Chili peppers, corn, manioc, beans, pineapples, gourds, and squashes were among the crops grown. (Bananas had to wait for the Spanish conquest.)
 

Pottery appears in the Andean lowlands.
 

3760 BCE:
 

According to the findings of a fourth century CE calendar council headed by Rabbi Hillel II, the Jewish God creates the Universe.
 

The worship of a grain goddess called Isis (or Osiris) spreads throughout Nilotic Africa. There is evidence to suggest that the Osirian religion, which used unleavened bread as a medium of exchange and was one of the roots for early Judaism, first developed in black Africa.
 

About 3600 BCE:
 

Bronze is manufactured in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Iraq. Prehistorians conjecture that the development was owed to people accidentally mixing copper and tin in their pottery kilns or bread ovens, and that smiths' need for tin (which is rare throughout most of the Middle East) is responsible for the development of long-distance trading during the mid-fourth millennium. Doubtless some traders found it easier to steal goods than to manufacture them. So this may explain the concurrent emergence of militarized Central Asian bands.
 

About 3500 BCE:
 

Rice farming develops in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. As wet-rice farming is hard for farmers without metal tools, this was probably dry-rice farming along river deltas. Nevertheless, the coincidence of these events suggests the emergence of maritime trade.
 

Eastern European potters start using flat disks that rotated around a central pivot for the purpose of making ceramic pots. While some prehistorians conjecture that these turntables influenced the design of vehicular wheels, log-rollers seem a more likely inspiration for vehicle wheels, especially as the earliest vehicle wheels known (some Sumerian wheels dated to around 2800 BCE) were made from solid planks.
 

Sweet potatoes are domesticated in the Northwestern Andes. These tubers are unrelated to the Southeast Asian and African yams, and only became an Asian dietary staple after the Spanish transported them to the Philippines in 1594.
 

Sumerians experiment with kiln-firing brick, a technology that is perfected a few hundred years later in Northwest India.
 

Grape wine is manufactured in Iran.
 

About 3400 BCE:
 

Opium poppies are cultivated in West Central Europe, including parts of Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy. Of course, this does not mean that the plants originated there, only that archeobiologists have found Papaver somniferum seeds there. It also does not mean that the ancient Swiss used the poppy's alkaloid-rich sap medicinally or recreationally. After all, poppy seeds are tasty in their own right, and make very useful oil.
 

About 3200 BCE:
 

Babylonian merchants revolutionize Middle Eastern trade by using their cuneiform scripts to track secular profits and losses. (Previously such scripts had been used solely for recording religious and political events.) Feminist prehistorians conjecture that the development may have been owed to women, as the Babylonian religion had female priestesses and gods, and merchants' wives were frequently writing to their husbands concerning business ventures.
 

North Chinese fortune-tellers experiment with divining the future using cheap yarrow stalks instead of expensive sheep bones. Drawings of these yarrow stalks are thought to have inspired the linear trigrams used to illustrate the ancient Chinese text known as the I Ching, or "Classic of Changes". (Started as early as the twelfth century BCE, the I Chingis the third oldest Chinese text. It is the text that the Chinese use instead of Bibles and Qur'ans to ward off zombies and soulstealers.)
 

About 3127 BCE:
 

According to Indian texts written during the sixth century BCE, the god-man Krishna is born at Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh. Lord Krishna spent 14 years there, then 11 years at a nearby town called Jumna. At the beginning of the Kaliyuga cycle, he retired to an island across the ocean, where he lived for another hundred years before ascending to heaven. Stories describing the life of Krishna report that he sometimes engaged in wrestling matches. To win these bouts, Krishna used knees to the chest, punches to the head, hair pulling, and strangleholds. As such tactics are by modern standards unprincipled, to say the least, the story suggests that early Indian wrestling champions may have been more concerned with gaining personal reputation than earning karmic credit.
 

3114 BCE:
 

According to a stele erected in Guatemala about 690 CE, the Mayan calendar cycle known as the Long Count begins on August 13. Mayan corn-planting and forest-burning rituals probably determined the day, while the year was probably influenced by seventh century astrological theory.
 

3102 BCE:
 

According to Indian astrologers writing in the sixth century BCE, the Vedic Kaliyuga ("Age of Iron") begins on February 18. Some modern Vedic astrologers have rectified this date so that it reads April 15, 3101, while yet others say that it began with the death of Krishna in 3006 BCE. No matter: the Kaliyuga Age is 432,000 years long, and Indian Standard Time was only introduced on January 1, 1906.
 

About 3100 BCE:
 

A Sudanese warrior called Menes forcibly unites Egypt and Syria with the Sudan, thereby establishing himself as Egypt's first Pharaoh. This is known because Egyptian court reporters began simultaneously recording reign histories on tomb walls using pictorial writing. As the Egyptian patron of record keeping was the goddess Seshat, and as tapestries existed in Syria during the fourth millennium, some prehistorians believe that these Egyptian clerks were female. (Reign histories and tax records were probably embroidered or woven unto pictorial cloths before they were painted on walls or inscribed on boards or clay tablets. On the other hand, as Menes was Sudanese, some African prehistorians have stressed the fact that Menes was a black African rather than a Mediterranean, and suggested that the development of writing may have had a black African origin. In any case, the fact remains that no one really knows who the Egyptian clerks were, or who created their pictorial (hieroglyphic) and symbolic (hieratic) notational systems.
 

As for weapons, the contemporary Egyptians and Nubians used stone-tipped spears and maces, wooden self-bows and throwing sticks, and flint knives and arrows. Their armor, meanwhile, consisted of hide shields and fabric halters and midriff bands. (Bone-and-metal armor does not appear until the sixteenth century BCE, and the development of chariot-borne archery. The reason? It weighed too much.) Magical weapons were also probable, given the Biblical evidence, but are not as easily documented using archaeological sources.
 

About 3000 BCE:
 

Copper is manufactured in Malaya.
 

People start building levies and dams, digging irrigation ditches, and yoking oxen to plows. Still, humans provided most of the muscle power, as the surviving pictures show the yokes attached to the animals' horns, which is not mechanically efficient.
 

In a list of his more valuable prescriptions, a Sumerian physician describes something called "joy plants." Many prehistorians believe that this refers to the use of opium gum as a medicine. Perhaps. But, if true, the total amounts used must have been tiny, as the first recorded death due to opium overdose did not occur until 1037, nor were opium's addictive qualities described until 1613.
 

The Phoenicians and Minoans (the latter an archaeological term, since no one knows what the people of that culture called themselves) ship tin, salt, wine, brightly colored cloth, and olive oil around the Mediterranean. Excepting salt, which was an important preservative, these were products used for the luxury trade, not common consumption.
 

A limestone plaque from a Sumerian site called Nintu Temple VI show pairs of belted wrestlers, while a bronze cup or vase shows two standing wrestlers struggling for control. The wrestling was probably used for ritual purposes, as Sumerian soldiers normally waged war using slings, spears, and lances. (While bows-and-arrows existed, they were used mainly for hunting.)
 

Membrane drums appear throughout the world. The development was probably due to people discovering that untanned hides stretched over beer-pots resounded with the voice of the Thunder God when struck. This implied magical powers and divine intervention, and provided amusement during festivals and sewing bees, and an auditory distraction during surgeries, tooth extractions, and childbirth. If the surviving artwork is correct, then the early drummers were as often female as male.
 

2953 BCE:
 

According to tradition, Indochinese astrologers create the Sino-Vietnamese calendar. Of course, if you assume that those astrologers knew what they were doing, then they would have invented this calendar about 1679 BCE, when its cosmology would have matched the night sky. At any rate, the 12-year cycle this Sino-Vietnamese calendar used described the length of time it took Jupiter to complete one orbit of the night sky. The animal names ("tiger," "rat," etc.) currently used to describe each of the years in that 12-year cycle only date to the ninth or tenth century CE, and were created by Buddhist astrologers as a way of popularizing their science among the unlettered masses.
 

About 2940 BCE:
 

According to a text written in the sixth century BCE, the Emperor Fu Hsih introduces marriage contracts into China. Fu's successor, Sui Jen Shih, reportedly introduced single-edged swords into the Middle Kingdom. This is possible, considering that jade, gold, and copper spearheads and axes have been found at archaeological digs throughout China. Still, Chinese swords are more conclusively dated to the eighth century BCE than the thirtieth.
 

About 2800 BCE:
 

Four-wheeled carts appear in Eastern Europe and Manchuria. This dispersion suggests that the steppe peoples transmitted the technology.
 

Egyptian papyri describe the use of Indian spices such as cinnamon. These spices were not used to flavor food as much as to make medicines, dyes, and perfumes. Indeed, a fourteenth century list of "spices" included 288 different items, of which the less-palatable ones included turpentine, frankincense, and gold leaf.
 

A great flood occurs in the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
 

Cotton is domesticated in India.
 

Clothing decorated with metal or bone disks appears among the steppe nomads living east of the Black Sea. Judging by burial sites, decorated clothing was originally worn by women. Later, similar disks are found stitched unto men's clothing, too, in patterns that suggest an eye toward arrow and knife resistance rather than style.
 

About 2700 BCE:
 

The Phoenicians give names to the constellations. While the development may have had astrological purposes, I suspect that it was mainly a mnemonic system: as late as the sixteenth century, astrologically-based mnemonic systems were in use in seafaring European nations.
 

2697 BCE:
 

According to documents first written during the sixth century BCE, Wang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, rules China. Wang-ti is subsequently credited with many things, including the animistic philosophy known as Taoism. Legends aside, Taoism is more conclusively dated to the sixth century BCE, probably as part of a folk response to Confucian legalism.
 

About 2690 BCE:
 

Britons begin making and using yew bows. Although made from a single piece of wood, and therefore technically self-bows, these weapons were actually compound bows, as the wood from which they were made from was carefully selected to include both sapwood and heartwood. (The flexible sapwood was used for the back of the bow, while the denser heartwood was used for its belly.) Anyway, yew bows were more flexible and powerful than bows made from ash, elm, and other potential bow woods. Still, selecting the right trees required considerable skill, and making and adjusting the weapons was not easily learned. So yew bows were generally aristocratic hunting weapons instead of war weapons. And, while fourteenth century English merchants used Portuguese yew to equip Welsh archers with the weapons that the English generals needed to shoot down Scottish spearmen and French knights, what people did 3,000 years later is not necessarily indicative of what people did in the past.
 

About 2660 BCE:
 

The Step Pyramid is built at Saqqara, Egypt. This makes it the world's oldest unreconstructed stone structure. The distinction is made because there are the remains of a tower at Jericho that date to around 8350 BCE, and the ruins of a temple on Malta that date to around 3250 BCE.
 

2640 BCE:
 

According to tradition, silk is domesticated in China. Although archaeological evidence suggests that this traditional date is 600 years too early, learning to heat immature silkworm cocoons for the purpose of extracting their fibers contributed to many Chinese wars and robberies. After all, a bale of undyed silk was worth several months pay for an army officer, and several years pay for a peasant.
 

About 2600 BCE:
 

According to a Babylonian account written during the thirteenth century BCE, a chariot-driving hero named Gilgamesh becomes the ruler of the Sumerian city of Uruk. His method involved beating his opponents in wrestling matches, then raping their women afterwards.
 

Between 2551-2494 BCE:
 

The Giza Sphinx, whose design was associated with the worship of the goddess Hathor and whose face has been associated with its patron, the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khefren, is built in Egypt. Erosion rather than gunfire damaged the Sphinx's face, subsequent Christian and Muslim claims notwithstanding.
 

About 2500 BCE:
 

Sumerian sculptures show infantrymen advancing shoulder-to-shoulder carrying copper-reinforced wooden shields to protect them from the spears and arrows of their opponents. The surviving artwork shows the soldiers six across. This may represent a column of sixes, an early example of a phalanx, or artistic convention. The use of sixes is a reminder of the Sumerians' concurrent development of base-sixty calculations. While astrologers claim that base-sixty was due to Sumerian astrologers' knowledge of lunar cycles, surviving Sumerian arithmetic problems included things like "How long would it take for a certain amount of money to double if it has been loaned at a compound annual rate of twenty percent?" (note 1) Therefore it seems more likely that base-sixty was really owed to Sumerian merchants combining some existing base-five and base-twelve counting systems.
 

Elsewhere:
 

Egyptian engineers sail wind-powered boats up the Nile. According to some modern writers, the Egyptians also experimented with gliders. While this might explain the legend of Icarus, the Cretan youth who flew too near the sun, such technological feats seem unlikely. So a more likely source for the story of Icarus is some unpleasant Minoan ritual that involved tarring and feathering criminals, and then throwing them off cliffs.
 

Central Asians domesticate Bactrian camels. At their fittest, these animals could go 33 days without food and nine days without water while carrying 500 pounds of baggage at a rate of 32 miles a day. In short, they opened the Central Asian deserts to human use.
 

Dogs are introduced into Indonesia.
 

About 2350 BCE:
 

The Akkadian warrior known as Sharru-kin ("Legitimate King") creates Mesopotamia's first important military dynasty by making his sons into regional governors and his daughters into the high priestesses of the Moon-Goddess. Sharru-kin (who is better known today as Sargon the Great) is also famous for being the first Middle Eastern leader to have been saved from infanticide at birth by being placed into a basket of rushes and sent forth on a river.
 

Sharru-kin's army consisted of a core of nine battalions stationed near Akad (Agade) and a varying number of militiamen levied as the situation required. Akkadian regulars wore cloth kilts, leather jackets, and copper helmets, and were equipped with single-curved composite bows, bronze-tipped spears, and copper axes and knives. Around town, they also carried shields and rode chariots. The regulars left these chariots at home during rural campaigns, as the four-wheeled contraptions lacked suspensions and would have fallen apart if maneuvered at speed in rocky country. The Akkadian militiamen, meanwhile, wore sheepskin kilts, and were equipped with self-bows, wooden spears, and slings. They were paid in bread and beer, and their leaders were known as "cup-bearers."
 

2349 BCE:
 

According to the exegesis of Anglo-Irish Bishop Ussher, the Great Flood occurs. This would put the event about 800 years after the historically verifiable flooding of the Euphrates, and overlooked the Babylonian stories about the punishment that the Earth Goddess meted out to the mischievous male god who caused that flooding in the first place.
 

2333 BCE:
 

Tan'gun, the semi-divine offspring of a bear and a tiger, establishes the Korean nation in October. Or so goes a thirteenth century CE story still repeated as sober fact in South Korean schoolbooks.
 

About 2300 BCE:
 

The world's oldest surviving map, a depiction of the Mesopotamian city of Lagash, is carved into a stone tablet held in the lap of a Sumerian god.
 

Donkey-mounted couriers begin carrying written messages about Iraq and Iran. Originally, these imperial messengers, called angarosin Persian and angelos, or angels, in Greek, had no scheduled routes or relay stations. Instead, they counted on getting replacement mounts from the areas through which they traveled. This procedure sometimes led to conflict with the locals. (The government paid local leaders to provide the post riders with grooms, shelter, watering facilities, and substantial numbers of mounts. Obviously, not all complied, which meant that the post riders simply took what they wanted. Hence the conflicts.) A modified system in which the kings kept their own postal herds worked better, and by the thirteenth century, the Mongols had relay stations linking every major town between the Yellow and Black Seas.
 

Eastern Mediterranean smiths begin beating meteoric iron into sacred knives and medallions. Meteoric iron has continued to be made into aristocratic weapons into historic times, Indonesian krisses being the most famous examples. Meteoric iron is fairly common throughout the world. While the Ka'bah in Mecca is the world's most famous iron meteorite, the largest, a block 9 feet long, 8 feet wide, and weighing about 65 tons, was found near Grootfontein, Namibia, in 1920.
 

Friezes on the walls of a tomb in Saqqara, Egypt show youths wrestling. Other friezes on the same tombs also show boys in light tunics boxing with bare fists and fencing with papyrus stalks, perhaps in the context of playing soldier.
 

About 2200 BCE:
 

People belonging to the Kotosh culture of the Peruvian highlands burn chili peppers in ceremonial fire pits. Since burial sites were nearby, this may have been done to provoke tears.
 

Irrigation agriculture spreads through the Andean lowlands of Peru. Avocados, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts were among the crops grown. Coca chewing and beer drinking also date to this era.
 

About 2100 BCE:
 

According to the usual exegesis of Genesis 12, the Hebrew patriarch Abraham leaves Harran (a town in Anatolia) for the Promised Land. If one suspects that Noah's sons lived 40-60 years rather than the 400-600 years described in the story, then the story becomes a mythic description of a Central Asian migration into Palestine circa 1570 BCE rather than a literal account of one elderly man's solitary trek.
 

Before 2000 BCE:
 

Mongoloid populations displace Australoid populations in Southeast Asia.
 

Chariots and the horses used to pull them are buried with dead humans at sites throughout the Central Asian steppes.
 

Egyptian medicine becomes famous throughout the Mediterranean world. Too much must not be made of this reputation, though: the author of the Kahun Papyrus, the oldest surviving Egyptian medical text, did not distinguish diseases from their symptoms, and its author was unsure how venereal diseases were transmitted, let alone treated.
 

About 2000 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the Yellow Emperor of China defeats a horned monster named Ch'ih Yü in a head-butting contest. From a philological standpoint, the Yellow Emperor's participation seems unlikely, partly because he would have been about 700 years old at the time, and partly because the story was not recorded until the sixth century BCE. So perhaps the allusion is to siege warfare rather than actual wrestling. This said, North Chinese farmers were reliably reported playing head-butting contests during the third century BCE, and similar head-butting games are still played in North Korea, where they are known as pakchiki.
 

Sumerians start cooking with garlic and onions.
 

Norwegian rock paintings show elk-hunters wearing skis.
 

About 1950 BCE:
 

The world's oldest wrestling manual appears on the walls of four separate tombs built near Beni Hasan, Egypt. Their purpose was probably to show the departed ways to defeat the opponents they might encounter in the afterlife. If the dead were able to follow the pictures, they might have been successful, too, as nearly all of the 400 holds and escapes shown are still used in freestyle wrestling. The wrestlers are usually naked except for a wrestling belt, and are shown with contrasting skin colors to make it easier to distinguish individual holds.
 

About 1900 BCE:
 

A British culture known as the Wessex People builds Stonehenge IIIB on Salisbury Plain. The most recent speculation is that the structure was designed to measure the 19-year cycle of lunar eclipses. Although often called a Celtic construction, the Gallic Celts did not arrive in Southern England until the sixth century BCE. The story about it being a Druid temple only dates to the seventeenth century. Before that, the English believed it to be some Roman or Saxon construction.
 

An unidentified culture places 167 large stones in an ellipse at Mzoura, Morocco, about 30 miles southwest of Tangier. Prehistorians speculate that the construction served astronomical functions, as the stones align with the setting sun in the spring and fall, and their placement requires considerable knowledge of right angles.
 

Egyptian sappers use portable huts made from reed frames and covered with animal hides to protect engineers from arrows and hot oil while they used spades to dislodge bricks from enemy cities' walls.
 

About 1800 BCE:
 

Sumerian astronomers, many of whom were female, are reported trying to predict and control the weather. Their meteorological methods are a root of Hellenistic (note 2) and Vedic astrology, as are their 60-minute hours and 360-degree circles.
 

Metallurgy spreads through Northern Europe.
 

Ceramic pottery and heddle weaving spread through the Andean highlands. The cloth and pots were decorated with designs similar to ones still in use four thousand years later.

1766 BCE:
 

According to a Chinese history written during the ninth century CE, the Shang Dynasty is established near Anyang in Honan Province. According to twentieth century archaeological findings, the Shang Dynasty is more firmly linked to a North Chinese victory over the South Chinese in 1523 BCE. Either way, Shang armies, like those of the Eastern Mediterranean, consisted of several dozen chariot-mounted aristocrats and some unarmored servants. Offensive weapons included composite recurved bows and copper-tipped spears and axes, while defensive weapons included palisaded walls, leather-and-bone armor, and moats.
 

About 1750 BCE:
 

The Babylonian king known as Hammurabi orders his clerks to inscribe their legal codes into stone steles and clay tablets. As evidence of what the king thought important, surviving inscriptions include sixty-eight sections on family law, fifty on property rights, and seven on the rights of priestesses.
 

About 1700 BCE:
 

Lightweight two-wheeled chariots appear on the steppes north and west of the Caspian Sea. These were made from light hardwoods and leather mesh, and weighed less than 70 pounds. From a technological standpoint, the heat-treated wooden wheels were also impressive, as they weighed a tenth as much as a disk wheel. Their use allowed chariot-borne archers to theoretically pursue game at nearly 20 miles an hour across flat sandy terrain. Of course, such use required considerable skill, as the chariots were unsprung and flipped whenever a bump was hit too hard. The vehicles were also enormously expensive, as were the composite bows, metal-studded leather armor, three crewmen, several horses and grooms, and mountain of spare parts and feed needed to support each vehicle. And let's not forget the even bigger bureaucracy needed to manage the lot. Nevertheless, military kingdoms based on chariot-borne archers controlled Asia Minor by 1650 BCE, and were spreading into the Balkans and India by 1600 BCE. Accordingly, historian Robert Drews speculates the chariot-borne revolution involved soldiers using their chariots as archery platforms rather than as battle taxis for aristocratic infantrymen.
 

About 1628 BCE:
 

A volcanic eruption calculated at three times the power of Krakatoa blows the center out of Aegean island of Thera. In 1967, the Greek scholar Angelos Galanopoulos claims that stories about the tsunamis caused by this 500 megaton explosion inspired Plato's stories about sunken Atlantis. While Galanopoulos' theory sounds plausible, there is little concrete evidence to either support or refute his claim.
 

Mycenaean signet rings show women holding what look like opium poppies. As these rings were made from gold, and as what look like smoking paraphernalia has been found nearby, prehistorians speculate that Mycenaean shamans may have inhaled opium smoke through pipes. If so, it was an idea that didn't catch on, as smoking did not become a general European fashion for another 3,000 years.
 

1623 BCE:
 

Mesopotamian art shows armored four-wheeled carts protecting sappers as they dislodged bricks from enemy cities' walls during wars in Northern Syria. As the walls of major Mesopotamian cities could be over 80 feet thick, such operations were time-consuming. Therefore treachery, disease, and starvation usually decided most siege operations.
 

