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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.
 

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