Assyrian priests are reported divining their gods' will by reading the still-steaming innards of freshly-killed farm animals. The gods were then tempted to change their minds through the sacrifice of certain parts to sacred flames. And what was done with the rest of the sacrificed animal? People ate it, of course. In short, the gods got the innards and the smoke, while priests and aristocrats got the good cuts and beggars got the scraps. (While the word "sacrifice" means "to make [offerings]," it also implies "feast.")
 

About 1600 BCE:
 

The Mycenaean Greeks fight wars for the purpose of collecting female slaves. Why? For one thing, female slaves were less likely to rebel, and rarely tried to run away after having had a child or two. More importantly, they were used to working with textiles, which the Mycenaeans used for trading and for money. The Mycenaeans had recently introduced quota systems as a way of manufacturing commercial textiles. While men grew flax, tended the sheep, and sold the finished cloths, women combed, spun, wove, and dyed the raw materials. Although the men's responsibilities were not especially labor-intensive, the women's responsibilities were extremely labor-intensive. And, as the men were capable of producing hundreds of tons of raw wool and flax annually, this was hardly an inconsequential problem. Hence the need for constantly acquiring more cheap, comparatively docile industrial workers.
 

Amber becomes a major trade commodity in Western Europe. Called elektron by the Greeks, the fossilized material supposedly had magical powers. Therefore it was often worn as a bead or amulet.
 

About 1550 BCE:
 

The Egyptians obtain horses from the Syrians.
 

Metalworking tools appear in Andean America. Gold was worked in the northern highlands, while copper, tin, and brass were worked in the southern. Miners and smiths used hafted stone hammers, wooden scrapers and sticks, hide bags, and coiled baskets.
 

About 1520 BCE:
 

A fresco made on the Aegean island of Thera shows boys boxing. The youths wore loincloths around their waists and leather or cloth wrappings around their right hands. Their targets were facial, and their blows were clubbing rather than straight. Considering this and other artwork, plus evidence in the Illiad, some prehistorians speculate that the boxing was part of some Minoan funeral ritual. But that is not certain, especially since the Illiadwas written 700 years later by people from another culture. Therefore it is safer to say that surviving art suggests that boxing may have had ritual significance for the Minoans.
 

About 1500 BCE:
 

Near the ford at Jabbok, the Hebrew patriarch Jacob wrestles with an apparition of God, thereby earning the title of "Israel," or "wrestler with God." While the Jewish Bible has Jacob receiving his blessing because of his courageous refusal to release his grip despite a dislocated hip, the Christian Bible says that his adversary won by grabbing Jacob's genitals ("the sinew which shrank, that is upon the hollow of the thigh"). Either way, somebody cheated.
 

Meanwhile:
 

Millenarian philosophies appear in Iran and Syria. Subsequently attributed to the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, these claimed that an apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of good and evil would lead to a world without imperfections. In practice, they simply fueled peasant uprisings resulting in the deaths of millions of people.
 

Human-powered plows appear in Northern Europe.
 

Lamellar (sewn plate) armors appear in Central Asia, Egypt, and Eastern Europe. When making such armor, artisans took horses' hooves, cleaned them, and split them to resemble scales. Then they drilled holes into the scales and stitched them into knee-length goatskin coats with ox-sinews. Finally, they painted the armor to look like snakeskin. The paint was partly to prevent rust and partly to invoke the protection of the Goddess, whose symbol was the serpent.
 

While searching the Mediterranean for the tiny sea snails that they crushed to manufacture their famous dyes (and the tin that they used to mordant, or set, them), the Phoenicians pass the Pillars of Hercules, and settle Iberia's Atlantic coast. The Olmecs (note 3) were simultaneously building villages around Tabasco and Veracruz on Mexico's Gulf Coast. Because many Olmec sculptures have "African features" (that is, everted lips and flat noses), José Melgar, Thor Heyerdal, Ivan Van Sertima, and others have speculated that an Egyptian or Phoenician convoy may have been blown off course and then drifted into the Caribbean, thus introducing "Egyptian" ideas into the region. Meanwhile, Wayne Chandler, Gordon Ekholm, and Rafique Jairazbhoy claim that Shang-era refugees were introducing Chinese culture and artifacts to Peru and Costa Rica. Finally, the US writer Charles Wicke claims that the Olmecs were originally from Oaxaca and Guerrero on Mexico's Pacific coast, and only gradually moved east. For their part Mexican art historians prefer to believe that the artists were Mayans, and that their statues represented kings as human manifestations of the jaguar god.. All this is to say that nationalism often colors interpretations and that in truth no one knows who the Olmecs were, or what their sculptures meant to their creators.
 

The Sechín culture builds some large cities along Peru's northern coast. Sechín decorations included monuments showing warriors standing among decapitated enemies.
 

1469 BCE:
 

An army of a thousand or more chariots commanded by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III defeats a smaller Canaanite chariot army in the field, and then sacks the city of Megiddo. While the purpose of the war is unknown, Elizabeth Wayland Barber suggests that it could have been for the purpose of introducing the Syrians' sophisticated weaving techniques into Egypt. At any rate, due to a concurrent solar eclipse mentioned in the brief account of the battle that survives, this event provides the world's first astronomically datable battle. And, if the Revelation of Saint John the Divine is to be believed, then a future battle at this site, which the Jews knew as Armageddon, is also to be the last.
 

About 1450 BCE:
 

An Anatolian nation that the Greeks called the Chalybes learns how to make iron from ferrous soils. Some prehistorians speculate that the development was related to the manufacture of red ocher cosmetics used to honor the Great Goddess. A less mystical explanation has the discovery being made by people rooting through the remains of wind-driven fires. (There are points along the Black Sea coast where the sand is so ferrous that it fuses into iron at very low temperatures.)
 

Alphabetic writing appears in Syria.
 

True swords appear in the mountains of Austria and Hungary. Known to archaeologists as Sprockoff Ia swords, these were cast bronze weapons that measured about 28 inches in length from pommel to tip. Their double-edged blades roughly paralleled one another until the last six or seven inches of their length, when they narrowed to a point. To prevent breakage, the tang was cast with the blade, and wood or bone scales were riveted to the tang to create a handle. Long channels ("fullers") also ran the length of the blade. Often called blood grooves, their real purpose was to lighten the sword without reducing its strength. If cold-hammered with a high tin content, these weapons could be almost as sharp and flexible as good quality steel. The weapons and the methods for casting them gradually spread south into the Italian Alps, and became very popular with Greek and Macedonian adventurers during the thirteenth century BCE.
 

1424 BCE:
 

According to the Bhagavad-Gita ("Lord's Song"), the god-man Krishna and the warrior-king Arjuna discuss the meaning of life. Their decision was that a warrior should have a code of ethics and be willing to fight in defense of it. They also decided that it was inappropriate for a warrior to avoid battle by choosing to live as a merchant or a priest, as he would then be untrue to his social obligations.
 

Fourteenth century BCE:
 

The ancestors of the modern Turks, Mongols, and Tungus make copper weapons and metal-studded leather armor. The Chinese say that the Mongols or Tungus learned the methods from them, while the Russians say that the Turks learned them from the Ukrainians. But, as the Turks, Mongols, and Tungus are all quite imaginative and warlike people often maligned by the Russians and Chinese, it is not impossible that the Central Asians actually created the technology themselves.
 

A Hittite Master of Horse named Kikkuli describes a new method for training chariot horses. As his technical terms were Iranian, the methods probably were, too. The process lasted 169 days. It involved training horses and driver to stop rapidly from a gallop, turn about, and then retreat in the direction they from which they had come. Training was also given in rapidly harnessing and unharnessing animals, probably so that exhausted or wounded animals could be replaced, and finally learning to maneuver in squadrons of 10 to 50 chariots.
 

1375 BCE:
 

A solar eclipse is reported at Ugarit, in Northwest Syria, on May 3. According to contemporary astrologers, the event meant that the local lord was about to be attacked by his vassals. This was hardly a bold statement on their part, considering that the Hittites were then in the process of conquering Syria and Palestine.
 

About 1350 BCE:
 

Religions honoring triune gods appear in Mesopotamia.
 

Pharaoh Amenhotep IV promulgates the world's first known monotheism, a cult of himself as the personification of the sun-god Aten. (The Hebrew patriarch Joseph was probably one of Amenhotep's ministers.) Many pharaohs prided themselves on their archery. Amenophis II, for instance, claimed that he had once shot four targets set 34 feet apart with such force that his arrows penetrated three inches of Asian copper.
 

Rock-throwing slings appear in Egypt. The ones that survive were made of plaited linen, and were probably meant to scare birds out of heavenly fields. (The story of David and Goliath notwithstanding, the military use of slings was militarily uncommon until the seventh century BCE.)
 

About 1300 BCE:
 

The Arabs domesticate dromedary camels. As dromedaries can't bite or kick especially well, and have no real defenses except relatively slow flight, this probably saved the animals from extinction.
 

Patrilineal religions spread through the Middle East. The many stories about male gods castrating their fathers and raping their mothers are probably reminders of the conflicts between the new and old religions. Or maybe it simply refers to the Assyrian practice of conquest by genocide.
 

The Rigveda ("Knowledge Hymn") provides the earliest reference to hereditary castes in North India. According to its texts, the mouth of the god Purusha became brahman ("those who pray," or priests). Purusha's two arms became rajayana, or kings, a category that was later changed to kshatriya, or nobles. (There was frequently conflict between the kings, priests, and nobles concerning which of them was in charge.) Meanwhile, Purusha's two thighs became wealthy merchants and landowners (vaishya). Finally, the god's two feet became farmers and artisans (shudra). From a modern perspective, the reason that commerce was undervalued involved the distrust that churchmen and kings, who had inherited their land and the peasants who worked on it, felt for anyone who was capable of earning the money needed to purchase land. Similarly, artisans were undervalued because they had to work for a living, something from which aristocrats and churchmen were exempt. Peasants, on the other hand, were probably of no interest to anyone except themselves, so long as they worked without complaining. Therefore they were generally viewed (and treated) about the same as cattle.
 

About 1275 BCE:
 

To keep their calendar in step with the seasons, Chinese astrologers start adding intercalary months to their lunar calendars. The mathematics involved are not simple, and as late as the seventeenth century errors were still being corrected. All of which is to say that most early dates based on Chinese calendars that are not supported by external data are only approximate.
 

An Egyptian army commanded by Pharaoh Ramesses II fights a major battle against the Hittites near Hatti, Syria. The Egyptian army had hundreds of chariots and tens of thousands of soldiers and support personnel. Charioteers, chariot-borne archers, and aristocrats comprised 15% of the total force. Another 10% were "shooters" (dismounted archers used to protect horse remudas or chase guerrillas through the mountains), "runners" (infantrymen who followed the chariots to dispatch enemy charioteers who fell from their carts or whose chariots broke down), or "strong-arm boys" (the men who protected noblemen and supplies in camp). And the rest were engineers, support personnel, and camp followers. A speculation: did the entertainments of the "runners" and "strong-arm boys," few of whom were ethnically Egyptian, include the wrestling, boxing, and stick-fighting games painted on a tomb wall near El Amarna, Egypt, around the same time?
 

About 1250 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the Hebrew patriarch Moses leads his people out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land. While this date is speculative, it is plausible, as the Patriarch Joshua was burning Canaanite towns around 1200 BCE. The root-word hepiru means "vagrants," and is associated with the Semitic peoples who served as mercenaries in the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Hittite armies.
 

According to the Hellenic story of Jason and the Argonauts, a Lakedaimonian boxer named Polydeukes defeats a foreign bully named Amykos. In the story, Amykos, who was the larger of the pair, wielded his fists and forearms like clubs, and charged into the attack, while the smaller Polydeukes bobbed and weaved and feinted, and ultimately battered the larger man into bloody submission. While a fine story, the strategies and techniques described likely reflect the boxing of the third century BCE, when Jason's tale was put into its final form, rather than the boxing of the twelfth century.
 

Mycenaean funeral rites are described as including high-stepping dances performed by fully-armored men who used their shields as drums, and their swords as drumsticks. This seems anachronistic, as archaeological evidence does not reveal the presence of swords at Mycenaean sites until after 1200. But, at any rate, that was what Plato, writing seven centuries later, claimed. Plato also said that the Mycenaeans had three different kinds of dances. These were military dances, public dances, and general dances. Military dances imitated warfare through high leaping and expressions of darting and striking. Public dances served religious functions. General dances were done for recreation and entertainment. As the descriptions of leaping dances in preparation for warfare also assume the use of leg-biting swords, this also seems anachronistic. So perhaps Plato's descriptions really describe the dances of his own time better than those of his Mycenaean ancestors.
 

About 1230 BCE:
 

According to Exodus 20, God issues the Hebrews ten rules for ethical behavior. Although an unusually non-culturally-specific set of rules, the fifth of these commandments, namely "Thou shalt not kill," evidently did not apply to Hebrew warfare. For example, in Numbers 31, Moses rebuked the Hebrews for not killing their male captives and all female captives who had known men by lying with them, and then selling the orphaned children into slavery. It also did not prevent the mutilation of dead enemies. Otherwise I Samuel 18:25-27 would not describe how David delivered the foreskins of 200 slain Philistines to King Saul as part of a prenuptial agreement. (The contemporary military practice was to remove the penis of uncircumcised enemies, and the right hands of circumcised enemies.) Similar practices remain popular in Lebanon. In 1976, for instance, the French photographer Catherine Leroy observed Palestinian and Lebanese fighters regularly castrating their still-living prisoners.
 

About 1210 BCE:
 

According to Homer, the Fates give Achilleus, son of Peleus, the choice between a short life crowned by everlasting fame and a long life that no one would remember. The youth chooses the former (perhaps because he was tired of his mother dressing him as a girl) and goes on to become the short-lived (but famous) hero of Homer's Illiad. On the other hand, Achilleus' mother was not so pleased by her son's choice, and she complained to her friends about the pain of being the mother of the best of men. Similar themes have recurred in literature and life throughout recorded history. As recently as 1991, for instance, it was suggested that the Chinese-American actor Bruce Lee chose an early death and cinematic fame to a long life and historic oblivion.
 

About 1208 BCE:
 

A Libyan king hires Balkan, Italian, and Palestinian mercenaries to help him during an attack on the Egyptians. Although the Egyptians killed the Libyan king and drove off his mercenaries, the Europeans and Palestinians continued raiding the Nile Delta for the next hundred years. In 1873, French historian Gaston Maspero said that these raids were a manifestation of some ancient Greek Volkwanderung, and called the raiders the "peuples de la mer." By 1928, Maspero's theories were accepted as scientific fact, and the "Sea Peoples" were described as a unified nation that roamed the Mediterranean rather than as Greek and Sicilian pirates who traveled about in boats.
 

About 1200 BCE:
 

Many Eastern Mediterranean towns and cities are systematically looted and burned. While Gordon Childe suggested in 1942 that the destruction had a technological basis, and was owed to Anatolian smiths discovering some method for making cheap iron swords and arrow heads, Jane Waldbaum showed in 1968 that 96% of twelfth century Eastern Mediterranean weapons were made of bronze instead of iron. So metallurgy obviously wasn't the answer. Accordingly, Robert Drews argued in 1993 that the destruction instead owed to a revolution in military tactics. Said Professor Drews, "Men in 'barbarian' lands awoke to a truth that had been with them for some time: the chariot-based forces on which the Great Kingdoms relied could be overwhelmed by swarming infantries." If Drews' theory is correct -- and it seems plausible -- then the nearest modern analogy is probably the Mfecane of nineteenth century Southern Africa.
 

Chinese aristocrats start eating with chopsticks.
 

Late Stone Age Mongoloid peoples displace the Early Stone Age Australoid populations of Indonesia and the Philippines. These Mongoloids included the ancestors of the Polynesians and Micronesians.
 

About 1193 BCE:
 

After a 12-year siege, Achaian warriors succeed in destroying the Mycenaean seaport on the Dardanelles coast that they called Troy. Although I can't prove it, I suspect that the Greeks' famous wooden horse refers to totems carried by Central Asian mercenaries hired by the crafty Odysseus. (note 4) Also, while Homer attributed the causes of the Trojan War to the wrath of Achilleus and the beauty of Helen, modern scholars are more likely to attribute it to trade disputes and generic conflagration-era battles between infantry and charioteers. Dates of destruction range from 1275 BCE to 1180 BCE, which suggests multiple assaults on the same geographic location.
 

Funeral games (agon gymnikos) played by the Homeric warriors during their siege of Troy included chariot races, boxing, wrestling, foot races, discus throwing, and archery events. Prizes (aethlon) included valuable metal artifacts, weapons, oxen, mules, and slave women. Some of the prizes were taken from the dead man's property. This was not theft, but a way for the living to honorably receive mementos of the dead. As George MacDonald Fraser said in Quartered Safe Out Here about a similar division of dead men's property in 1945, "It was not callousness or indifference or lack of feeling for two comrades who had been alive that morning and were now names for the war memorial; it was just that there was nothing to be said." Heroes included Odysseus, who knew every trick in wrestling, foot racing, and war, and the noble-born Euryalos, who defeated the boastful carpenter Epeios by stepping inside Epeios's guard and punching him on his jaw.

About 1179 BCE:
 

Egyptian artwork lauds Pharaoh Ramsses III for his prowess on his feet, and shows armored spearmen doing as much fighting as chariot-borne archers. Egyptian militiamen fought in teams of four, while foreign mercenaries fought as individual skirmishers. The change probably reflects the transition away from chariot-borne armies to infantry armies.
 

1170 BCE:
 

A Trojan refugee named Brutus establishes a New Troy that eventually becomes London. Or so goes a story created by the Welsh historian Geoffrey of Monmouth about 1147 CE, probably to justify the Norman conquest of England. Geoffrey's story was particularly popular during the fourteenth century, a time when it seemed that the city was without heroes.
 

About 1160 BCE:
 

A frieze at Medinet Habu celebrating the accession of Pharaoh Ramesses III shows ten pairs of wrestlers and stick-fighters in an arena surrounded by grandstands. The matches were probably fixed, as the art shows that Egyptians always won, and the Libyans, Sudanese, and Syrians always lost.
 

1123 BCE:
 

King Wan and his son, Tan, the Duke of Chou, become the first Chinese princes known to have commissioned the production of a written copy of the I Ching, or "Classic of Changes." King Wan is also attributed with increasing the number of the linear diagrams shown in the I Chingfrom their original eight to their modern sixty-four.
 

1122 BCE:
 

According to tradition, a Chinese prince called Chi-tzu establishes the Choson Dynasty in North Korea. The tradition does not appear in written sources until the Han Dynasty invasion of Korea in the first century BCE.
 

Twelfth century BCE:
 

Sculptures show barefoot Syrian warriors riding horses. These warriors carried clubs, wore metal helmets, and strapped small round shields to their upper arms for protection.
 

About 1100 BCE:
 

Babylonian astrologers create days having twenty-four sixty-minute hours. As the length of a solar day varies according to the seasons, the reason was that they had a base-sixty mathematical system.
 

Arab women start riding dromedary camels. Pre-Islamic Arabs were matristic, and their women often taunted enemy armies by lifting their skirts and threatening them with female pollution.
 

About 1075 BCE:
 

The War Ministry of Shang Dynasty China organizes huge hunts within imperial game preserves for the purpose of training its military reservists in the art of war. This was likely some form of fire-hunting, with peasant infantrymen frightening game animals toward an astrologically-significant killing field where chariot-borne archers waited to shoot down the animals as they appeared.
 

About 1050 BCE:
 

Engineers employed by the North Chinese King Wu of Chou build siege weapons capable of throwing 3-pound stones to a range of about 100 yards. Forty men were needed to operate and maneuver these weapons, which were originally little more than giant slings. To justify his rebellion against the Shang, King Wu of Chou also encouraged the development of a philosophical doctrine known as t'ien-ming, or the Mandate of Heaven. This stated that as the rightly guided human sovereign was accountable to Heaven for his actions, divine support would be withdrawn from him when he became unjust. This belief that God was on the side of the bigger battalions was codified during the sixth century BCE, and made a fundamental part of the Six Secret Teachings of the T'ai Kung general.
 

About 1015 BCE:
 

According to I Samuel 17:21-58, a Hebrew shepherd named David uses rocks and a sling to slay a Philistine giant named Goliath. However, according to I Chronicles 11:22-23, the deed was done by Benaiah of Kabzeel, while according to II Samuel 21:19, it was done by Elhanan of Bethlehem. The type of sling used is less speculative. Palestinian tribal slings of the 1930s were about 30 inches long, and made from woven wool. The slinger hooked his right forefinger through a loop at one end of the sling while holding the other end with his finger and winding it like the propeller on a rubber-powered airplane. With a two-ounce projectile, maximum range was about 200 yards, with an effective range of about 60. As for Goliath, his spear "like unto a weaver's beam" was probably some kind of sling-launched javelin. (While javelins with throwing thongs were rare in Palestine, they were common in Thessaly.) Sling-launched javelins had a longer maximum range than a sling, but having a more-easily evaded projectile, a shorter effective range. If all this speculation is correct, then the battle was not between a giant expecting to wrestle with a foolish stripling, but between two very competent sharpshooters at long range.
 

Tenth century BCE:
 

Polynesian sailors begin paddling their twin-hulled canoes around the Western Pacific. Their ancestral home was probably somewhere in Indonesia.
 

Phoenician tuna fishermen establish Makom Shemesh, "the City of the Sun," on Morocco's Northwest Atlantic coast. This Far Western outpost is associated with the exploits of the Phoenician god Melkarth, whom the Greeks renamed Herakles.
 

Caravans link India with Tibet and sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean. However, caravan routes between China and Iran only become certain during the first century BCE.
 

Chinese texts mention a game of strategy called wei hai("encirclement chess"). This game was played using black stones and white shells on an astrologically significant board, and is the progenitor of the more famous Japanese game called Go.
 

Iron farm tools appear in North India.
 

In Denmark, stinging nettles are boiled in lye to create linen-like fibers. Historian Elizabeth Barber suggests that clothing made from these nettle fibers is a likely source for the Northern European stories about the magical shirts worn by gods and heroes.
 

About 950 BCE:
 

The Egyptians grow opium poppies at Thebes. Poppy seeds were burned as incense, used as aphrodisiacs and amulets, and made into hair dyes. As for the narcotic sap, it was put into honey-based medicines used to put crying babies to sleep.
 

Ninth century BCE:
 

In a series of speculative treatises called the Upanishads, or "Sitting Next to One's Teachers," North Indian philosophers describe reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Three centuries later, these theories become known as yoga, or "the union (of the mind and senses)."
 

Chinese generals are reported riding about battlefields on horse-drawn chariots. Since these four-wheeled carts were hard to handle and lacked any suspension, their use was more symbolic than practical.
 

Mandolin-shaped bronze daggers and red ceramic pottery appear in Korea. There is evidence to suggest that Korean rice cultivation began developing simultaneously.
 

About 890 BCE:
 

Warriors living along the Eastern Mediterranean littoral start riding horses. The development was perhaps economic, as it cost twice as much to buy a chariot as it did to buy the team that pulled it. Further, horses and camels could operate in rougher terrain, and carry heavier weights at higher speeds for longer distances. The transition from charioteering was slow, however, and contemporary Assyrian artwork shows one rider holding the reins while another rider shot arrows from horseback. The move toward equestrian activity also caused men to start wearing trousers instead of pleated kilts.
 

The Athenian King Theseus is entertained by the spectacle of men hitting each other in the head with leather-laced fists. While post-modern feminists have claimed that these bouts were part of bloodletting fertility rituals honoring either the Sun God or the Earth Mother, many sport historians state that that they were part of funerary games. My own speculation is that boxing is the sport of butchers and smiths. Consider the following examples: Odysseus boxed for a prize of a blood-sausage. The staggering quantities of meat eaten by Indian wrestlers have always been a proud part of their boasting. Butchers have easy access to a high protein diet, and the staggering quantities of meat eaten by Indian wrestlers remain a proud part of their boasting. One of the few pugilists mentioned in the Kievan Chronicles was a tanner. Many early English boxers were butchers ­ and Smithfield Market in London has been the site of pugilistic bouts and animal fights since the twelfth century. Many early American boxers were also butchers, Tom Hyers, for instance. And as recently as 1960, Smokin' Joe Frazier worked at a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, and trained by punching sides of beef, a practice immortalized in the movie Rocky. The Japanese swordsmen who routinely sliced bodies were not aristocratic sword-testers, or even wayward samurai, but butchers. Chinese Muslim boxers were often butchers, and the exorcists, the ones who created star-walking in the thirteenth century did most of their exorcisms in twentieth century Taiwan for butchers. Butchers and smiths established the Marcusbrüdern and other medieval European fencing guilds. Hausa dambeboxers are predominantly young men belonging to the butchers' guild. Gurkhas test their kukris and their strength by slicing bulls' necks during Dussehra festivals. The bulls killed in Iberian bullfights are taken to slaughterhouses and butchered, and the father of the Spanish matador Francisco Rivera Paquirri (remembered for being gored to death on Spanish television on September 26, 1984) was a butcher. In imitation of a Japanese creation myth, the Korean rassler Mas Oyama had himself filmed karate-chopping an ox outside a Japanese slaughterhouse. And on it goes. Overall, the relationship seems plausible. After all, butchers are physical laborers whose job involves killing an animal with an edged weapon or hammer, then immersing themselves in its blood and guts and gore. They are townsmen with the time and the need to improve their killing techniques. They often feel a psychological need to work off some of the bad karma that comes from being a professional killer. (The animals know what is coming, and don't like it much.) Most importantly, the theory fits better than any alternatives that I've seen. For instance, while flagellants beat themselves, and Aztec priests augured the future through human entrails, I'm not aware of many priests outside tenth century Iceland who routinely engaged in mutual combat. A priest's battles, after all, are with demons, physically safer occupations than battles with men and beasts. Peasant recreations do not seem to apply, either. (Typical peasant recreations included football, wrestling, foot racing, and drinking.) Nomad recreations don't apply, either, as tribal people always preferred archery, wrestling, and horseracing. Excepting the patronage of aristocratic gamblers (and they don't count, as a dyed-in-the-wool gambler will bet on when the sun will rise), aristocratic recreations do not apply, either, as rich people always liked archery, whoring, and hunting. Ditto for the mercantile classes, whose favorite recreation has always been counting coin, or the scholars, whose student brawls are mostly drunken orgies. Who does this leave? Butchers and smiths. Of course, it remains only conjecture.
 

About 870 BCE:
 

To counter the thick walls that many Eastern Mediterranean towns had built to keep infantry out, the Assyrians introduce wheeled battering rams.
 

About 850 BCE:
 

The Syrians begin writing their language using a combination of Aramaic and Assyrian scripts. The modern Syrian Arabic script dates to around 512 CE, when Egyptian missionaries created it for the purpose of translating religious texts into the Syrian vernacular. While Muslim tradition holds that these missionaries were Nestorian Christians or Jews fleeing Byzantine persecution, they were more likely worshippers of the Goddess.
 

The jaguar gods of the Mexican Olmecs appear in northern Peru. As the surviving art does not show warriors, and as weapons are rarely found in contemporary graves, the jaguar religion probably did not conquer by warfare. Instead, merchants probably spread it.
 

814 BCE:
 

According to second century Roman historians, the Phoenician Queen Dido establishes the North African city of Carthage. Carthage became the Phoenician capital following the fall of the Eastern Mediterranean ports of Byblus, Sidon, and Tyre to Alexander the Great five centuries later, and was the scene of great battles with the Romans during the third and second centuries BCE.
 

800 BCE:
 

According to tradition, an Ionian poet known as Homer creates the Greek epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. The poems more likely date to the mid-eighth century, and could have been created by different poets. While the truth is probably unknowable (our modern versions only date to the third century BCE, by which time they were already legendary), these two epics created the Western literature's prototypical soldier-kings, namely "The Man of Pain," or "Odysseus," and the "Warrior," or "Achilleus."
 

The Hellenic poet Hesiod writes a treatise called Theogony. This told the Greek creation myths, and with the Iliad and the Odyssey, defined the personalities of the principal Hellenic deities.
 

Eighth century BCE:
 

According to the Ramayana epic, the Indian kingdom of Kosala conquers Sri Lanka, perhaps over control of the spice trade with Yemen and Ethiopia. Lord Rama is the Indian hero of this conquest. In these tales, Rama's best friend and ally is the monkey-god Hanuman. As long as Hanuman remained celibate and loyal to his Lord Rama, he was blessed with great wisdom, wind-like speed and strength, and immunity from all types of weapons. And Hanuman did stay celibate and loyal, and in the process became the patron saint of many subsequent Indian soldiers and wrestlers. This celibacy probably gave rise to the Indian wrestling expression langoot ka saccha, "Be true to your trunks."
 

Iron is smelted in Rwanda, in the Mountains of the Moon.
 

776 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the first Panhellenic Games are played at Olympia, a shrine to the god Zeus standing on a plain west of Corinth. Although it has been speculated that these games commemorated the victory of the hero Herakles over his enemy, King Augeias of Elis, their original purpose is actually unknown. Further, archaeologists have shown that foot races were run at Olympia during the twelfth century BCE, while philologists have not found a list of Olympic victors that predates the sixth century BCE. Therefore the exact date appears to be important mainly for setting the epoch for a calendar created by Timaeus of Sicily in 264 BCE. Timaeus' calendar measured time by describing the years between the Olympic games. Therefore, television sportscasters notwithstanding, the word "Olympiad" properly describes the four years between the two festivals rather than the Olympic Games themselves. Or, more precisely, the five years between those games, as in Greek and Latin you count both ends of the sequence rather than just the beginning, as is done in English.
 

775 BCE:
 

A solar eclipse on September 6 provides the first astronomically verifiable date in Chinese history. Another solar eclipse on March 10, 721 BCE serves the same function in Babylonian history.
 

About 770 BCE:
 

True swords (that is, metal blades that are more than twice as long as their handles, and equally usable for cutting, thrusting, and guarding) appear in China. These early Chinese weapons were generally made of hammered bronze. While the Chinese worked terrestrial iron from about 1000 BCE, they used it mainly for tipping plows until the fourth century BCE.
 

753 BCE:
 

After seeing a flight of twelve vultures, the wolf-boy Romulus reportedly establishes Rome on the left bank of the Tiber River. The date is legendary and only appeared in print during the fourth century BCE. Nevertheless it is important because the Romans used it as the starting point for the Julian calendar of 46 BCE. It also suggests how towns on opposite sides of the Tiber may have united to create the city of Rome.
 

752 BCE:
 

According to the poet Pindar, who was born around 522 BCE, victors at the Olympic Games begin receiving crowns made from the leaves of wild vegetation. While the dating is doubtful, the winners of games held at Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea were receiving crowns of wild vegetation by the mid-sixth century BCE. The reason was that the best players often competed for honor and reputation (arete) rather than monetary gain (aethlon).
 

About 750 BCE:
 

The Assyrians develop bridles and bits that allow riders to control their horses while shooting their bows. This effectively doubles equestrian firepower, leaving chariots to become nothing more than rich men's playthings.

About 741 BCE:
 

Babylonian astrologers introduce 365-day solar calendars.
 

About 740 BCE:
 

Assyrian friezes show riders armed with lances and swords, and armored with metal helmets and cuirasses. Yet these were probably not true cavalries, as, in a world without stirrups, cavalrymen would have carried bows rather than swords or lances. Further, few ancient men could afford a metal cooking pot, let alone a fancy cuirass. Therefore the men shown were probably aristocrats who rode their ponies to the battlefield, then dismounted and fought in formation with their men. ("Dueling nobles," says Robert Drews, "are essential for the poet's story, but in reality the promachoiwere much less important than the anonymous multitude in whose front rank they stood.")
 

About 720 BCE:
 

"And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins," says the writer of Isaiah 11:5. What he evidently meant was that being a righteous man was as honorable as earning a victor's belt in wrestling or chariot racing.
 

720 BCE:
 

According to a Roman writer of the second century CE named Pausanias, the runner Orsippos becomes the first Hellenic athlete to compete in the nude. Yet, while Pausanias was usually reliable, he may have been wrong about this, as the Athenian historian Thucydides, who lived during the fifth century BCE, described athletic nudity as a recent development. Thucydides also said (as Homer had said before him) that wrestlers and boxers wore loincloths when they competed. So it is possible that Hellenic athletic nudity was restricted mostly to runners, artwork, and the Olympics. As for the motivations behind this nudity, Pausanias said that it was mostly to keep women from serving as coaches and trainers. (Hellenic women's magic was said to reside in their bodies, while Hellenic men's was said to reside in their clothes.) On the other hand, another Roman writer named Lucian said that the nudity mainly ensured that the athlete trained hard, as without clothes fat showed. Either way, the fact remains that we don't know why the Hellenes competed in the nude, only that they did.
 

About 710 BCE:
 

According to Livy, a Roman historian of the first century CE, a Roman king called Numa Pompilius establishes Italy's first calendar of twelve months duration. As Nu-Ma is the name of a Roman creation god, this is a dubious tradition at best. Given this, one suspects that the Roman 355-day calendar, with its ten-day weeks and March 1 New Year, was created later, too. Internal evidence suggests that this was perhaps around 450 BCE.
 

708 BCE:
 

According to a victor's list made up by Sextus Julius Africanus after 217 CE, wrestling is made part of the Olympic Games. However, the date is questionable, as the oldest statue at Olympia to honor a wrestler is only dated to 628 BCE. Nevertheless, wrestling was popular with the ancient Hellenes, and their wrestling was standing wrestling done by men wearing loincloths and belts. Unless otherwise specified, winning seems to have consisted of throwing the opponent on his back three times. If the crowd grew restive (matches often took hours), winners also could be decided using a best-of-three lifting contest.
 

About 700 BCE:
 

A Chinese text ranks wrestling as a military skill on a par with archery and chariot racing. Contemporary Chinese wrestling was called shuai chiao ("leg-bone wrestling"). It consisted of standing jacket wrestling combined with elbow locks. Despite the name, foot sweeps were not allowed, nor was there much groundwork or choking. The sport was associated with harvest festivals, and Japanese sumo and Korean ssireum may be offshoots.
 

Mayans establish the city of Tikal in Central Guatemala. The reason probably had to do with an abundance of easily worked flint.
 

Seventh century BCE:
 

Assyrian soldiers are reported celebrating their victories by whirling like tops. In other words, dancing. This is remarkable mainly because Middle Eastern people generally associate whirling dances with women instead of soldiers. Given this, it is possible that the Assyrian soldiers' dances honored Mother Earth, whose ground these men had consecrated with human blood. On the other hand, as these soldiers were some of the most vicious ever known, it is even more probable that they danced because simply because they enjoyed it.
 

An Iranian people known as the Scythians use horses and two-wheeled chariots to conquer Southern Russia. While the Scythians had a matrilineal society that modern archaeologists appreciate for the magnificence of its funerary artifacts, they were not a pacific people. For instance, they hung scalps and heads from their horse-harnesses and tent-poles, and made arrow-quivers and drumheads from human skin. While this emphasis on human artifacts may have had metaphysical meaning, the Scythians and the Altaic Pazyryk people to their east were also the world's first known international drug dealers. So it is also possible that the skulls and skins simply ensured that dead business rivals stayed dead. (In a pre-modern society, putrefaction is the only sure sign of death.)
 

688 BCE:
 

According to a victor's list drawn up by Sextus Julius Africanus around 217 CE, boxing with ox-hide hand-wrappings is added to the Olympic games. As the first Olympic statue to honor a boxer was only erected in 544 BCE, this dating is unreliable. Some very ancient writings describe these coverings as being wrapped under the hollow of the hand, thus leaving the fingers free. (Leather and metal knuckle-dusters were only added during the fourth century BCE.) Their purpose was to protect the boxers' own thumbs and wrists from injury. (Most Hellenic boxers used clubbing attacks to the temples and neck rather than jabs to the face or hooks to the body.) Speculation: is Hellenic boxing analogous to modern Hausa dambeboxing, where young men of the butchers' guild tie knotted string around their strong-side hands, and then proceed to hit one another in the head for the amusement of post-harvest crowds, and the honor and glory of their guilds and villages?
 

About 685 BCE:
 

An Assyrian letter writer describes the hallucinogenic properties of kunubu, or orally ingested hashish. The Greek translation of this term subsequently provides the basis for the English word "cannabis."
 

About 670 BCE:
 

The Hellenic city-state of Argos organizes its army into human battering rams known as "phalanxes." (The word means fingers, and apparently refers to the soldiers' spears thrusting out from the main body like fingers from a palm.) The idea behind the phalanxes was to make small numbers of expensively equipped men capable of defending walled vineyards and orchards from the ravages of equally small numbers of unarmored cavalrymen. Phalangite warfare is important because it introduced the myth of quick, decisive wars into Western consciousness.
 

The mints of the Lydian King Gyges make the oldest datable coins. This said, coins appear in China about the same time. No one knows if there is any relationship between these two events, or whether they were independent inventions.
 

660 BCE:
 

When the grandson of the sun-goddess Amaterasu descends from heaven to the top of Mount Takachiko, he brings with him the Imperial Regalia of Mirror, Jewel, and Sword. Or so goes a still-popular Japanese legend first started in the eighth century CE.
 

648 BCE:
 

According to the victor's list produced by Sextus Julius Africanus after 217 CE pankration (literally, "total fighting," in the sense of "no holds barred") is introduced into the Panhellenic Games. A giant named Lygdamis of Syracuse being its first known champion. The latter attribution cannot be verified, though, as the oldest statue honoring an Olympic pankratiast was only dated 536 BCE. In pankration, competitors were allowed to punch, kick, or wrestle. Contemporaries said that it was popular mostly with men who were too short to box and too light to wrestle. They also complained that pankratiasts danced and sparred more than they fought, and did not train as hard as wrestlers.
 

About 628 BCE:
 

According to a story written in the sixth century CE that said that "The Old Camel Man" lived 258 years before Alexander, the Iranian prophet Zoroaster flourishes in Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. Still, while the dating is suspect, the religion is clearly ancient. It also featured powerful invisible gods pitted against equally powerful foes called satans ("adversaries") and described those gods as speaking to men from burning bushes. (Natural gas fires are common throughout the Middle East and Southern Russia.) Zoroastrian priests were interested in astrology and divination, and the Greek word for those priests, "Magi," means "foreign wizards who are skilled in spells."

About 600 BCE:
 

Chinese engineers use irrigation canals to facilitate their farmers' wet-rice cultivation.
 

Chinese scholars start compiling a text ultimately known as the Shih Ching, or "The Book of Songs." The work included many oral traditions, and is the source of most ancient Chinese history.
 

The Mongols and Tungus move into Mongolia. (They originally lived in Siberia.)
 

North Indian philosophers introduce the idea of omnipotent male gods who occasionally manifest themselves on earth during times of trouble.
 

A Danubian cult of bread and wine known as Orphism (after Orphis, a Mycenaean poet who rowed through the Dardanelles with Jason and the Argonauts) or Dionysianism (after its principal deity) spreads through Greece and Italy. As commonly practiced, Orphism was less a religion than a cult of sociability. Male pipers and female percussionists were widely associated its festivities, which were known as Bacchanalias. While its fetishes of bread and wine survive in the Christian communion rites, and its revelries became Carnival, its association with drunken orgies also caused pipes and drums to become unpopular in most orthodox Christian services.
 

Etruscan tomb art shows a man whose head is tied in a bag using a club against an opponent armed with a noose and a dog. While some historians speculate that such amusements were the progenitor of Roman gladiatorial combats, there is no proof that this Etruscan art was literal rather than symbolic. Moreover, the Romans did not start holding gladiatorial combats for another 400 years. Nor were they popular for another 500. (There were, for example, just 25 known gladiatorial exhibitions between named individuals in the half-century between 94 and 54 BCE.) So more researches are required to prove causality rather than coincidence.
 

Ukrainian and Kuban equestrians start carrying fire-hardened lances. These weapons were probably tipped with bone or flint, as metal lance heads are only positively dated to the first century CE in Central Asia.
 

Mesoamerican architects build their first pyramids. These probably served as funerary mountains for the souls of kings.
 

About 587 BCE:
 

Silver amulets bearing verses from Numbers 6:22-27 are made, and subsequently lost for archaeologists to find underneath a Jerusalem church in 1979. The event is mentioned because these inscriptions are the oldest surviving Biblical verses.
 

585 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the Hellenic mathematician Thales of Miletus becomes the first person to accurately predict a solar eclipse. Ten years later, Thales was reportedly the first Hellenic philosopher to discuss whether water, air, fire, or earth provided the underlying principle for the cosmos. As Thales' death was reportedly by sunstroke, and his conclusion was that fire, which both created and destroyed, was the most important of the four elements, there is a suspicion of Zoroastrian influence. This implies that his philosophy is more reliably dated to the late fourth century BCE than the early sixth.
 

About 580 BCE:
 

Women are reported participating in Hellenic athletic events. The reliability of these reports is debatable. After all, they include Athenian jibes at Spartan virility, Platonic utopian dialogues, and Roman bawdy tales. Still, there were rich women who managed athletes and owned stables during Hellenic times. Doubtless rich men's daughters also ran foot-races, raced chariots, and went hunting like the sons their fathers wanted but did not have. So perhaps the activities of these fortunate women are the sources for the entries.
 

About 570 BCE:
 

The Etruscan King Servius Tullius of Rome introduces Greek-style phalanxes to Rome. His army contained one large legion of about 4,000 armored men, plus separate companies of unarmored infantry, mounted infantry, engineers, musicians, and priests numbering perhaps 2,000 more.
 

About 564 BCE:
 

Coaches are introduced into Hellenic athletic competitions. These men were generally former athletes hired by local landowners to improve local youths' chances of winning intra-urban competitions.
 

About 550 BCE:
 

Iranian dismounted archers are reported going out in pairs. One carried a compound bow and the other carried a shield. The idea was probably not original to the Iranians, as the eighth century poet Homer had described Hellenic forces using similar techniques. At any rate, the way these shield-pairs worked was that one man held the shield. Meanwhile his partner would pop up from behind its protection, launch a shaft toward the biggest group of men that he could see, and then dodge back behind the shield, "like a child running to its mother." The maximum range of the Iranian archers was about 200 yards, with an accurate range of about 60 yards.
 

Reflexed compound bows appear in Central Asia. (A reflexed bow is one which, when unstrung, reverses its curve, while a compound bow is one made by uniting staves of similar material.) In the large sizes seen in eighteenth century Ottoman arsenals, these bows were powerful enough to penetrate plate armor or heavy wooden doors. Little Cupid-sized bows were popular during ancient times, probably because they could be shot ambidextrously with great rapidity. This would have been a useful trick for cavalrymen who still lacked stirrups, or city policemen who shot low-powered arrows from behind cover. The latter use is certain, by the way, as the Athenians used Scythian policemen from 530-350 BCE and their bows were of this type.
 

The Romans reorganize their volunteer infantry after the Greek fashion. The requirement for individual soldiers to purchase their own equipment helps to make the Roman Republic the first culture known to divide its population by wealth instead of birth.
 

547 BCE:
 

The Iranians mount archers on dromedary camels. A year later, these mounted archers prove their worth during a campaign that ends in the defeat of the famous Lydian King Croesus.
 

544 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the Buddha achieves Nirvana while sitting under a tree in Bodhgaya, India. In the process, he becomes Siddharta Gautama. (Gautama is a name meaning "One who achieves his aim." The title Buddha means "Enlightened One," while the title Siddharta means "One who is rich in the power of the universe.") The Buddha's power was not entirely spiritual, either. According to subsequent stories, he was a champion wrestler, archer, runner, swimmer, and mathematician who won his first wife in a duel. While modern scholarship suggests that this traditional date for the Buddha's enlightenment is 60 years too early, it remains important because medieval Buddhist calendars used it as their starting point.
 

Around 540 BCE:
 

An Olympic wrestling champion named Milo of Kroton (a Greek colony in Southern Italy) reportedly develops his famous strength by carrying a heifer the length of a stadium every day for four years, a feat that has in modern times been claimed as the progenitor of progressive weight training. The truth of the tale is unknown, however, partly because the length of a Hellenic stadium varied, and mainly because the Hellenistic writer named Athenaeus did not record the tale until around 228 CE. Still, the feat is theoretically possible. After all, Herbert Mann of Germantown, Tennessee once threw a 600-pound bull over his hips and carried it 185 yards.
 

534 BCE:
 

An Icarian poet named Thespis delivers a monologue during a spring festival held at Athens, and in the process, becomes Europe's first famous actor. One wonders what made his words so memorable, as competing acts included acrobatic displays, obscene comedians, and sexually explicit dances. No matter: stage plays became enormously popular soon after, perhaps because rich men viewed the commissioning of a play to be a reasonable way of honoring the gods while simultaneously competing with their neighbors.
 

520 BCE:
 

According to the victor's list produced by Sextus Julius Africanus after 217 CE, the hoplitodromos, or foot race in armor, is added to the Olympics. The Roman traveler Pausanias, who lived around 170 CE, thought that the purpose of this event was military training. According to surviving artwork, armored racers ran naked except for helmet, greaves, and shield. While the armor was special lightweight armor made for racing instead of fighting, the helmets and greaves were eventually discarded, probably to reduce heat injuries among the athletes. Modern scholars believe that the event actually became popular during the 460s rather than the 520s. The reason is that the most important armored races were held at Plataea, where Spartan discipline and training had been a root of a victory over the Iranians in 479. The dramatic death of a military runner on the steps of the Athenian courthouse following this battle was invented by the Roman moralist Lucian around 170 CE, and popularized during the nineteenth century by a Robert Browning poem called "Pheidippides." The modern distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, represents the distance between Windsor Castle and Stamford Bridge Stadium in London, and was set in 1908. Hellenic runners usually ran distances ranging from a few hundred yards to just under two miles.
 

About 512 BCE:
 

The Throne of Jamshid is built at Parsa, in Southwestern Iran. Called Persepolis ("Persian City") by the Hellenes, it was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE.
 

About 511 BCE:
 

According to tradition, a crippled general from Shantung Province called the Honorable Sun, or Sun Tzu, writes The Art of War, as a way of passing his knowledge on to others. The text is among the very first known discussions of strategy as a rational rather than heroic endeavor, or to describe warfare using scientific terms. (Describing warfare in terms of the Five Spheres, Earth, Wood, Fire, Water, and Metal, suggested considerable scientific knowledge.) It is possible that the book's thirteen chapters were written (or at least, seriously revised) a century and a half later by a relative of Sun's known as Bin. Evidence to support the latter claim includes Sun Tzu's description of the use of war music in Book Six. While Chinese armies used bells, cymbals, and drums to beat the assembly, call halts, and maneuver forces during night attacks until the 1950s, these innovations are usually dated to 387 BCE, and military reforms instituted by the Marquis Wen of Wei.
 

About 510 BCE:
 

According to Livy, Roman senators overthrow an Etruscan king named Tarquin the Proud after Tarquin's son rapes a senator's daughter. While Livy's story probably owed more to Hellenistic theater than to historical fact, it still suggests the beginnings of the Roman Republic.
 

Fifth century BCE:
 

The Chinese start dividing their days and nights into twelve watches of two hours apiece. Although the practice is associated with the night watches of Turkish merchants and Mongolian soldiers rather than the studies of Chinese court astrologers, these double hours were subsequently incorporated into both Chinese astrology and martial arts. In astrology they were used to provide astrologers with a guide to the inner person, and in the martial arts they were used to suggest the best times for using various striking techniques.
 

Etruscan soldiers start carrying curved short swords known as kopis. Later popularized by the armies of Cyrus and Alexander, these slashing weapons are sometimes claimed as ancestors for the Gurkha kukri. That relationship seems unlikely, partly because the Romans and Greeks are not the only people smart enough to design curved short swords, and mainly because the Nepalese used their kukris mostly for slaughtering livestock, chopping wood, and clearing brush until their transition to firearms and bows during the 1760s.
 

Mayans make statues showing psilocybin mushrooms.
 

Peruvians make pots showing men chewing coca leaves and friezes showing men carrying staffs made from the stalks of psychotropic cacti.
 

500 BCE:
 

The Hellenic philosopher Pythagoras of Samos dies in Italy, perhaps in an arson fire set at the house of the wrestler Milo of Kroton. (Milo's wife Muia was an avid Pythagorean, and Pythagoras himself had been an avid wrestler during his own youth.) Besides creating systems for measuring right angles and then divining the future through the use of numerical relationships, (note 5) the Pythagoreans also became famous for doing rhythmic exercises to musical accompaniment. Hellenistic philosophers such as Apollonius of Tyana spread these exercises into India during the fourth century BCE, while Indian monks introduced them into China during the fourth century CE. These Pythagorean inventions pertain to the modern martial arts partly because the names of many traditional martial art practice forms have numerological significance. (Examples include the Okinawan karate kata suparinpei and sanchin. The former translates as "One hundred and eight meanings" and alludes to the place in the Buddhist hell where souls receive their final decisions on reincarnation while the latter translates as "Three straight" and alludes to the three bodies of the Buddha that can be understood only through direct intuition.) The nineteenth century British also liked the Pythagorean theory that participating in athletic games was more important than winning them.
 

A Chinese text describes siege weapons as throwing fifty-pound projectiles to a range of 400 yards.
 

488 BCE:
 

A Hellenic sprinter called Astylos wins two Olympic running events, a feat he repeats during the next two Olympics. This hero's training program reportedly included large amounts of strenuous exercise and near-total abstinence from wine, meat, and sex. If true, then his regimen probably was based more on religious taboos than on science, as there was a contemporary religious theory that one gained in proportion to what one gave up. The practice also may have been useful for allowing the athlete to avoid the unwanted advances of bisexual patrons.
 

About 484 BCE:
 

Some Mongolian transhumants known as the Yüeh-chih make equestrian raids into North China. Most other Northeast Asian transhumants remained pedestrian for another 200 years.
 

484 BCE:
 

According to a stele erected around 370 BCE, a man named Theogenes of Thasos (an Aegean island near Thrace) starts a string of 1300 unbroken victories in boxing, wrestling, and the pankration. Even allowing for exaggeration (the string had grown to over 1400 victories by the second century CE), that still works out to a match every six days for 22 years. Therefore, unless there were truly giants in those days, Theogenes' career was probably managed as carefully as any twentieth century professional wrestling champion's. By way of contrast, Joe Louis fought just 25 times during the nearly twelve years that he was the world's heavyweight champion. Likewise, Harry Greb's 178 wins still stand as the longest unbroken string of boxing victories known -- and even those included five unofficial losses and over a hundred "no decision" bouts.
 

479 BCE:
 

The Chinese philosopher known as Master Kung dies in Shantung Province. Although ignored in its own time -- the fourth century philosopher Meng-tzu was actually the first great Confucianist scholar -- his philosophy subsequently becomes the cornerstone of the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy. Confucianism also underlies East Asia's earliest chivalric codes, for, in the sage's own words, "By the drawing of the bow, one can know the virtue and conduct of men." Still, the generally agnostic Confucianism was not popular among people who preferred shamanism or who lacked access to formal education and the jobs it ensured. So a rival philosophy based on North Asian animism, and known as Taoism, or the "School of the Way and Its Power," developed throughout the following century. The early Taoist sages included the retired bureaucrat Lao Tzu, who taught that to go far meant to return to one's roots, and the philosopher Mo Tse, who advocated both universal love and peace through superior firepower. Nevertheless, many everyday Taoists were not so enlightened, and folk Taoism's advocacy of group sex and other curious customs appalled Confucian officials for the next 2,000 years.
 

A Greek woman named Hydne becomes a Hellenic hero by helping her father Skyllis pull up the anchors of some Iranian ships during a storm, thus causing the ships to founder and their crews to drown. While most modern authorities suggest that Hydne and her father were probably sponge-fishers, it is possible that they were upper-class athletes whose training for Dionysian swimming meets had been interrupted by war. Why? First, Hydne and Skyllis' subsequent fame (Greek sponge-fishers rarely became Athenian heroes), and second, the paucity of detail and mass of conjecture surrounding the original sources.
 

478 BCE:
 

A Bengali prince known as Vijaya, "the Victorious," conquers Sri Lanka. Doubtless Vijaya and his army went to the island by boat, although Indian legend has it that they walked there via a stone bridge. Vijaya's imperialism was probably motivated by his desire to control the region's rapidly expanding trade with Iran.
 

473 BCE:
 

Literary sources report Chinese men dressed as bulls engaging in pushing contests. Stone carvings dated to 250 BCE also depict pushing contests between real bulls. Similar non-lethal bullfights remain popular in Okinawa and Indonesia into the present.
 

About 470 BCE:
 

Following repeated defeats at the hands of armored Greek infantry, the Iranians try armoring their cavalry. While their earliest efforts led them in the direction of armored saddles, these proved bulky and without stirrups, uncomfortable to sit (or stand) in. So, toward the end of the century, the Iranian cavalrymen started carrying shields and wearing bronze thigh guards instead.
 

About 460 BCE:
 

The Doric historian Herodotus describes the practices and culture of some female warriors he called the Amazons. These Scythian women were probably priestesses of the Earth Goddess, and the subsequent legends about their mastectomies are likely owed to Hellenistic stage tradition than actual practice. (Hellenistic actors traditionally bared their right breasts to show that they were playing unmarried females.)
 

About 457 BCE:
 

The Jewish prophet Ezra writes the Laws of Moses using the Aramaic script that evolved into Square Hebrew during the second century BCE. The Hebrew Creation myth known as Genesis appears about the same time. Both developments show Babylonian influence.
 

About 450 BCE:
 

After a combination of frustrated imperial ambition and local corruption bankrupts the Athenian treasury, the Athenian government begins equipping its soldiers with just helmets and shields instead of full armor. Still, this is hardly the almost total nudity shown on contemporary Athenian art. Instead, that is more probably an indication of the sexual proclivities of those Athenians wealthy enough to afford high-quality art. (A 1989 study found that 64% of human societies openly tolerate and sometimes even encourage bisexual liaisons between dominant males and their social inferiors.)
 

Hellenic philosophers divide mathematics into arithmetic (numbers at rest), geometry (magnitudes at rest), music (numbers in motion), and astronomy (magnitudes in motion). These were then combined with the study of grammar (the art of using words properly), rhetoric (the art of making eloquent speeches), and dialectics (the art of deductive reasoning) to form the basis for a proper Hellenic education, the purpose of which was to train young aristocrats to become bankers, merchants, politicians, and tax-collectors. Neoplatonist scholars (notably Martianus Capella) rediscovered these seven liberal arts during the fifth century CE, and subsequently turned them into the Western world's pedagogical ideal.
 

Etruscan art shows athletes competing for prizes. Sports included wrestling, discus-throwing, jumping, running, and vaulting. While boxing, both gloved and bare-fisted, also appears on Etruscan art, it was separate from wrestling and done to the accompaniment of music. So perhaps it was linked with ecstatic dancing or religious ritual instead of sport.
 

446 BCE:
 

In the Pythian Ode, the poet Pindar wrote that for losers at Hellenic athletic events, there was "no pleasureful trip home. When they came back to their mothers, no joy burst forth, none of that laughter that gratifies. No. Rather, down back roads, hiding from their enemies, they skulk, bitten by their calamity." In other words, for the Hellenic athlete, just as for the American football coach George Allen, winning was not everything, it was the only thing.
 

About 445 BCE:
 

Hellenic philosophers describe the four "roots" of the universe as being Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These elements in turn had basic characteristics, namely hot, cold, dry, and wet. The concept of "atoms," or invisible, indestructible particles in motion, developed from these fifth century BCE discussions. It is not known if these Hellenic philosophies were based on the contemporary Chinese theories concerning Earth, Wood, Fire, Water, and Metal, or whether they were independently reached. My suspicion is that they were independently reached, but I cannot prove this.
 

About 440 BCE:
 

The Doric historian Herodotus writes that when Scythian priests put certain seeds into an urn filled with red-hot stones, "Immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed." Indeed. The seeds being burned were those of cannabis ruderalis, or Siberian marijuana, and they were probably used in harvest rituals, as the Scythians grew hemp for the purpose of making clothing.
 

Spartan military training is described as including a gymnastic weapon dance known as pyrrhiche, or "dressed in red." Boys started learning the movements of this dance about the age of five, and versions were also practiced by women and by professionals. The martial dances taught youths to guard with their shields and to thrust with their swords, and also made them stronger, more agile, and better team players. Accordingly, the Athenian philosopher Sokrates observed that the best dancer was usually the best warrior.
 

438 BCE:
 

The Parthenon ("Virgin's Apartment") is consecrated in Athens. The name refers to the building's original purpose, which was to house a gold-plated statue of the goddess Athena Promachos ("the Champion"). The Byzantines shipped this statue to Constantinople in 426 CE, where it disappeared. The building itself was blown into picturesque ruins in 1687, when an Ottoman powder magazine built on its grounds exploded after being struck by lightning.
 

About 425 BCE:
 

The Boeotian League fields a bellows-powered flamethrower during the Peloponnesian War.
 

About 410 BCE:
 

An exiled Athenian general named Thucydides starts work on the text that would become the seven-and-a-half volume History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was a careful scholar, and always used eyewitness accounts when he could get them. Therefore he is considered to be the father of modern history. Unfortunately, his writings ignored political and economic problems, so his text is also the first (but hardly the last) military history to be written in a social vacuum.
 

409 BCE:
 

The world's oldest surviving personal horoscope is cast in Babylon.
 

401 BCE:
 

An Iranian prince known as Cyrus the Younger hires 10,000 Hellenic mercenaries to help him wrest control of Iran from his brother Artaxerxes II. Although the coup fails after his brother's soldiers kill Cyrus, his campaign remains interesting. For one thing, Cyrus' Hellenic mercenaries represent one of the first paid armies. For another, the Greek retreat across Iran toward the Black Sea prompted the writing of Xenophon's Anabasis("Upcountry March"), an epic (if not always reliable) tale that started Prince Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander to thinking about conquering the world.
 

During their retreat across Iran toward the Balkans, Xenophon's soldiers and camp followers sometimes used sword-and-shield dances to encourage local potentates to let them pass peacefully through their kingdoms. (As the Hellenic dances were very athletic, anyone who did well in them was likely to do well during actual combat. And, according to Xenophon, the dancers chosen for the demonstrations did very well.) As similar displays of prowess have been reported in many martial cultures, and are generally used to preclude actual fighting by proving one's ability to fight well, such dances are probably a root of the martial art practice forms now known by the Japanese loan-word of kata.
 

Fourth century BCE:
 

The Chou Pei Suan Ching, or "Arithmetic Classic," appears in China. In it, a Chinese prince and his astrologer discuss the manufacture of calendars and the properties of right triangles and fractions. Because their system relied on knowledge of base-five and base-ten instead of base-sixty, the Chinese mathematics appear to have been free of much, if any, Greek or Babylonian influence.
 

Blacksmiths begin working iron in Northwestern Tanzania, the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, and Meroë in the Sudan. Although contemporary developments, they were probably independent inventions.
 

Horse-riding Siberian adventurers introduce iron weapons into North Korea.

The concept of "soul" or "incorporeal life-force" enters mainstream Hellenic thought. The development is attributed to the school of an Athenian philosopher named Aristokles, who was called Plato, or "broad shoulders," after the shoulders that he had developed as a wrestler in his youth.
 

Horseshoes appear in Central Spain. At the time, they appear to have been used mostly for decoration.
 

About 400 BCE:
 

Mayan astronomer-priests start hammering their Long Count dates into stone steles. The Mayans' arithmetic skills were sound, and their system of notation included a zero at least five centuries before South Indian philosophers hit upon the idea. The Mayan system is noteworthy since it uses base-twenty. This is a rare and cumbersome system that is well suited for use by an educated minority that wants or needs to maintain its monopoly over knowledge.
 

About 398 BCE:
 

Engineers working for the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius the Elder invent what the Greeks called katapeltes("hurlers") and the Romans called ballistae ("throwers"). Essentially giant crossbows set crossways on pedestals, and spanned using windlasses, these weapons threw clay balls or iron arrows over 300 yards. By Imperial times, the Romans mounted these machines on ox-carts, and used them as field artillery. A related lever-armed weapon known as a scorpion or an onager appeared around 240 BCE. Early versions threw 10-pound projectiles about 300 yards, while later versions threw 60-pound projectiles about 400 yards. Modern researchers believe that a sling was used at the top of the arm, otherwise maximum ranges would have been about a third less. During the early Christian era, the Eastern Romans also used hand-held versions for hunting birds. These smaller weapons were called "belly-shooters" (gastraphetes), after the way that they were held while reloading. The weapons shown in bas-reliefs in the Musée Crozatier in Puy-en-Velay are so short that they may have been made of steel. They probably fired lead bullets or darts about 20 yards with great accuracy. Maximum range was probably around 300 yards. Be that as it may, hand-held crossbows played no role in European warfare until besieged Normans started using them for household defense during the 940s CE.
 

The Chinese invent trebuchets. These were enormous slings attached to pivoting wooden beams. While crews of men pulling on ropes powered early trebuchets, later ones were powered using mechanical countermasses. The Iraqis, Syrians, and Iranians introduced trebuchets into India and Outremer during the twelfth century, and the French started building them soon after. While small trebuchets threw 30-pound rocks about 200 yards, thirteenth century trebuchets hurled 300-pound rocks nearly 400 yards, and much heavier weights (such as dead horses) about half that.
 

396 BCE:
 

The Romans experiment with paying soldiers using salaries rather than percentages of the loot. The idea was to keep them interested during protracted sieges and campaigns through areas where there was little loot. As actual cash arrived only infrequently, good officers soon found it useful to advance their men portions of their pay whenever passing through towns or villages. And, before thinking that arrears of a year or more are awful, remember that in those days cash economies were rare and commercial banking was nonexistent. Therefore, as late as 1945, British soldiers in Burma and Africa were doing most of their buying and selling using foodstuffs rather than cash.
 

A Spartan princess named Kyniska becomes the first woman to win the chariot racing events at Olympia. While Plutarch wrote that Kyniska personally drove the winning chariot, most other ancient sources suggest that she was the owner of those horses rather than their driver.
 

388 BCE:
 

During one of the first fixed fights on record, a boxer named Eupolos the Thessalian pays the fighters Agetor of Arkadia, Prytanis of Kyziokos, and Phormion of Halikarnassos to lose to him during the Olympics. The Syracusans and Cretans trying to buy national teams rather than train their own also scandalized the same games.
 

About 387 BCE:
 

Marquis Wen of Wei hires veteran soldiers to teach his new recruits how to march and wield weapons. The marquis also used bells, drums, and gongs to control his soldiers' maneuvers. Similar innovations also appeared in Roman and Indian armies around the same time.
 

About 385 BCE:
 

Attic mathematicians introduce logistics to warfare. That is, they taught their quartermasters to count beans and their captains to hold daily head-counts. (The word's modern meaning, which is to procure, maintain, and transport military equipment, facilities, and personnel, only dates to 1861. It is attributed to the Swiss Baron Henri Jomini, who enjoyed identifying principles and coining words.)
 

About 380 BCE:
 

Aristocratic cavalrymen from the city-state of Taras (modern Taranto, in Northeastern Italy) introduce shields to mounted European warfare. The fashion probably evolved from equestrian games. Roman armies normally assigned about 300 cavalrymen per legion, and used them mostly for scouting and pursuit.
 

371 BCE:
 

After suffering a string of disastrous defeats during which thousands of their soldiers ran away, the Spartans try publicly humiliating their deserters instead of killing them.
 

About 366 BCE:
 

The Romans introduce the Ludii Romani ("Roman Games"). These took place in September, and included boxing matches and chariot races. The matches were popular, and five additional festivals appeared between 220 and 173 BCE.
 

About 360 BCE:
 

The Hellenic cavalryman Xenophon writes that Spartan military pedagogy taught its young men that the greatest sin was not lying or stealing, but getting caught. The Spartan system is then contrasted with the Iranian system, which taught young men to ride and shoot, and respect the King. Such conceptual variances were also present in the two societies' views on athletics, which the Hellenes viewed as a sacred endeavor, while the Iranians saw them as activities fit only for children.
 

About 356 BCE:
 

Raids by the Mongols and Turks on the Northwestern China cause the Chinese to build earthen forts around water holes and other key points in the desert. In 215 BCE, Shih Huang-ti, "the First August Sovereign" of a united China, orders these forts linked with by roads smooth and wide enough for cavalrymen to use. These early fortifications provided the foundations for the Great Wall of China, on which construction began around 1470, and completed around 1720.
 

About 350 BCE:
 

Winners in Hellenic boxing or wrestling events are described as receiving prizes equal to 500 days of a skilled laborer's time. This translates to a lot of tax-free dollars, and serves as a reminder that, despite modern Olympic mythology, most Hellenic athletes were paid professionals rather than noble amateurs. This said, the Greeks still paid fourth-rate musicians better than second-rate athletes.
 

In an essay called Laws, Plato describes Hellenic boxers and pankratiasts as wearing leather thongs over their hands while fighting and padded gloves while sparring. He also noted that when sparring partners were not available, the boxers and pankratiasts would beat on sandbags or shadow box. Too much should not be made of this civility, as during matches the boxers and pankratiasts punched genitals and thumbed eyes as happily as a club fighter of the 1930s.
 

According to a story by Chuang Tzu, Chinese kings enjoyed watching sword fights, often to the exclusion of affairs of state. While hundreds of fencers were killed or injured during the course of a year, new ones were always available due to the rich prizes offered. These Chinese gladiators were described as having their hair in a tangle, with their whiskers pointing out. They wore slouching caps with coarse tassles and short coats. They also had staring eyes, and talked about nothing but the hazards of their game, a condition which twentieth century physicians would term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
 

About 341 BCE:
 

According to the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 10,000 Ch'i crossbowmen shoot an enemy general as he stops to read a message left nailed to a tree. While it is doubtful that 10,000 men could stay quiet long enough to ambush anyone, the story still describes the introduction of crossbows to warfare. From an archaeological standpoint, these Chinese crossbows probably were not related to Hellenic katapeltes or Indian yantra. (Their cast bronze triggers were entirely unlike the simple wooden levers used on the Hellenic and Indian weapons.) Instead, archaeologists believe that they were a Thai or Vietnamese invention, perhaps adopted for use by women on horseback. At any rate, the Chinese crossbows were called ch'uan, or "hand," after the way that they were drawn, or nu, or "anger," after the way that they were used. Their maximum range was about 200 yards, with a maximum effective range of about 100 yards, and they fired either short iron-tipped arrows or small clay balls.
 

About 340 BCE:
 

Engineers serving King Philip II of Macedon develop Europe's first torsion catapults. These shot javelins 400 yards, or 30-pound rocks half that distance. Other important military innovations attributed to Philip's army include the creation of permanent reserves, the vigorous pursuit of defeated enemies, and the development of cavalry forces designed to exploit weaknesses in the enemy line.
 

About 338 BCE:
 

The infantrymen of King Philip II of Macedon are issued eighteen-foot long pikes called sarissa. When used in phalanx-style formations, these were equally effective against cavalry and infantry. Similar pikes became popular in Switzerland and Germany during the sixteenth century.
 

Roman artwork shows shields emblazoned with wolves, minotaurs, horses, and boars. This suggests that there were four legions rather than just one.
 

337 BCE:
 

The Carthaginians introduce Balearic and Rhodian slingers into their armies. The slingers' weapons consisted of a small pouch attached to two strips of sinew about 18 inches long. The slingers whirled these strips about their heads once, and then released one of the two strips of sinew. While rocks could be fired, prepared projectiles included metal darts and the small lead balls that the Normans called boulettes. Maximum range was about 200 yards. Inside 20 yards, they could kill deer or unarmored men. Nevertheless, slings (and bows, for that matter) were disliked by most aristocratic officers, probably because they were the tools of farmers and goat-herds instead of the tools of heroes.
 

Inscriptions engraved at Delphi record the feats of a family of athletes from Thessaly, in Northern Greece. While the pankratiast named Hagias won thirteen major games, it was his brother Telemachos, the wrestler, who apologized for having accidentally killed an opponent. This suggests that death and crippling injuries were not common during Hellenic wrestling matches. (It also infers that death was not that common during the pankration. After all, Telemachos, who had the steles erected, didn't mention any deaths in association with his brother.)
 

About 335 BCE:
 

During some essays on proper government, Plato describes a utopia called Atlantis. Most people took this story allegorically instead of literally until 1553, when Hernán Cortés' panegyrist Francisco López de Gómara suggested that Plato's Atlantis could have been located in the Americas. Gómara's unsubstantiated musings cause Gregorio García and Diego Durán to speculate that the American Indians descended from the Ten Tribes of Israel. Their leap of faith in turn influenced the mythology of the Pennsylvania Quakers, the Latter Day Saints, and various New Age prophets.
 

335 BCE:
 

Prince Alexander III of Macedon orders his soldiers to shave their faces daily. Ostensibly this was to deny enemies a grip during hand-to-hand combat. Yet, since the Macedonians equated beards with manhood, it was more likely a way for the twenty-year old monarch to assert his authority over his older advisors.
 

About 333 BCE:
 

Prince Alexander III of Macedon cuts an intricate knot tied on the yoke of an ox-cart used to transport Phrygian kings to their weddings. This fulfills a local prophecy and provides Hellenes with the story of the Gordian knot. From a modern perspective, the story also symbolizes the spread of Hellenistic patriarchies into matristic Central Asia, as a common weaving knot is known as a Gordian knot.
 

About 330 BCE:
 

A Hellenic navigator called Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) circumnavigates Britain and talks about the islands lying farther north. Nine centuries later, translations of these reports inspire Irish monks to sail toward the Fairy Islands, or Faeroes, in cockleshell skin boats.
 

The Alexandrian conquests introduce Babylonian and Egyptian astrology into the Hellenic world, and Hellenic astrology into the Indo-Iranian world. Blending the philosophies and religions of these different cultures is behind much of the scholarship of the Hellenistic era.
 

Etruscan bronze statuettes show men wrestling with women. While the men were naked, the women wore thigh-length pleated tunics. Accordingly, the art was probably allegorical rather than erotic.
 

About 324 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the cavalrymen of Alexander the Great begin carrying unit standards. The inspiration was said to be their practice of flying their prisoners' clothes from their lance points. As lance pennons appear on Central Asian art much older than the fourth century CE, the practice was probably borrowed from the Central Asians, who used pennons to give widely-separated riders an indication of their leaders' positions. Their use suggests, however, that Alexandrian battlefields were beginning to sprawl beyond the sound of a hunter's horn, or the control of a single charismatic leader.
 

About 322 BCE:
 

Inspired by the successes of Alexander the Great, a North Indian robber baron called Chandragupta Maurya sets out to conquer India. Like Alexander, with whom he reportedly served for a while, Maurya was wildly successful, and the North Indians, or Aryans, push south of the Ganges for the first time.
 

According to Greek sources, Chandragupta kept an armed female bodyguard. As most subsequent Indian kings viewed women as breeding stock and amusements, and little more, these women may have been sword-dancers. On the other hand, they may have been real. After all, Central Asian women often donned armor and fought alongside men and many kings have found that women and eunuchs make more trustworthy bodyguards than their own scheming brothers. (The Mughuls, for instance, used female archers and eunuchs to defend harems as recently as the sixteenth century.) Finally Chandragupta was a Jainist rather than a Buddhist. Early Buddhists despised women. The Buddhist contempt was due to the North Indian belief that women were impure and loathsome, and had insatiable sexual drives. (Women, it was whispered, even sold their souls to the moon in exchange for the power to enslave men's hearts. Hence the term honeymoon, which refers to the mead men drank to free their minds from the bonds of lust. Buddhist texts featuring the sayings of female saints did not appear until the first century CE, and fundamentalists fought the notion that women might achieve Paradise until the twelfth century. The Jainist philosophy, on the other hand, appeared in Bihar during the sixth century BCE. Unlike Buddhism, encouraged women to hold responsible positions in society. Jainism's most enduring precept is its theory that it was better to conquer that evil that lurked within one's heart than it was to conquer a thousand enemies.
 

321 BCE:
 

During a battle along the Dardanelles, two Hellenistic soldiers named Neoptolemos and Eumenes seek each other out.(note 6) First the two men fought on horseback with their swords. Then they wrestled one another to the ground. Finally, Eumenes won and Neoptolemos died. This is a reminder that despite Roman philosophers' discussions of martial discipline, warfare remained an essentially individual activity in Mediterranean Europe until the mid-seventeenth century and in Southwest Asia and North Africa until the twentieth.
 

About 320 BCE:
 

While fighting the Samnites of Southern Italy, the Romans start dividing their infantry units by age and experience instead of by arms and armor. About the same time, they also started deploying their units in checkerboard patterns known as maniples. While this made it easier for commanders to provide reinforcements, the checkerboard pattern also may have invoked divine assistance. (The Romans, like the Chinese and Indians, commonly used checkerboards for geomantic and divinatory purposes.)
 

About 312 BCE:
 

Roman engineers start construction on the Appian Way. Although this was the first road to be built for the purpose of allowing armies to easily move men and supplies from one end of a country to another, there is evidence to suggest that it generally followed Celtic traders' wagon tracks.
 

About 307 BCE:
 

North Chinese charioteers convert to cavalry mounts. The hardest part of the conversion for many old soldiers was learning to wear trousers instead of robes.
 

About 306 BCE:
 

The Hellenistic king Ptolemy I establishes the Mouseion, or "the place of the Muses" at Alexandria. Ptolemy then stocked the Mouseion with rare texts and talented scholars, and made Alexandria the center of Hellenistic higher learning. There were actually two libraries at Alexandria. The larger was the Brucheum, which was attached to the Museum, and the smaller was the Serapeum, which was attached to a nearby temple dedicated to the god Serapis. According to bibliographies dating to the third century BCE, there were over forty thousand papyrus scrolls stored in the Serapeum and almost half a million scrolls in the Brucheum. As a single edition of the Illiadrequired twenty-four scrolls, complete works were of course fewer. (Bound books date to the first century CE, and were then used to bind popular rather than scholarly works.) As a result, these libraries' resources would have been dwarfed by single wings of modern university research libraries, and rivaled by many metropolitan and suburban libraries. Royal libraries appeared at Rhodes during the third century BCE and at Pergamum during the second century BCE. The latter was the most important rival, mainly because of its easy access to the animal skins needed to make parchment. (Because of shipping costs, only Egyptian texts could be inexpensively printed on papyrus.)
 

304 BCE:
 

Equestrian sports become the rage in Rome. The training ground was called Campus Martius, or "War Plain." While the major meet was held on July 15, during the feast of Castor and Pollux, the start of the racing season was in March, to mark the beginning of the annual campaign season, and ran until October.
 

About 300 BCE:
 

The Koreans introduce South Chinese wet-rice agriculture into Japan, while the Iranians introduce it into Egypt and Syria.
 

People living near Lake Turkana in Northwest Kenya place basalt pillars so that they are aligned with the constellations.
 

About 297 BCE:
 

According to tradition, an Indian vizier named Kautilya writes the Artha Sastra, or "Treatise on Material Gain." Internal evidence, however, suggests that various authors contributed to the text over several centuries. Either way, the Artha Sastra remains one of the first texts to say that kings had a right to wage wars against their peers if all other means of achieving their goals had failed.
 

About 290 BCE:
 

While commenting on the I Ching, the Taoist scholar Chuang-tzu introduces the convention of describing "yin" and "yang" using the adjectives "bright" and "dark" instead of the nouns "weak" and "strong."
 

About 285 BCE:
 

Chinese engineers develop torsion catapults. It took a hundred men to twist the silk ropes to the degree of tension needed to launch 25-pound rocks about 160 yards.
 

The South Indians start using elephants as siege weapons, perhaps because their use constituted an appeal to the elephant-god Ganesha, or more likely because they were large, noisy beasts. The animals' usefulness as battering rams also explains why iron spikes usually studded the gates leading into Indian towns and forts.
 

281 BCE:
 

The Roman Republic becomes the first government to issue its soldiers with weapons, shields, and helmets from central stores. This largess was forced by military necessity, for if the Romans' new system of maniples and centuries was to work, then its members had to be equipped similarly. Nevertheless, body armor remained an individually acquired item. Accordingly, it was worn mainly by veteran soldiers or rich men.
 

280 BCE:
 

A Hellenistic king called Pyrrhos of Epeirus introduces war elephants into Italy. Despite Pyrrhos' notoriously costly victories, his war elephants impressed Carthaginian observers and as a result the Carthaginian military replaced its war chariots with African forest elephants about 262 BCE. As elephants were becoming extinct in Morocco and were expensive to obtain from India, the animals do not figure in European warfare after Hannibal's defeat in 168 BCE.
 

279 BCE:
 

Twenty thousand Baltic Celts occupy the area around modern Ankara. This causes the Greeks to start calling the region the kingdom of the Gauls, or Galatia.
 

About 275 BCE:
 

The Romans start habitually fortifying their military encampments at the end of the day's march. This made their camps more resistant to surprise attacks and gave their inhabitants a refuge following defeats. This was not the Romans' own idea, but one they borrowed from King Pyrrhos of Epeirus. Nevertheless, the Romans learned the lesson well, and it became a key to success for an army that was expected to win despite the incompetence of its leaders.
 

About 270 BCE:
 

Chinese scholars describe matter in terms of the Five Configurations (wu hsing). These elements included wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and may show Hellenistic influence via India. The appearance of this cosmology in Sun Tzu is part of the reason that many non-Chinese scholars think that Sun Bin actually wrote -- or at least extensively revised -- the text.
 

About 265 BCE:
 

The Romans introduce mail armor. Since the adopted this practice from their Gallic mercenaries, historians' tales about the Gauls' heroic nudity are exaggerated. The source the story is probably Plutarch, writing about 101 BCE: "These barbarians were contemptuous of the Romans and so eager to harass them that they faced snowstorms dressed in light clothing, more to show their endurance and fortitude than because it was necessary."
 

About 263 BCE:
 

Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, dies. (The word "Stoic" means "Portico," and refers to the Painted Portico in Athens where Zeno had taught.) The Stoic school taught that human beings were souls burdened with a corpse, and that they could free their souls from worldly passions and fears by strictly, almost savagely, disciplining their bodies. The philosophy was popular with middle and working class athletes. Also, with the support of the Caesar Marcus Aurelius, who had been a wrestler in his youth, it became an unofficial state religion of the Roman Empire during the second century CE. A similar muscular athleticism also appeared in Europe and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 

About 260 BCE:
 

The Hellenistic philosopher known as Aristarchus of Samos publishes On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. This text denied the Babylonian theory that the earth, sun, moon, and the five known planets all revolved in uniform circles around a central fire in the heavens. Instead, it presented a geocentric model that dominated Western thought for the next 1700 years.
 

260 BCE:
 

A particularly bloody victory over Kalinga (in modern Orissa) causes a Brahman emperor named Ashoka to convert to Buddhism, and renounce his demonic conquests (that is, wars for gain rather than necessity). While this conversion reportedly reduced the violence of North Indian warfare, it also retarded the advancement of Indian science and technology, as the early Buddhists held both astrology and alchemy in contempt.
 

About 255 BCE:
 

The Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Old Testament, is translated into Greek at Alexandria. (Alexandria had more Jewish residents than any other city in the Hellenistic world, and the best educated probably spoke and read Greek rather than Aramaic or Hebrew.)
 

About 250 BCE:
 

The Chinese start making cast-iron weapons. That said, iron swords were outrageously expensive until the first century CE, when a man called Tu Shih invented a water-powered bellows for the purpose of smelting metals. Furthermore, Tu's forge must have remained a closely guarded secret, as similar water-powered forges do not appear in Europe until the Swedes independently invented them around 1340.
 

Copper and bronze artifacts appear in Indonesia.
 

About 246 BCE:
 

As part of a memorial for a deceased patrician named Junius Brutus Pera, three pairs of slaves are made to fence with one another in the Roman cattle market. The spectacle makes this funeral famous, and soon has other Roman patricians clamoring after their own bustiarii, or "funeral men." While many modern historians believe this Roman morbidity had Etruscan roots (evidently the Etruscans thought that blood ensured the earth's fertility), so little is known about Etruscan society that this remains unproved. My own speculation is that it was something created by bored rich men. In Northwest Coastal Indian terms, it was a potlatch. That is, the wealthy Romans squandered their money and slaves simply to raise their social standing. (The cost could be breath taking, too. In 174 BCE, for instance, 74 men fought for three days to honor the father of Titus Flaminius.) Although some early Imperial gladiators were freemen, early gladiators were usually slaves. The sport was uncommon until the first century BCE, when schools were established in Capua and other Campanian towns. As trainers at these schools included retired gladiators, the suspicion arises that Hollywood showed more gladiators dying during any of a dozen forgettable movies than actually died throughout the entire Roman period. (note 7) Gladiators were in great demand as bodyguards for rich men, and professionals fought wild animals more often than they fought one another. (Christian propaganda notwithstanding, the animals the gladiators fought were probably bears or bulls instead of lions, as captive African lions are notoriously reluctant about attacking people they don't know. Witness, for example, the debacle in Jakarta, Indonesia, in September 1966, where a lion refused to attack a modern gladiator named Bandot Lahardo despite being goaded by armed officials. A bull, on the other hand, was not so reluctant, and gored Lahardo badly before being driven into a cage.)
 

About 245 BCE:
 

Successful Hellenistic generals start replacing their infantry phalanxes with armies combining cavalry and infantry. In the seventeenth century, descriptions of these post-Alexandrian armies helped define modern European military professionalism.
 

About 235 BCE:
 

Hellenistic scholars start analyzing the Illiad and the Odyssey for the purpose of removing post-Homeric additions and changes. The result is the creation of the literary sciences known as philology, grammar, and critical analysis. Third century Hellenistic literary critics included Aristarchus of Samothrace, who had once managed a wrestling school.
 

228 BCE:
 

Following the establishment of diplomatic contacts with Corinth, the Romans begin participating in the Isthmian Games. The promoters of the Circus Maximus introduce Hellenic athletes into Rome in 186 BCE, and essentially move the Olympics from Elis to Rome in 80 BCE. The nudity of the Greek athletes offended Imperial audiences, however, and even clothed their antics never impressed the Imperial crowds as much as animal fights.
 

222 BCE:
 

A North Chinese conqueror known as King Cheng of Ch'in makes himself the Shih Huang-ti emperor, or the First August Sovereign of a unified China. The name "China" is a corruption of the name of this conqueror's home province.
 

About 220 BCE:
 

Chinese priests begin writing their thoughts on silk using ink and brushes instead of using styluses to engrave them on wood, bamboo, or metal. This changed the flow of their ideograms, and led them toward the realization that calligraphers' brushes can be mightier than warriors' swords.
 

About 217 BCE:
 

Following a string of spectacular Carthaginian victories, the Libyan soldiers serving under the Carthaginian general Hannibal start wearing captured Roman armor. Nevertheless, Hannibal's Gallic and Celt-Iberian soldiers continued to fight stripped to the waist, perhaps as a means of showing contempt for death. At any rate, this bare-chestedness was probably what the Romans meant when they described their foes as fighting naked, as even in Latin, there is a considerable difference between fighting "naked" and fighting "stark naked." (Support for this theory, by the way, includes the Victorian and Wilhelmian descriptions of Japanese and Indian wrestlers, who are invariably described as "naked," when every indication is that the wrestlers actually wore loincloths.)
 

Chinese monks begin studying Indian Buddhism, probably in the hope that it would help them exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons. (While Chinese interest in Indian astronomy and medicine provides an alternative explanation, the first famous scholar to convert to Buddhism was Yen Fou-tiao, who converted in 189 CE. Hence my conviction that the original uses involved folk religion rather than philosophy and science.)

216 BCE:
 

King Ptolemy IV of Egypt sends his best pankratiast, a man named Aristonikos, to the Olympic Games. His goal was to show Egypt's superiority over Greece. To the Greeks' satisfaction, the Theban pankratiast Kleitomachos ultimately prevails. And how did he do this? Not by outfighting the Egyptian, but by appealing to the patriotism of the ethnically Greek officials and crowd. This is a reminder that neither the use of athletics for political purposes nor biased officiating are anything new.
 

About 210 BCE:
 

The oldest surviving Chinese map is made for the Shih Huang-ti emperor. As it was made to a scale of 1:170,000, and used standardized symbols, this implies a previous cartographic tradition.
 

About 209 BCE:
 

Work stops on the underground mausoleum of the Chinese Shih Huang-ti emperor. When Chinese archaeologists excavated it during the 1970s, inside they found 20 horse-drawn chariots, 29 saddled cavalry mounts, 1,400 terra-cotta warriors, and 10,000 bronze weapons. The Chinese war chariots were painted black, and pulled by four horses. While commanders' chariots had roofs that festooned with bells and drums, battle chariots went topless, probably to facilitate archery. There were sixteen chariots in a company, and four companies in a battalion. Each chariot had four men riding inside and eight infantrymen running alongside. Charioteers' weapons included self-bows, lances, and battle-axes. Some nearby guardian figures stand in what appear to be boxing postures. As boxing is unlikely on the battlefield, perhaps they were men employed to carry shields or calm horses. The Imperial cavalrymen rode in squadrons of 48. Two squadrons made a troop. Their horses' manes were shaved and their tails were knotted. Having saddles, bits, and bridles, but lacking stirrups, the Chinese cavalrymen used crossbows instead of lances or swords. This meant that they had to stop to reload, as their weapons were cocked by putting the feet on the bow on either side of the stock and pulling the string up with both hands. The Chinese infantry were divided into units attached to the chariots and units that were not. However, the equipment and formations used by both groups were similar. Officers carried swords while non-commissioned officers carried halberds. Common soldiers in the front and the flanks carried crossbows or polearms. Soldiers in the rear carried axes and two-handed swords. All groups carried crescent knives for self-defense and cutting meat and kindling. Field-grade officers and generals wore long coats of plate armor painted against rust and linked together with linen cords. (The armor plates above the waist were fixed, while the plates below the waist and at the shoulders were moveable.) Company grade officers wore shorter coats of plate armor. Non-commissioned officers sometimes wore armor, but usually wore heavily padded fabric coats instead. Rank was shown by distinctive headgear as well as armor. Soft caps were worn on the march or in garrison, while helmets were worn in the field.
 

209 BCE:
 

A Roman proconsul called Publius Cornelius Scipio takes the Iberian seaport of Carthago Nova (Cartagena) from the Phoenicians. He then orders its Celt-Iberian smiths to teach their steel-quenching techniques to the Romans, who, like the Chinese, were better at working bronze than steel. (The Phoenician steel-making techniques were good enough that the Romans rarely duplicated them, and modern mills have a hard time improving on them.) According to the Greek historian Polybius, Scipio's metallurgical interests also caused the development of the gladius hispaniensis, the Romans' famous double-edged stabbing sword. (Previously the Romans had used blunt-tipped chopping swords called ensis.) Archaeological evidence, on the other hand, suggests that Iberian mercenaries introduced short stabbing swords to the Romans several decades earlier.
 

About 208 BCE:
 

According to tradition, the theft of a North Vietnamese king's magic crossbow trigger causes his kingdom to fall to the Chinese. But the process of Chinese expansion into North Vietnam had begun decades earlier. Therefore this story is more likely a reminder of the difficulties the Vietnamese had in trying to replicate the precision-made bronze crossbow triggers used by the Chinese.
 

202 BCE:
 

During the unrest following the First Emperor's death, a Western Chinese general known as Liu Pang accepts the Mandate of Heaven, and establishes himself as the first Former Han emperor. (note 8) This is the first stable Chinese national government, and Liu Pang's descendants rule China from their capital at Ch'ang-an until the first century CE, when a rebellion forces them to move their capital to Lo-yang. Therefore the Han Dynasty is probably analogous to Rome, while the First Emperor is analogous to Alexander the Great.
 

About 200 BCE:
 

Thumb rings appear in Central Asia. (In the so-called Mongol hold, one locks the thumb to the right side of the string and locks it into place with the index finger. The arrow, meanwhile, is held between the thumb and upper joint of the index finger. Thus the rings, which allowed archers to pull their strings without chafing their skin.) Using thumb rings, skilled archers could shoot five 18-inch shafts in three seconds in return for reduced range and accuracy. The Han cavalryman Li Kuang, who flourished between 166 and 137 BCE, repeatedly shattered Hsiung-nu attacks by having his cavalrymen dismount, lie down behind their horses, and then release their crossbow bolts when the enemy got to with twenty or thirty yards. In other words, while mounted troopers preferred rapid fire, dismounted soldiers were better served by aimed fire. Still, relying on good shooting required well-trained and disciplined soldiers. Lacking these, most Chinese generals preferred shooting back from long range to risking all on good archery.
 

North Indian texts describe the magical power of war drumming. According to these texts, when the best bull-hide drums were beaten on one side, enemies were put to flight, while when they were beaten on the other, the same enemies were turned into friends.
 

The Hellenistic philosopher called Bolos of Mendes writes The Physical and the Mystical, the oldest surviving alchemical text.
 

The Rosetta Stone, a trilingual reiteration of the Ptolemaic tax laws applicable to temples, is made in Egypt. It probably stood near a temple gate to remind revenue agents that church property was exempt from taxation.
 

Second century BCE:
 

So that they can make stronger infantry shields, the Romans develop plywood. This infers the development of fairly sophisticated animal glues.
 

200 BCE:
 

The ninety-fifth Olympics introduce pankration for boys. (When calculating dates by Olympiads, remember that the first one doesn't count.) The winner was a youth named Phaidimos of Troas.
 

About 190 BCE:
 

Alchemical research becomes popular in Alexandria.
 

186 BCE:
 

Hellenistic professional athleticism comes to Rome. This was probably part of an aristocratic lust for novelty, as freak shows, animal acts, and orgiastic entertainments featuring the killing of condemned criminals entered Rome almost simultaneously.
 

168 BCE:
 

Following some important German victories, the Romans experiment with decimating units that have embarrassed themselves through flight. (That means that they executed every tenth man.) However, the Romans soon find the practice counterproductive and subsequently settle for flogging shirkers and dishonorably discharging deserters.
 

166 BCE:
 

Fueled by rural resentment and sparked by the installation of statues of Zeus in Jerusalem, Judas Maccabaeus starts a guerrilla war in Palestine. Within two years Jerusalem is freed from Seleucid rule. However, the Jewish victory, which is commemorated by the festival of Hanukkah, owed more to simultaneous tax revolts in Syria and Iran than to any particular military successes on the part of the Maccabees. Religious texts dated to this era include Enoch, Jubilees, and the Book of Daniel.
 

165 BCE:
 

A new stage play by the Roman dramatist Terence is upstaged by a rope-dancer and a boxing match. Undaunted, Terence unveils an improved version five years later, and is again upstaged by the announcement that the boxers were about to begin. This is a reminder that Roman boxing and wrestling were as much theatrical acts as combative sports.
 

About 140 BCE:
 

Paper is invented in Northwest China. At first it was used mostly as a packing material, but according to legend around 105 CE the Chinese began using it as writing material when a eunuch called Tsai Lun convinced the emperor that paper made an inexpensive and lightweight substitute for bamboo leaves and metal plates.
 

Hellenistic mathematicians begin dividing circles into 360 parts. This development has been attributed to a Rhodian astrologer named Hipparchus of Nicea, who is also remembered for creating a star catalog that greatly influenced the Alexandrian astrologer Claudius Ptolemy. However, the influence of Iranian astrologers, or magi, is apparent, as Babylonian horoscopes had always been cast using circles divided into 360 parts.
 

139 BCE:
 

Praetor Cornelius Scipio Hispanus bans Chaldean astrologers from Rome, "since by their lies and by a false interpretation of the stars, they bewildered weak and foolish minds for their own profits." In other words, they caused unrest among the socially disadvantaged by suggesting alternative futures.
 

134 BCE:
 

The katapeltes, or tripod-mounted crossbows, of the Roman Republic are described as throwing 1-pound metal arrows for a distance of about 300 yards. Meanwhile, the largest Roman catapults, or onagers, were throwing rocks weighing 150 pounds for similar distances. Nevertheless, these extremes do not tell us what the maximum effective range was. (Maximum range is the greatest distance to which a projectile can be propelled under ideal conditions. On the other hand, maximum effective range is the greatest distance to which a projectile can be propelled under normal conditions while still causing significant damage to its target. Maximum range is of interest mainly to gamblers, while maximum effective range is of more interest to soldiers.)
 

128-119 BCE:
 

China's Former Han Wu-Ti ("Martial Ruler") emperor sends his cavalrymen on a series of annual raids into Central Asia. The objective of these raids was partly to forestall similar raids by the Central Asians, and mainly to steal good horses from the Turks. The Wu-Ti emperor is also remembered for creating huge stud farms throughout China, and introducing a centralized bureaucracy staffed by civil servants selected on their ability to pass standardized tests rather than their political connections.
 

126 BCE:
 

A Chinese diplomat named Chang Ch'ien introduces Mediterranean wine grapes to the Former Han Imperial court.
 

122 BCE:
 

An Liu, a Turkish grandson of the Former Han emperor, is whisked to Heaven after imbibing too much of a Taoist elixir of life. Since Taoist elixirs tended to include high concentrations of mercury, the prince's death is hardly surprising, and it is mentioned mainly as a reminder that tea, whiskey, and black powder were all developed by occult Taoists searching for ways of extending human life.
 

About 110 BCE:
 

The Chinese perfect the horse collar, which makes plowing using animal power practical for the first time. Still, deep plowing was not truly practical until the sixth century CE, when the Slavs invented iron-tipped moldboard plows.
 

About 107 BCE:
 

A string of military defeats at the hands of the patrilineal Gauls causes the Roman Senate to replace the Roman army's Goddess totems with the more manly eagles of Hercules.
 

105 BCE:
 

To show recruits exactly what happened on battlefields, the Roman governors of Pavia, Italy, introduce public gladiatorial matches. That these matches were not intended to be recreational (ludii) is indicated by their name, munera, which means "spectacles." More important military innovations dating to this era include the development of lightweight javelins called pilum. The thin iron heads of these weapons were attached to their wooden shafts using brittle rivet. That way when they struck the ground they broke, which in turn meant that they could not be thrown back. And if they stuck in a shield, they left their long iron heads sticking out. These made shields unwieldy, and encouraged shield-bearers to throw them away. This in turn made the now unprotected infantry extremely vulnerable to additional javelins or sword thrusts. This latter innovation is attributed to a Roman general named Gaius Marius.
 

102 BCE:
 

Turkish merchants introduce Chinese silk into Europe. By the first century CE, silk joins African ivory, Arabian incense, Baltic amber, and Indian spices on Imperial Rome's list of "essential luxuries."
 

First century BCE:
 

The Syrians introduce rigid camel saddles. These transferred the weight of the load to the animals' ribs without causing the animals too much discomfort, which in turn made camels highly practical archery platforms. About the same time, North Indians begin hanging leather toe loops from their horse saddles. South American gauchos used similar toe loops instead of stirrups from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. Their advantage was that they allowed a rider to mount and dismount faster, and also to use wooden spurs instead of a quirt, thus freeing his hands for archery, lancing, and roping. (Ropes were attached to horses' tails, and then looped and thrown underhand to ensnare their target's legs.) Years of riding like this, says historian Richard Slatta, deformed the toes, and made "walking difficult, not to mention undignified." On the other hand, in the saddle, such a man "was a centaur to be reckoned with."
 

The Moche culture achieves military control over the fertile valleys of coastal northern Peru. The Moche had a powerful central government that was at its peak in the fifth century CE. Moche engineers constructed large valley-neck irrigation canals, and Moche farmers irrigated their fields using guano collected from coastal islands. Moche architects designed some of the largest adobe structures in pre-Columbian America. (One structure known as the Pyramid of the Sun contained more than 140 million bricks and stood over 130 feet high.) Moche iconographic art often showed men brandishing knives and severing human heads. Moche warriors wore shirts and helmets decorated with coats-of-arms, and carried maces, javelins, and square shields. The Moches' enemies probably included the Recuay people of the Peruvian highlands. Recuay ceramics show men with square shields leading llamas and other men wrestling.
 

About 100 BCE:
 

Chinese monks describe tea as a possible elixir of immortality. Tealeaves were originally eaten rather than brewed. The bitter flavor caused tea to be used mostly for esoteric purposes until the sixth century, when monks began putting tealeaves into water and then boiling them. Merchants gradually spread the practice of brewing tea into India and Iran, and from there it moved to Europe during the eighteenth century.
 

The world's oldest surviving astronomical observatory is constructed near Athens. The patron was a man named Andronichus of Cyrrhus.
 

Belgic Gauls displace the Neolithic Britons living along the Southern Thames. Their descendants then lost to Julius Caesar in 54 BCE.
 

About 80 BCE:
 

A large amphitheater is built at Pompeii. Awnings were placed over it to protect audiences from the sun, and refreshment booths were placed outside its gates. While theatricals, boxing matches, and wild animal shows were all held there, the boxing matches and animal shows were more popular than the theatricals. Perhaps this was because the actors could not match their audiences' demands for scantily clad women riding horses, or criminals being ripped apart by bears.
 

74 BCE:
 

Greek assassins are reported blackening their faces with soot before perpetrating their pre-dawn murders.
 

73 BCE:
 

About seventy gladiators flee a training camp at Capua and establish a defensible position at the base on Mount Vesuvius. The runaways' original weapons were kitchen utensils, axes, and spits. Along the way, they seized better weapons from traveling merchants, and made some fire-hardened spears and hide-and-wicker shields. With these weapons, they started raiding local estates. Excited by the thought of plunder and freedom, agricultural slaves and disaffected herdsmen flocked to their standards. The local garrison is sent to stop these outrages. The former slaves defeat it. The following spring, four legions come down from Rome to put down the rebellion. They too are defeated. So in the autumn of 72, the future triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus takes ten legions and marches south. Although incompetently led -- Crassus was a far better politician than field commander -- numbers told, and six thousand rebels were captured and crucified after the battle of Lucania in the spring of 71. Rebel leaders included the Thracian gladiator Spartacus and the Gallic gladiators Crixus and Oenomaus. However, their leadership was more nominal than real. Says historian Keith Bradley: "The growth of the rebel movement was not a deliberately contrived or carefully orchestrated phenomenon." Instead, it was "an example on the grand scale of traditional patterns of flight and revolt."
 

70 BCE:
 

Hellenistic astrologers create Babylonian-style horoscopes based on the exact day and hour of birth. Of course, too much should not be made of this newfound precision. In a world without time zones or mechanical timekeepers, most people were lucky to know the year of their birth, let alone the exact day and hour. Therefore one suspects that astrologers were simply identifying auspicious times using previously published tables, then claiming that their patron was born during one that matched his or her personality.
 

67 BCE:
 

Roman laws reserve the first fourteen rows of public arenas for aristocrats.
 

About 65 BCE:
 

Syrians introduce dromedary camels into Egypt.
 

63 BCE:
 

Julius Caesar orders the construction of a gladiatorial barracks at Capua housing 5,000 men, and a year later, makes gladiatorial spectacles a routine part of Roman secular festivals. Plutarch wrote that 320 gladiators participated in these spectacles of Caesar's. Some seem to have been aristocrats protesting new tax laws. Why would rich men voluntarily accept such risk just to protest new taxes? One reason, says historian Carlin Barton, is that the later Republican and early Imperial Romans viewed noble suicides as an extraordinarily honorable response to a bad situation. And another, says Barton, was that the Romans believed that gladiators lived free from all moral restraints, and were therefore able to do whatever they liked while they lived. Therefore they were very popular sexual partners, and partied like kings.
 

53 BCE:
 

Outside Harran, in Eastern Anatolia, a Parthian army shooting arrows from long range and resupplying itself using camel caravans destroys a Roman army of 39,000 men. As Roman mercenary cavalry did not routinely shoot arrows from horseback until the fourth century CE, it is not entirely clear whether the Parthian soldiery was true cavalry using heavy compound bows, toe loops, and saddles, or whether it was simply mounted infantry using horses as battle taxis.
 

About 50 BCE:
 

Indian physicians begin the Ayur Veda ("Life Science"). This text, which forms the basis for most subsequent South Asian medicine, was an appendix to the Atharva Veda ("The Wisdom of Atharvan"). It is part of a collection of magical incantations traditionally dated to the early first millennium BCE.
 

47 BCE:
 

Julius Caesar utters the telegraphic veni, vedi, veci ("came, saw, conquered") to commemorate his army's easy victory over King Pharnaces II of Pontus, a kingdom in Asia Minor. This slogan is later made into a sign, mounted on a decorated wagon, and paraded through Rome as proof of the speed with which Julius Caesar had defeated his rivals.
 

38 BCE:
 

The Roman government bans aristocrats from voluntarily serving as gladiators. Why did Roman aristocrats volunteer to enter the arena? According to contemporaries, it was a combination of pride and lust. The lust involved the licentious lifestyle allowed the gladiators, while the pride involved the aristocrats' desire to protest a political system that promoted sycophants rather than men who would speak their minds.
 

37 BCE:
 

The Koguryo Kingdom is established in Northern Korea. Koguryo is notable as the first Korean kingdom whose aristocracy did not engage in any productive activities except training for war. That martial instruction would have included dance and metaphysical training, as performing oracle-bone divination and thanksgiving rites correctly were among the most important royal duties.
 

31 BCE:
 

A stone stele erected near Tres Zapotes, Mexico records the earliest archaeologically verifiable date in the Americas.
 

23 BCE:
 

According to the eighth century Chronicles of Japan, the Emperor Suinin watches a sumo match between two commoners. This match sounds more like a brawl than a well-regulated event, for it only ended after a hero named Sukune-no-Nomi kicked a bully called Taima-no-Kehaya in hip, knocking him down, and then proceeded to kick him to death. The dating is also suspect, as most Asian societies practiced wrestling well before the first century BCE. Furthermore, the event itself is suspect as Sukune is better remembered as Japan's first important puppeteer, and while puppet plays and martial arts share a long history, that does not make what the puppeteers said happened in the past true. At any rate, it is likely that early Japanese wrestling was more like modern Korean ssirum than modern Japanese karate.
 

22 BCE:
 

Before leaving Rome for a tour of his eastern provinces, Octavian, the Augustus Caesar, prohibits private citizens from using gladiators as bodyguards, and makes the Imperial Guard the only paramilitary force allowed inside the Roman city limits. The Grand One was equally careful to avoid the knives of friends, too, such as had killed his Uncle Julius back in 44 BCE. Therefore he always went about with a mail shirt and his own knife under his tunic.
 

About 19 BCE:
 

The Roman poet Virgilius publishes The Aeneid. This Latin epic followed Aeneas, a Trojan soldier who survived the Trojan War to become a leading citizen of Rome. The text provided the Mediterranean world with its first graphic descriptions of the Land of the Dead. These descriptions greatly influenced early Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Saint Augustine, and through them, the medieval Christian views of Heaven and Hell.
 

4 BCE:
 

King Herod the Elder dies in Judea, an event that marks the latest possible date for the birth of Jesus Christ. Christ's birth was probably not in late December, either, as a sensible tax collector scheduled a census for spring rather than mid-winter. (Actually, the December date was only chosen in 354 CE, when Latin churchmen decided to usurp the winter solstice festivals of the god Mithra.) Still, none of this negates the historical veracity of Jesus. After all, Pontius Pilate governed Judea from 29-31 CE, and the Byzantines were saying as late as the ninth century that the nativity occurred 318 years before Constantinius's conversion to Christianity in 313.
 

First century CE:
 

Folding single-edged knives become common in Palestine. As these short-bladed weapons were popular with assassins and thieves, they became known in Latin as sica, or "murderers." Accordingly, they have been suggested as the source of Judas Iscariot's nickname. An even likelier source for the nickname, which was popular with Zealots, is the Semitic word 'askar, or "soldier."

Exposure to Iranian and Roman philosophy causes Indian Buddhism to fragment into the Theraveda and the Mahayana schools. Theraveda priests taught that they could bring only a few disciples to enlightenment during a single lifetime. On the other hand, Mahayana priests taught that compassionate, semi-divine saviors known as bodhisattvas could enlighten many. Hence the names, which mean "Teachings of the Elders" and "The Greater Vehicle (to Salvation)." The division is mentioned because many subsequent writers have credited Mahayana monks with establishing the first Buddhist martial arts.
 

Mail armor spreads eastward from the Ukraine toward Manchuria. While heavy -- vests weighed about 15 pounds, while shirts weighed about 40 -- and expensive (they cost as much as a good horse), they were popular because they were impervious to arrows shot from beyond 30 feet, or to most lance thrusts. Asstirrups were not yet in common use, the weight of the horse was not routinely added to the power of the thrust. This said, savage bits and stout four-cornered saddles still gave riders stable platforms from which to throw javelins or swing swords.
 

Bantu-speaking Central Africans move their cattle toward South Africa. The Central Africans and their cattle reached the Zambezi River by the second century and the more hospitable Transvaal and Eastern Cape regions by the fourth or fifth centuries. The African migration appears to have been relatively non-violent, and precipitated mainly by the pressures of rapidly growing populations.
 

9:
 

The loss of three legions in Germany ends Augustus Caesar's plans for conquering Europe between the Rhine and the Elbe Rivers. The German victory also causes the Romans to develop their first lamellar, or scale, body armors (the ones seen in all the movies). The reason was that scale armor was cheaper than mail armor.
 

18-27:
 

A peasant rebellion rocks Shantung Province and leads to the collapse of the Hsin Dynasty and the creation of the Later Han Dynasty. This unrest (called the Red Eyebrow Rebellion after its members' practice of painting their eye brows blood red) was led by a woman who claimed to speak with the voice of the local gods. Strictly speaking, this was a case of spirit-possession rather than shamanism. Still, it clearly was not Taoism, as Terence Dukes and other modern martial art writers have claimed.
 

21:
 

The first (and only) emperor of China's Hsin Dynasty decrees that his officials wear color-coded caps, gowns, and sashes. Bureaucrats wore red, soldiers wore black, scholars wore green, and novices wore white, which were all colors having great symbolic value. (Contemporary military totems included a blue dragon in the east, a red phoenix in the south, a white tiger in the west, and a black warrior in the north.) Asian alchemists and musicians used similar color codes to show their students' progress toward perfection, and around the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese judo teachers introduced analogous color schemes, first as a way of showing progress, then as a way of facilitating tournament play.
 

41:
 

Later Han soldiers under the command of the Shensi aristocrat Ma Yüan kill a Vietnamese feudal lord living near Tonkin and publicly rape his wife and sister-in-law. These rapes may have bee official acts, as, from the Han perspective, they would have demonstrated the superiority of Chinese patrilineage over Vietnamese matrilineage. On the other hand, they could have been individual acts, as the Chinese did not consider rape a public crime until 1983. Either way, the outrage causes the two women, named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, to incite a Vietnamese rebellion. This rebellion in turn introduces the Chinese to the giant bronze drums that the Vietnamese mountaineers used to transmit military information and provides a favorite subject for Vietnamese stage and puppet plays.
 

About 45:
 

The Roman military starts issuing iron helmets to first-line units. Bronze helmets remained common in second-line units for another century. The reason was the expense and difficulty of working iron: in general, a competent craftsman was doing well to make six helmets a month.
 

About 49:
 

Saint Paul introduces the Christian doctrine of peace and love to the people of Philipi, in Greek Macedonia. In these accounts, which appeared before the Jewish War of 66-70, no one viewed Jesus as a dangerous Galilean revolutionary, and few knew more than "a few sayings of the Lord."
 

About 50:
 

As Germanic mercenaries begin replacing Iberians in Roman service, four-foot long single-edged swords of Germanic design begin replacing two-foot long double-edged swords of Iberian design. The Romans called these Germanic weapons spatha, which subsequently provides the root for several modern words including spade (in the card-playing sense) and the fencing term "epée."
 

52:
 

According to Suetonius, 15,000 gladiators preparing for a mock sea-battle in a flooded arena greeted Caesar Claudius with the cry, "Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you!" In this spectacular, Claudius played editor, the man who got to point his thumb up, and condemn the defeated gladiator to death, or turn his thumb down, and allow him to remain alive awhile longer. And, said Seneca, the crowd was rough, crying, "Kill him, beat him, burn him! Why does he run on the steel so timidly? Why does he slay with so little verve? Why is he such a Scrooge about dying?" So why did the gladiators, most of whom were prisoners, fight? Because the alternative was something even nastier, such as public crucifixion.
 

About 55:
 

The Roman Caesar Nero introduces his notorious Youth Games, which featured, in the words of the historian Tacitus, "performances by naked degenerates sorted by age and vice." The degeneracy to which Tacitus referred included sword fights between women. The obscenities he described included bare-legged women and the giant phalli that mimes often wore. This said, Nero's cult of himself as the Savior of Mankind is far more important for posterity, as it encouraged the spread of monotheism throughout the Roman Empire.
 

About 60:
 

When a British queen named Boudicca refuses to pay taxes to the Romans, a Roman official has the woman flogged and her daughters raped. The outraged Celts retaliate by killing tens of thousands of Romanized Britons living in what is today Norfolk and Suffolk, and burning the Roman capitol at Londoninium. When this rebellion is rediscovered through translation in the sixteenth century, it causes Boadica's chariot, as the translators called it, to become an integral part of Elizabethan English nationalism. As for the unfortunate first century queen, she and her daughters committed suicide near Epping Upland after the Romans slaughtered the British men in battle.
 

About 65:
 

Probably because the Buddhists promised immortality, some influential members of the Later Han Imperial court convert to Buddhism. Buddhist sutras written in Chinese appear immediately afterwards.
 

In a text called Han Shu, or "the Book of the Han," a Chinese scholar named Pan Kuo mentions something called chi chi hsiu, or "skillful striking." This is sometimes claimed as a reference to an otherwise unknown form of Chinese boxing. However, the allusion is more likely to the engraved daggers that the Chinese government awarded to generals who defeated the horse peoples of Central Asia.
 

66:
 

Jewish social bandits lead a millenarian revolt against the Roman government of Palestine. During the early stages of the revolt, a terrorist organization known as the Sicarii, in reference to their curved knives, captures a Herodian fortress called Masada. The Romans respond with force, and when the fortress finally falls to Flavius Silva's Tenth Legion in 73, all of its defenders except two women and five children commit suicide rather than suffer the ignominy of defeat or surrender. The story is later made a cornerstone of modern Zionism.
 

About 67:
 

The Roman Caesar Nero orders a new gate built in Rome to commemorate his athletic victories in Greece. Errors in Edwardian scholarship attribute Nero's act to ancient Greek practice, and make it part of modern Olympic lore.
 

About 68:
 

According to a seventh century tradition, Christianity appears in Iran. However, this is unproved. For one thing, he first Gospel, that of Saint Mark, was still unpublished. For another, the persecutions that supposedly drove the Christians into Iran are more descriptive of the fourth century than the first.
 

About 70:
 

Written accounts of the life of Jesus Christ appear in Palestine. These were probably designed to distinguish the Christians from other eschatological Jewish sects. For instance, Saint Mark, the first of these Gospel writers, was always careful to show Jesus rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar's, and unto God what was God's.
 

About 75:
 

Gujarati merchants introduce Shaivism into Java.
 

About 80:
 

Toward attracting Gentiles to Christianity, Saint Matthew adds details such as the Virgin Birth and the Slaughter of the Infants to the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He also diverges from Mark by making the Pharisees Jesus' chief opponents, and having Pontius Pilate, who was by all accounts a cruel governor, wash his hands of Jesus' death.
 

83:
 

A Han Dynasty geomancer describes how to fix a piece of magnetite to a strip of wood and float it in water for the purpose of finding south. By the eighth century, Turkish merchants were using magnetized needles suspended from silken threads to help with overland navigation. By 1050, Southern Sung sailors were using magnetized needles to help with maritime navigation. Around 1190, an English monk living in France described how European sailors were using gimbal-mounted lodestones to help them with maritime navigation. By the thirteenth century, the Arabs and Indians were using magnetic compasses at sea, too. The pattern of transmission suggests that while the Europeans may have gotten the idea from Seljuq Turk or Byzantine merchants, they probably developed maritime compasses on their own.
 

About 90:
 

Saint Luke writes the first Christian Gospel to specifically state that the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven were open to Gentiles as well as Jews.
 

90:
 

Roman entrepreneurs introduce gladiatorial battles between dwarves. Similar midget acts remained popular in circuses and professional wrestling rings for the next nineteen hundred years.
 

95:
 

Saint John the Divine is banished to Patmos (an island off the coast of Turkey). While there, he writes the apocalyptic Book of Revelations.
 

97:
 

After learning just how strong the Rome of Trajan was, the Chinese cavalryman Kan Ying wisely refrains from attacking Roman Antioch. Otherwise, Kan and his master, the general Pan Ch'ao, were successful in ensuring Later Han control over the entire length of the Silk Road. The Chinese control of the route explains how Buddhism traveled from India to China, and how Han Dynasty silk traveled to Europe.
 

About 98:
 

The Roman writer Tacitus reports that German priests forecast the outcome of upcoming engagements by comparing the strength of the two sides' war-chants. Warriors amplified their chants by shouting into their shields while clashing their weapons against them. Sixteenth century English playwrights called this sound "swashbuckling," and it was especially useful against cavalry attacks, as they badly scared the horses. These German war cries are probably comparable to the three energy-shouts, or kiai, described by the mid-seventeenth century Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in his Book of Five Rings. The samurai also placed similar value in the snap of a bowstring, saying that you could tell whether the archer was good or bad just by listening to that sound. Still, stories about these Japanese energy-shouts being powerful enough to kill are fanciful. The loudest unamplified human sound recorded is around 128 decibels, which is a bit below the sound levels (130 decibels) commonly reached at rock concerts and far below the lethal threshold of 192 decibels.
 

Second century:
 

Indian Buddhists are encouraged to "avoid all contact with evil or cruel persons who brutally practice . . . the arts of boxing, wrestling, and nata." Nata is, literally, "dancing." However, in some of the more violent dances, the dancers go through choreographed battles against invisible demons. Terence Dukes has suggested that nata, known as tandava, inspired the exercises that the Indian monk Bodhidharma taught the Chinese Shaolin monks. But the exercises Bodhidharma taught are all conjectural, nata are associated with the Lord Vishnu rather than the Lord Buddha, and the Romans and Greeks shadow-boxed, too. ("So fight I," said Saint Paul in I Corinthians 9:26, "not as one that beateth the air." Unarmed versions of these Hellenistic shadow-boxing exercises were known as skiamachiae, or "private contests," while armed versions were known as hoplomachiae, or "armed contests.") So, while coincidence has been established, causality has not.
 

The Romans spread wrestling entertainments throughout Europe. The Latin name for wrestling was lucta, a word meaning "scuffle." Like modern Turkish wrestlers, the Roman wrestlers' bodies were rubbed with oil and sprinkled with sand before a match. While their techniques emphasized upper-body wrestling, their matches were frequently decided by trips. They also spread pugmachia, or boxing. Roman boxers wore metal-studded leather gloves over their right hands, and aimed their blows at one another's head and arms. Finally, there was pankration, a form of all-in combat that German archaeologists of the 1920s said was more violent during the Roman era than ever before. Yet, without a time machine, who really knows for certain? This said, historian Don Sayenga believes that the wrestling done by the Greeks and Romans is a direct ancestor of the oil wrestling done at Turkey's modern Kirkpinar Festival. For evidence, Sayenga notes that the ancient Greek word for wrestling was pali, while the Turkish word for wrestler is pelevanlar, the Persian word is palewani, and the Hindi word is pulwan. The philology seems wrong, though, as the Turkish word pehlivanlar means "hero" or "strongman," not "oil wrestling" (That is yagle gures.) On the other hand, Sayenga's pattern of transmittal seems logical. Late Roman wrestling schools were concentrated in Hellenized Asia, and, says Gary Lind-Sinanian of the Armenian Library and Museum, "the disappearance of written references to Greek wrestling reflects a shift in the writers, not the sport."
 

About 100:
 

A Hellenistic merchant called Alexander reaches South China by sea. Soon afterwards, the Chinese begin casting individual horoscopes. While the causality is not proven, it seems likely that there was one.
 

Fortified castles appear in Yemen.
 

A Roman writer known as Dio the Golden Mouth describes boxing champion Melancomas of Caria as having been beautiful despite his profession. Dio attributed this to a rigorous training regimen that allowed Melancomas to keep his guard up at all times, and to dodge blows instead of receiving them. ("He thought it a noble achievement," said Dio, "to last out the time without being beaten by the weight of his arms, without getting out of breath, and without being distressed by the heat.") Of course, as Melancomas had been dead for 25 years at the time of the writing, it is quite possible that Dio was suffering from temporal distortion, a condition that results in people seeing perfection in people or events of the past.
 

In a biographical sketch called "Philopoemen," the Roman moralist Plutarch writes that the athletic body and lifestyle were different in every way from the military. The diet and the exercise were particularly different, as the athletes slept and ate regularly, while the soldiers trained to endure wandering, irregularity, and lack of sleep. This being the case, Plutarch viewed athletics as something that distracted a man from more important things, such as waging war or earning fame. This anti-athletic perception is subsequently borrowed by the early Christians, and is one reason why Christian writers often ignored organized athletics. Another factor was a rash of fixed fights followed by faction fights.
 

107:
 

According to Cassius Dio, who sometimes exaggerated, the Roman emperor Trajan holds gladiatorial games that lasted four months and involved thousands of prisoners of war.

109:
 

The Later Han Dynasty conquers North Korea. This helps spreads Confucian government and the Chinese script throughout Northeast Asia.
 

121:
 

The first Chinese-language dictionary is presented to the Later Han Imperial Court at Lo-yang.
 

122:
 

To avoid the expense of raising and equipping additional legions, the Roman Caesar Hadrianus orders the construction of fixed fortifications in Germany and Britain. The most famous of these fortifications, a 72-mile long wall running from Tyne to Solway, establishes the modern border between Scotland and England.
 

About 134:
 

Following yet another millennial uprising in Judea, the Romans start exiling particularly troublesome Jews to out-of-the way places. To avoid persecution Christians begin claiming that theirs is a separate religion instead of an eschatological Jewish sect.
 

About 140:
 

Taoist alchemists start attempting to transmogrify base metals into gold or silver. Mercury, called "cinnabar," was one of their favorite metals. This is ironic, since the alchemists were seeking wealth and long life, and mercury poisoning kills.
 

Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria writes a masterful thirteen-volume astronomical encyclopedia that the ninth century Arabs called Almagest. Ptolemy's observations and mathematics were excellent, so excellent in fact that his mistaken beliefs about the sun circling the earth went unquestioned for the next 1,400 years. However, to the horror of many medieval Christians and modern Muslims, the purpose of this encyclopedia was to provide students with the background needed to understand the five-volume astrological text called the Tetrabiblos.
 

The philosopher Justin visits a gladiatorial fight at Rome. Afterwards he writes that that the spectators went wild when a defeated gladiator defiantly stuck out his neck to receive a deathblow, but hooted and jeered whenever a loser bolted in panic. Gladiators of this era were usually impoverished laborers who sold themselves into slavery to avoid starving. They were then pitted against professional fighters whose managers picked their victims with an eye toward inflating their champions' records. The same practice subsequently appears in English, American, and Thai boxing and for the same reason: the big money was not in the fighting, but in the side betting.
 

141:
 

The Chinese physician T'o Hua is born. As an adult, T'o created a series of exercises called Wu Chin Hi, or "Five Animals Play." According to tradition, T'o chose the bear for its strength, the crane for its ability to turn and roll, the deer for its gentleness, the monkey for its agility and alertness, and the tiger for its rooted and solid nature. Imitating their movements was supposed to lengthen and improve life by strengthening the legs and removing disease, apparently by causing perspiration. (The Greeks, Indians, Romans, and Chinese all believed that saliva, sweat, and semen were vital fluids. Therefore their athletes and warriors learned ways of conserving their semen and even spat into their palms before engaging in strenuous activities. Perspiration, on the other hand, removed impurities from the system.) Although the inspiration is said to have been T'o's observations of the animals themselves, the animal dances of Turkic animists seems a more likely source, especially if those dances were done by sorcerers interested in acquiring the animals' magical powers.
 

About 155:
 

The Tibetans and Turks regain control over the middle portions of the Silk Road. Modern British and Soviet historians have argued that these people were the ancestors of the Huns. Although the Székely of Rumania claim descent from the Huns (their name is Hungarian, and means "from beyond the frontiers"), philological and archaeological evidence suggests that the Huns were probably Iranized Goths and Slavs rather than Turks.
 

166:
 

Roman merchants in search of a better price for spices and silk (then worth more than their weight in gold) sail east from Sri Lanka to reach South China and the Mekong Delta. Meanwhile, other Romans returning home from wars against the Sassanid Persians introduce smallpox into Italy and a quarter of the Imperial Roman population dies within the decade. As if that were not bad enough, Roman soldiers and merchants also spread rubella along the Mediterranean littoral during the 250s. Deaths from this disease in the city of Rome alone were credibly reported at 5,000 people a day. These body counts are mentioned as a reminder that disease may have hurried the collapse of late Roman civilization more than the military invasions so gleefully described by historians.
 

About 170:
 

Central Asian equestrians begin stiffening their saddle pillows with wooden frames. They probably copied the idea from the Chinese. The same Central Asian horsemen appear to have begun experimenting with stirrups about the same time. Although it is not certain, these early stirrups were probably used to help fat men more easily mount their horses, and the idea was probably the result of seeing Indian toe loops. However, the Central Asians were not always imitative. Neither were they all horse-riding transhumants. For example, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the brilliant ninth century mathematician who invented algorithms and algebra, was a Central Asian born east of the Caspian Sea. Instead, as an Arab philosopher once said, the Turks were to warfare what the Greeks were to science and the Chinese were to art.
 

About 180:
 

Chang Ling, the head of the Taoist Five Pecks of Rice sect, takes the title t'ien shih, or "Heavenly Master." In 1019 this title is awarded to some priests claiming descent from Chang. These priests' descendants retained it until 1927, when Chinese warlords chased them out of Kiangsi and into Fukien and Taiwan.
 

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons declares that the only true Gospels were the ones written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Said Irenaeus, just as there are four principal winds, and four pillars holding up the sky, he said, there can be only four gospels. Unsurprisingly, these four texts also did a better job of supporting Irenaeus' vision of an Imperial Roman Catholic church than did the apocryphal texts that told people to look to Jesus rather than to priests for answers.
 

The Roman physician Claudius Galenus, who served as a medical trainer at a gladiatorial school located at Pergamum between 157 and 162, boasts that just two of his charges died during his five years of service. (note 9) This suggests several things. First, casualty rates among gladiators were probably not as great as Ben-Hur suggested. Either that or his "gladiators" were wrestlers rather than swordsmen and animal fighters. Second, Galen's training program, which emphasized regular walking for the wind, progressive weight-lifting for the muscles, and rhythmic movement for the soul, is clearly worthy of emulation. Finally that development had absolutely nothing to do with the physician's appreciation for his patients, whom he routinely described as being as mindless as dumb animals. "In fact," said Galen in his Exhortation for Medicine, "their lives are just like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert nor force-feed themselves."
 

184-215:
 

Taoist priests (including the Heavenly Master, Chang Ling) lead major peasant uprisings in Shantung and Szechwan provinces. Known collectively as the Yellow Turban revolts, these were peasant rebellions associated with the collapse of the Later Han Dynasty. While remembered today mainly for their use of group sex as a recruiting tool, in their own time, they were notable mainly for their belief in the impending end of the world. The color symbolism has astrological roots, and represents the Saviors of the Ten Directions.
 

About 185:
 

The Gospel according to Saint Thomas appears in Syria, first in Greek script and then in Coptic. As Thomas supposedly introduced Christianity to India during the first century CE, this means that Arab merchants probably took Christianity to South India sometime during the third century CE.
 

185:
 

A supernova appears in the constellation Centaurus. Chinese astrologers claimed the sight foretold insurrection. However, one hardly needed to read the stars to see that, only pay attention to Later Han politics.
 

186:
 

After 200 years of Han Dynasty occupation, the Chinese syllabary enters common use in Vietnam.
 

About 188:
 

Quilted horse armor appears in China.
 

About 190:
 

The Indian grammarian called Patanjali writes the Yoga-Sutra, or "The Aphorisms of Yoga." While Mahayana Buddhism colored Patanjali's language, his aphorisms were clearly part of the Vedic tradition. Patanjali's goal was to teach his disciples to distinguish their spirits from material considerations, and he did this by teaching them to meditate single-mindedly on points located inside their bodies. This process, known as "centering," has since been claimed as important to success in such martial arts as t'ai chi ch'uan, aikido, and Greco-Roman wrestling.
 

Third century:
 

North Indian physicians begin describing various spots on the body that, when struck, pierced, or squeezed vigorously, cause debilitating pain, paralysis, unconsciousness, or death. According to tradition, there are 108 of these special points. While there are certainly many pressure points on the body, 108 is a number sacred to both Shaktavites and Buddhists. So it probably should be taken figuratively instead of literally.
 

About 200:
 

A Christian philosopher named Clement of Alexandria writes that women should be athletes for God. That is, they should wrestle with the Devil and devote themselves to celibacy instead of bowing meekly to their destiny of mothers and wives. However, this was not a universally held view, and wealthy Roman men continued amusing themselves with gymnastic, gladiatorial, and swimming entertainments featuring scantily clad female competitors. What these females thought of these entertainments and the men who patronized them is unknown. However, the Filipinas working as dancers and prostitutes outside twentieth century United States military bases in the Philippines disliked their equally scanty attire, and mud-wrestled and boxed only under compulsion.
 

A stele is erected in Alexandria that recounts the career of a pankratiast named Marcus Aurelius Asclepiades. According to the stele, Asclepiades was the son of a famous wrestler named Demetrios, and between 178 and 182 won at least ten major championships in Italy, Greece, and Asia. He then retired at the age of 25 to become an elected member of the Museum and a senior official in the World Track Association. Why did he retire? "Because of the risks and the jealousies involved," says his stele. Which was quite possible, too, as many matches of that period were fixed. Nevertheless, such words might have been self-serving. After all, the engraving went on to say that Asclepiades "was never in a tie match, never forfeited a bout, never protested a decision, never walked out of a contest nor entered a contest to please a king, nor did I ever win a fight that was started again [following a foul], but in all the contests which I entered I won the crown right there."
 

A Hellenistic writer named Philostratos writes a short text called On Athletics. Like most subsequent sportswriters, he described the athletes of his day as being inferior to the athletes of the past, and prone to training too little, and eating and drinking and fornicating too much. He claimed that the Spartans invented boxing to toughen their heads against blows. He said that gloves had replaced leather thongs for boxers' hands because thumbless gloves reduced the frequency of eye injuries. (Ox-leather was preferred to pig-leather because it was softer, and caused less scarring.) He said that wrestling was the most useful sport for men training for war, as it could be used by men wearing armor after their swords and spears had broken. Pankration, on the other hand, he decried as little more than a combination of bad boxing and worse wrestling. Further, its players preferred shadow-boxing to training with partners, and fought in mud rather than dirt, which broke their falls and robbed their techniques of their power. Therefore it was not much of a sport at all. Whatever combative sport one did, good coaches were essential. Technical skills were taught by paidotribes while diet and exercise were supervised by gymnastes. Surgeons set broken bones and treated soft tissue injuries. (Trachoma was probably common, as it was a problem for wrestlers into the twentieth century.) Finally, why, according to Philostratos, did men wrestle or box or run? Because they could. Not because they had to, but because they could.
 

Philostratos also urged athletes to disinfect and maintain their bodies with dust instead of steam baths or dry rubs with olive oil. ("Yellow dust," he wrote, "makes the body glisten and is quite handsome to observe when it is on the well-developed body of an athlete from a good family.") On a less homoerotic note, dusting also helped athletes stop sweating while keeping them from cooling too rapidly. These are the same explanations given by twentieth century North Indian wrestlers for similar practices. (And, perhaps as importantly, pre-fight powdering also offers judges a way of easily seeing whether a wrestler has been thrown, or a boxer has been struck.)
 

212:
 

The Roman Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antonius (also known as Caracalla, after the hooded coat that he habitually wore) grants full citizenship to everyone living within the borders of the Roman Empire. The idea was to make Roman citizens subject to income taxes (from which they had previously been exempt), and non-citizens subject to inheritance taxes (from which they had previously had some relief). Tax laws were also modified to tax what the land could produce rather than what it did produce. The result was that small landowners started fleeing the countryside, the aristocracy started plotting rebellion, and the army started having trouble getting new recruits, as the free citizenship significantly reduced the value of providing the army with sixteen years of faithful service.
 

About 220:
 

As a way of recruiting the best fighters for his bodyguard, a Chinese warlord named Liu Pei begins holding tournaments. During one of these, a man armed with an iron rod knocks down a saber fencer, only to have his rod sliced in two by the fencer's tempered blade. The maker of this magical weapon was a sword smith named Pu Yuan. Nevertheless, copper and bronze swords seem to have been more common in China until the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.
 

About 230:
 

To supply a Chinese army in the field, extensive logistical support was required. This was not a problem near navigable rivers, where boats could carry supplies, but was a serious problem in mountainous areas. Ox wagons were one answer, but they moved slowly, and the animals required so much fodder that they limited campaigns to just a few months duration. On the other hand, hordes of porters required cash payment and were likely to malinger or pilfer. As a compromise, wheelbarrows, known as "single-wheel push barrows," are invented in Southwestern China. The inventors were engineers working for the Shu warlord Liang Chu-ko.
 

About 250:
 

The eruption of the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador engulfs most of Central America in ash. This causes many people to flee El Salvador and Honduras for the Guatemalan highlands, and is probably responsible for the Guatemalan village of Tikal turning into an important Mayan capital by the 280s.
 

About 255:
 

Because cavalry could respond faster than infantry to incursions by mounted barbarians, the Roman emperor Gallienus orders the establishment of large (about 500 men each) mounted infantry units in Northern Italy, Greece, and the Balkans.
 

271:
 

A group of Gothic women captured while armed and dressed as men are paraded through Rome wearing signs that read "Amazons." So, while Xena, Warrior Princess is an exaggeration, this is a reminder that not every ancient reference to armored female warriors is apocryphal or allegorical.
 

273:
 

To quell a mercantile uprising, the Romans burn the Brucheum quarter of Alexandria. It is likely that the great secular library of Alexandria was looted during the fighting, or burned during the arson that followed it. However, the smaller religious library at the Serapeum survived until 390, when the Christian patriarch Theophilus had it burned.
 

274:
 

In a stinging renunciation of the Gnostics' Buddhist-influenced descriptions of reincarnation, the Christian bishop of Lyons decrees that human souls go immediately to heaven, hell, or purgatory. The acknowledgment of an afterlife was something new for most Christians, who had previously held that death was nothing more than a kind of permanent sleep.
 

276:
 

The Sassinid Persians crucify the Iranian philosopher Manes. Nevertheless, his teachings, which equated men with the God of Light (the sun) and women with the Prince of Darkness (the moon), survive this setback for several reasons. One was that his disciples spread his faith (which was not so misogynistic as modern feminists sometimes say) through the Sassinid Empire using an improved Syriac script known as Pahlavi. The other was that the Manichaean theories about the duality of good and evil greatly influenced the theories of a Christian saint known as Augustine of Hippo.

297:
 

Because the Britons living north of Hadrian's Wall dyed their bodies with woad to ensure their life after death, the Romans called them the "Picts," meaning "Blue People." The Romans also called them Caledonians, meaning "People of the Underbrush." On the other hand, they called themselves Gaedil, a Gaelic word meaning "Stormy People." Fingal and his son Ossian are these people's legendary hero-kings. Whether they were real people or were subsequent creations is a matter of scholarly debate. Either way, they were not Scots. That name only dates to the late fourth century, when Norwegian pirates who worshipped the goddess Skadi began settling Northern Britain. A wife of Odin, Skadi was the daughter of an ice-giant killed by Thor. She hunted wolves and bears from skis, and was notorious for collecting dead men's penises. In less legendary terms, this means she was a Finno-Ugric snow-goddess tamed, rather reluctantly, by patrilineal Norsemen.
 

About 300:
 

An Indian prince called Chandragupta I establishes the Gupta Dynasty in Bengal. As staunch Vishnaivites, Changdragupta and his son Samudragupta persecuted Indian Buddhists throughout the fourth century, which in turn caused many Buddhist intellectuals to emigrate to China and Tibet.
 

Arab merchants introduce opium into East Asia.
 

302:
 

Stirrups appear in Chinese art.
 

About 310:
 

Christianity appears in Britain. According to tradition, British resistance to the Roman religion provided a catalyst for a revival of Druidism. However, that explanation only dates to the eighteenth century, so may provide more insight into eighteenth century Welsh confrontations with Anglican and Methodist clergy than fourth century British confrontations with Roman Catholic clergy.
 

After 311:
 

Buddhist monasteries appear around Canton, Tonkin, and Nanking.
 

312:
 

According to an account written by an Orthodox bishop named Eusebius during the 330s, the Eastern Roman Caesar Constantinus I converts to Christianity. His goal was to obtain magical power over his enemies. However, Eusebius' account is of questionable veracity. For one thing, the cross he described sounds more like a Mithraic labarum than a Christian cross. For another, Constantinus did not convert the Roman Empire to Christianity. Instead, he only ended its persecution of heterodox religious cults. (Subsequent propaganda notwithstanding, Constantinus did not become a Christian until he was on his deathbed in 337 -- and then it was to Arian, or Alexandrian, Christianity rather than Orthodox Christianity.)
 

About 315:
 

A Turkic nation known as the Hsiung-nu introduces heavily armored cavalry into Northwestern China. Chinese cavalrymen soon began equipping themselves similarly, and funerary artifacts depicting armored cavalrymen appeared as far south as Yunnan by the end of the century. However, the Chinese did not figure out how to properly use their knights until the sixth century, when the first reports of mounted lancers appear. Instead, the fourth century Chinese, like the fourth century Romans, the tenth century Scandinavians, and the nineteenth century Apaches, used their horses mostly as battle taxis.
 

About 320:
 

The Chinese scholar Ko Hung writes that "Taoists prize and keep secret the recipes leading to [immortality]. They take pains selecting the very best pupils, and only after a long time do they give them the all-important oral instructions." This attitude continues to influence the pedagogy of the Chinese martial arts into the present.
 

About 325:
 

Missionaries introduce Christianity into the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum. However, it remained a rare faith until 451, when the Eastern Roman Council of Chalcedon declared Monophysism to be a heresy, which in turn forced many Egyptian churchmen into exile.
 

325:
 

Byzantine churchmen create Easter by combining the Jewish Passover and a Cybelene spring solstice festival, and introduce the Nicene Creed. At the time, the Creed was used mainly to persecute Syrian and Egyptian Christians who opposed Roman political power. Arguments over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father or from the Father and the Son caused the Roman Pope and the Byzantine Patriarch to excommunicate one another in 1054.
 

About 335:
 

Dismayed by the rapid spread of Christianity through the Eastern Roman Empire, King Shapur II of Iran makes Zorastrianism the official religion of the Sassanid Empire, and begins actively persecuting Christians living in Iraq, Iran, and Armenia.
 

About 340:
 

The Goths introduce wooden saddles of a Hunnish design into the Roman Empire.
 

The Buddhist scholar Hsien Fa visits India, and returns to China via Sri Lanka and Java.
 

Formal ordination procedures for Buddhist monks develop in China. While supposedly meant to keep criminals from pretending to be monks, and to keep young people from being converted against their will, they were more likely a way for the state to extract money from the monasteries.
 

343:
 

The Council of Sardica makes the Bishop of Rome, or papas, the highest authority in the Catholic Church.
 

About 350:
 

The oldest surviving Christian Bible is written. Known as the Codex Vaticanus, it was written in Greek rather than Latin.
 

359:
 

A Sanhedrin council headed by the Patriarch Hillel II synchronizes Judaism's 354-day lunar calendar with the 365-day solar calendar of the Romans.
 

About 360:
 

The Japanese (whose ancestors originally came from Korea) invade southern Korea. They are not effectively evicted from the peninsula until 562.
 

364:
 

The Ecumenical Council of Laodicea issues a canon prohibiting Christian clerks and priests from becoming magicians, enchanters, astrologers, or mathematicians.
 

About 365:
 

The rival Caesars Valentinian and Valens divide the Roman Empire (and military) in half.
 

371:
 

China's Chien Wen emperor uses Buddhist monks to exorcise the influence of evil stars over his empire.
 

372:
 

The Koguryo Kingdom of northern Korea converts to Buddhism. The motivation for the conversion was probably a desire for better relations with China.
 

About 375:
 

The city of Tiwanaku appears on the shores of Lake Titicaca. This city was home to 20-40,000 people, and is still famous for its monumental gateways and monoliths. While snuff and maize beer were clearly integral parts of Tiwanaku ritual, there is little to suggest major drug and alcohol dependency problems. For example, the Tiwanaku economy was based on horticulture, herding, and trade rather than war, and the city lasted for hundreds of years.
 

About 378:
 

Rather than fighting their enemies honorably in hand-to-hand combat, the Tikal king Jaguar-Paw and his brother Smoking-Frog begin using atlatls, or spear-throwers, for the purpose of killing men from long range. Other military innovations attributed to these Mayan warrior-princes include taking prisoners for the purpose of human sacrifice. Modern historians call these developments "Tlaloc-Venus warfare", as the Tikal campaigns were coordinated with the cycles of the planets Tlaloc (Jupiter) and Venus.
 

378:
 

Near the Thracian town of Adrianople, Gothic cavalry overruns and destroys an Imperial Roman army numbering over 60,000 men. Seen by modern historians as the beginning of the end for the Later Roman Empire, the defeat was seen in its own time as God's way of punishing the Caesar Valens for having become an Arian rather than Orthodox Christian.
 

384:
 

The Sarmatians settle Bulgaria. These semi-nomadic herders, better known to posterity as the Huns, moved to Bulgaria from the Ukraine at the request of Eastern Roman officials interested in using them to counterbalance the Gothic threat. The Huns sometimes fought singly, but more often fought in organized groups. Lacking stirrups or spurs, their warriors rode sidesaddle. For weapons, they used mounted archery at long range and swords and lassos at close range. And for a battle cry, they used a wolf-howl.
 

386:
 

Roman decrees prohibit Orthodox Catholic churchmen from having sexual intercourse with their wives. These bans, which were inspired by desert mystics, were not always followed. For example, a thirteenth century bishop of Liège became infamous for having fathered 65 illegitimate children, while several fifteenth century popes became equally notorious for promoting their sons into bishoprics.
 

387:
 

As the end of the Roman Empire was equated with the end of the world, the raids of Gothic horsemen into Northern Italy send Roman churchmen into an eschatological panic. Therefore, in 394 the Western Roman Caesar Theodosius expels both Mithraic priests and the Vestal Virgins from Rome and stops the reckoning of time in Olympiads.
 

About 390:
 

A Byzantine nobleman called Vegetius writes The Military Institutions of the Romans. This book probably had few readers in its own time, as its author was a historian instead of a soldier, and he combined tactics that were obsolete centuries earlier with tactics that had only recently been invented. Nevertheless, his book, which was designed to improve late Roman armies, influenced European military thought between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, and was a source of inspiration for Machiavelli's Art of War.
 

399:
 

To cut expenses, the Roman government closes its imperial gladiatorial schools.
 

Fifth century:
 

The Georgian script enters use in the Southern Ukraine. The ecclesiastical script was called Khutsuri and the warriors' writing was called Mkhedruli. While the ecclesiastical script has since become obsolete, the warriors' script remains in use.
 

Sanskrit inscriptions are engraved in steles built on Borneo and Java, probably at the command of the Javanese king Purnavarman.
 

The Natya Sastra, which assigned ritual meanings to the hand, head, and body movements used during North Indian gesture dancing, appears in Bharata. This text describes mudra, or hand-signs, which appear to have been similar to the finger movements often seen in East Asian martial arts. Perhaps this was because Nataraja, the King of the Dancers, was also Shiva, the Destroyer?
 

Quarterstaffs become associated with Taoist exorcisms. The idea was that when the priest pointed his staff toward heaven, the gods bowed and the earth smiled, but when he pointed it at demons, the cowardly rascals fled. Drumming was also associated with these exorcisms, perhaps to help the priest enter the necessary trance states.
 

About 400:
 

Chinese Buddhists describe "the five elemental configurations," or ping an hsing. These were moving meditations designed to merge the psychological and physical aspects of the human existence, and their practice was particularly associated with the T'ien Ta'i school of Buddhism.
 

The Chinese learn to make weapons-grade steel. Their process involved mixing different grades of cast and wrought iron.
 

Korean monks introduce the Chinese syllabary into Japan.
 

The Indian poet Vatsayana writes the Kama Sutra, or "Aphorisms on Love." While the poet's frank descriptions of erotic activity may have Roman or Taoist roots, his emphasis on acrobatic love between consenting adults of the opposite sex was clearly a local invention. The Kama Sutrais mentioned partly because it taught Indian courtesans that the way to captivate men included "practice with sword, single-stick, quarter-staff, and bow and arrow," (note 10) partly because its arcane breathing methods subsequently got tangled up with martial art practice, and mainly because it helped create the concept of romantic love between men and women, an idea the Arabs borrowed in the eighth century and the Normans took to Europe in the eleventh.
 

Indian merchants divide their cannabis into bhang (marijuana) and ganja (hashish). Their wrestlers then ate bhang mixed with almonds as a way of curbing their strength-sapping sexual desires. Arguments about the perils of drug abuse aside, I think that the Indian gurus had it wrong. That is, to my mind a fighter's abstinence from sex is less important to his chances of winning than his abstinence from love, as love has a way of satisfying that hunger in a fighter's soul, while sex is simply sex.
 

Turkish astrologers living in Afghanistan combine Babylonian and Iranian lunar calculations with Greek zodiacs to create the Vedic religious calendar.
 

The Polynesian kings of Samoa begin building heavily fortified villages on top of hills. These included hill-top defenses made from logs and packed earth, and were at the time among the most sophisticated on earth.
 

404:
 

When a Christian monk named Telemachus interferes with a gladiatorial bout by rushing between the two fighters, a Roman crowd drags him out and beats him to death.
 

405:
 

With the help of two female assistants, a Dalmatian monk named Jerome produces the Vulgate Latin Bible. Jerome's assistants must have been attractive as well as intelligent, too, as the good priest started his translation to help him keep his mind off them.
 

410:
 

The Visigoths capture Rome. Edward Gibbon notwithstanding, the main importance of this event is that it effectively severed the Western Roman Empire from the Eastern Roman Empire.
 

414:
 

Eastern Roman governors order the deportation of all Jews from Alexandria. Although they were far from successful, the Arab conqueror Amr ibn-al-As reporting the presence of 40,000 tribute-paying Jews at Alexandria in 642, this decree nevertheless marks the practical beginnings of the Diaspora and Rabbinical Judaism.
 

To commemorate their military conquests, the Mayans start building stone replicas of their battle standards. These symbols included owls, spear-throwers, crossed javelins, and the War Serpent.
 

About 418:
 

The Christian Saint Augustine introduces the doctrine of original sin. For Augustine, death and suffering were the result of Adam's sin instead of God's will. This view becomes dogma because it served three important purposes. First, it makes male humans the most important life forms on Earth. Second, it justified clergymen selling salvation for a price. And, most importantly, it released people from taking responsibility for their mistakes by transferring the blame for those mistakes to scapegoats such as Adam and Eve.
 

About 425:
 

An epidemic decimates the bodyguard of a Romano-British chieftain living in East Anglia. To replace his losses, the East Anglican chieftain hires Frisian and Saxon mercenaries. Their paid arrival is the so-called Saxon invasion of fifth century Britain.
 

Buddhist nunneries appear in China.
 

427:
 

Pyongyang becomes the capital of Korea.
 

About 430:
 

Germanic chieftains living west of the Main River convert to Roman Catholicism, evidently as a way of obtaining Christ's assistance in the shape of Gallo-Roman arms and armor.
 

431:
 

The Council of Ephesus condemns Nestorian Christianity. While the Nestorians said that Christ's divinity and humanity were separate, and the Orthodox Christians said that they were coequal, the real argument was whether the Church leaders should come from Alexandria, Constantinople, or Ravenna. As the Egyptians had the least military power, they were forced from Alexandria into Syria and Iraq. There they started translating Greek texts into Syriac, which in turn made it easier for the Arabs to assimilate Hellenistic science and technology.
 

About 432:
 

Christian art starts showing Christ on the cross. This was probably an outgrowth of Christian asceticism, which revered suffering and pain. Early crucifixes depicted Christ nude, as that was how fifth century rebels were usually hung. However, during the sixth century Christian artists began depicting Christ in diapers so that he would not be mistaken for the Scandinavian god Freyr or the Roman god Priapus, whose sculptures always showed them with erect penises.
 

432:
 

Roman Catholic priests known as patricus ("Fathers") appear in Ireland. The stories about the legendary Saint Patrick's driving the snakes out of Ireland probably refer to these priests' conflicts with the local priestesses, who used snakes as totems. The invention of whiskey has also been attributed to Saint Patrick. Yet this isn't likely, since Iranian alchemists didn't invent stills until the eighth century, or rum until the thirteenth. So the fifth century uisge beatha ("blessed water") of the British priests was more likely hard apple cider, then in the process of being spread through Northern Europe by Basque sailors and fishermen.
 

435:
 

The Vandals conquer Roman North Africa from Mauretania to Libya. The Vandals were a Germanic confederation from Central Europe. They looted their way across France in the early 400s, and eventually settled in Northern Iberia. By the 420s, the Vandal armies reached southern Spain, with its ports and fleets. The Vandal generals then decided to use those fleets to mount attacks on North Africa. As the Vandals were Arian rather than Orthodox Christians, they severely persecuted Roman Catholics. Thus the horror of their memory in Latin ecclesiastical writings. The Vandal fleets, which were manned mostly by North Africans, are the ancestors of the Barbary corsairs. On land, the Germanic Vandals were equestrians who preferred charging with spears and swords. Their Berber allies, meanwhile, rode camels and dipped their arrows in poison. Armor was meshed mail painted black against rust.
 

437:
 

To quell a Burgundian uprising, a Western Roman warlord named Aetius recruits thousands of Alan mercenaries from Eastern Europe, and then uses them to smash a Burgundian uprising. The Alans are then rewarded with land in the Rhone Valley. By the eleventh century, the Roman general has been renamed Attila, and his Alan mercenaries have become the Hunnish villains of the Nibelungenlied. The Ring described in the legend refers to ring-works, a series of concentric ditches the Eastern Europeans and Turks dug around houses, villages, barracks, and watchtowers. The incorporation of a motte, or artificial hill, adjacent to those ring-works, was a fifth century invention in Polynesia, and a tenth century invention in Western Europe.
 

About 440:
 

The Eastern Romans hold their last known gladiatorial contest. As chariot racing and public executions remained hugely popular, and acrobats, wrestlers, and sword-dancers continued working the intermissions, the disappearance was probably unrelated to Christian piety.
 

Artwork shows Eastern Roman cavalrymen carrying short bows instead of javelins. This suggests that these men were either Iranians or Huns. Whoever they were, they wore helmets, metal corselets, and greaves. (Or, more precisely, carried: unless battle was imminent, armor was normally carried in a leather case behind the saddle. The reason was that this reduced rust in bad weather and heat injuries during hot weather.) The Eastern cavalry wore their swords on their left side, their quivers on their right side, and slung their bows in sacks alongside their saddles. They shot arrows while on the move, and shot left, right, front, and back equally well. Germanic cavalrymen, on the other hand, kept their javelins and shields. The reason was that they preferred trotting forward to about 20 yards range, then, if the enemy stayed steady, veering right and throwing their javelins, or, if he broke and ran, chasing him down and impaling him. The standard defense against both methods of attack was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with shields raised or spears out-thrust, while simultaneously shouting and clashing weapons. Stirrups remained rare, which meant that men mounted horses either by vaulting into the saddle or with help from a servant.
 

444:
 

Taoism is proclaimed the state religion of the short-lived Northern Wei empire. As this represents the only time that Taoism was ever the official religion of China, Terence Dukes' complaints about Taoist discrimination against the Buddhists are based more on prejudice than fact, and hide the very real problem of Confucian discrimination against all religious sectarians.
 

About 445:
 

The Hun leader known as Attila (after a Gothic word meaning "Great Father") murders his older brother to become the paramount leader of the Danubian Black Huns. As such political assassinations were hardly uncommon, sensible landowners usually had several hundred well-armed and well-paid bodyguards. Because the bodyguards were paid in bread and beer, they became known in France as cum panis, or "bread sharers," and in Germany and the Eastern Roman Empire as bucellaires, or "biscuit eaters." Like the 47 Ronin of Japanese history, bucellaires often remained loyal after their master's death, especially if that death was due to homicide. For example, in 454 the Western Roman emperor Valentinian murdered his general Aetius, who had come to the emperor to ask for a marriage between his son and Valentinian's daughter. Several months later one of Aetius' bucellaires helped Valentinian dismount his horse, then repeatedly rammed his knife into the emperor's head.
 

447:
 

The Council of Toledo becomes the first Christian institution to describe the Devil as "a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, hair, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and a sulphurous smell." In other words, any number of pre-Christian deities and their representative masked dancers.
 

About 450:
 

Tantric Buddhism spreads through the North Indian states of Assam, Bengal, and Orissa. Tantric Buddhism has cults of both male and female deities, promises bliss through physical experiences of pain and pleasure instead of asceticism, and expresses the view that normally taboo actions such as sex outside of marriage, ecstatic dancing, and magic are legitimate for people who fully understand reality. (Indeed, the name "Tantra," or "weaving," infers the weaving of the supernatural into everyday life.) While this philosophy outraged mainstream Buddhists (to say nothing of mainstream Christians, Jews, and Muslims), Tantric philosophers created many important metaphysical concepts, including those of kundalini energy, chakras, and mantras.
 

Wood-and-iron stirrups appear in Korea and Manchuria. These allowed lancers to stand in their saddles, and turned horses into portable battering rams.
 

As Christianity spreads through Germany and France, the Gauls and Germans begin seeking universal rather than local laws. This results in the Code of Euric in 461, the Law of the Burgundians in 502, and the Salic Law in 511. However, the rights and privileges of the local warlords remained far greater than those of the local bishops, and most of the Frankish regulations described ways of peacefully resolving vendettas and inheritance disputes.
 

About 460:
 

The Silla Kingdom expands throughout Southeastern Korea. Its expansion was due in part to its increased wealth following its adoption of Chinese wet-rice agricultural methods.
 

About 462:
 

Indian philosophers design the first sriyantra, or "Blessed Devices." Sriyantra are geometric diagrams made by drawing nine interlocking isosceles triangles, five of which point downward and four of which point upward. The nine large triangles symbolized the feminine and the masculine energies of the universe, while the 43 smaller triangles made by their intersections symbolized various deities. As Tantrics later used similar patterns during their moving meditations, sriyantaare a possible source of inspiration for the patterns that seventeenth century Tibetan Buddhists used to teach fang wa, or sword dances.
 

469:
 

The Japanese Emperor Yuryaku institutionalizes cockfighting at Nara. He also required his serving girls to put on loincloths and wrestle like men.
 

About 470:
 

The oldest continuously burning Zoroastrian flame in the world is lighted at the ateshkadé, or fire temple, at Yazd, Iran. The Indian wrestling practice of doing thousands of dands, or dipping push-ups, each day may have begun with Zoroastrian genuflections to the sun, the supreme flame; the equivalent Brahmin genuflection was called surya namaskar, and even Sikh scriptures say that performing dandsis a great virtue.

About 472:
 

Chinese monks describe the Indian meditation practices that subsequently become known as Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.
 

476:
 

Rome is sacked, and the last Western Roman emperor is deposed.

1. Three years, two hundred eighty-seven days.

2. The ancient Greeks spoke various languages, many of which were not Greek. (Macedonian, for example, is a Slavonic language.) Additionally, most Hellenes did not live in Greece. (Troy, for example, is on the Dardanelles coast of Turkey.) Nevertheless these people shared a common culture. Accordingly, historians use the word "Hellenic" to describe the very insular pre-Alexandrian Greek culture, and the word "Hellenistic" to describe the more cosmopolitan post-Alexandrian Greek culture. For convenience, historians date the change to 337 BCE, when Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon, united the previously antagonistic Hellenic city-states behind an invasion of Iran.

3. Olmec means "people of the region of rubber" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. Strictly speaking, it could describe any Mayan or pre-Mayan inhabitants of southern Veracruz and northern Tabasco. However, as noted in the text, Charles Wicke is not convinced that the Olmecs started in Caribbean Mexico. Marshall Saville of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City assigned the name to the art style in 1929.

4. My reasoning is that the ancient Kirghiz were known as the Wooden Horse people, after their practice of traveling about on skis. While the Finnish epic Kalevala describes a magic elk built of timber and willow branches, the Kalevala was only collected during the nineteenth century. Therefore Romanticism rather than history may influence its stories.

5. Today, numerology is a form of divination based on the attribution of arcane meanings to numerical values. However, until the fifteenth century, most Europeans used letters from their alphabets to represent numerical values, and some including the Armenians, still do for all cases. (Even English, most numerals less than twenty are commonly written in books as words rather than numerals. The previous sentence contains an example.) So ancient numerology also included the ability to use numbers to create both magical and obscene words.

6. The era before Alexander the Great is known as the Hellenic Era, while the era afterward is known as the Hellenistic Era. The difference is that the latter era was more cosmopolitan than the former, and incorporated more Egyptian and Iranian philosophies and technologies.

7. Historian Carlin Barton believes "the gladiator had perhaps one chance in ten to be killed in any particular bout in the arena in the first century, and much greater chance of death in the following centuries." While early gladiators were prisoners of war, by the third century about half were volunteers. Why did they volunteer? Said Tertullian, writing in the early third century CE, because "Men give them [gladiators] their souls, women their bodies too."

8. By this time, it was common for Chinese people to be given two names at birth. The first name was the clan surname, while the second was the child's personal name. The former was used to facilitate tax collection, while the latter was used to invoke divine assistance.

9. By the first century CE, gladiatorial schools existed in most important Roman cities. The head of such schools was known as a gymnasiarchos. This person (it could be a woman) had to be 30-60 years of age, have good social and political connections, and be willing to attend to the administrative and religious affairs of a school. Martial training was supervised by a man called the xystarches, or master of the guild of fencers and wrestlers. Like the gymnasiarchos, this man was politically well connected, and his job mostly involved hiring and supervising instructors. The instructors, on the other hand, were hired more for their skill than their politics. Retired soldiers, for instance, often taught archery, drill, and javelin-throwing. There were also retired athletes who taught tumbling and supervised diets, gymnastai ("trainers in nude exercises"), and paidotribes("people who massage male athletes"). And, in the most exclusive schools, there were also physicians and bonesetters. (The two occupations were at this time quite exclusive. The physicians came from the upper classes and rarely deigning to touch a body. Bonesetters and surgeons, on the other hand, usually came from the working classes, and were often retired soldiers or athletes.)

10. The contemporary Indians divided their weapons into distinct classes. (Like eighteenth century Europeans, fourth century Indians liked classifying things.) Throwing weapons included missiles thrown by machines, by hand, and by magic spells, while hand-held weapons included swords, spears, knives, and body parts. In fact, Indian scholars identified over 130 thirty different kinds of weapons!