The National Library of Canada provides an authorized mirror of this e-publication. The base document, however, is the one at http://ejmas.com/kronos. Most recent update: December 2004. Copyright © 2000-2004 Joseph R. Svinth All rights reserved.

Kronos; A Chronology of the Martial Arts and Combative Sports, represents my idiosyncratic interpretation of the history of the martial arts, combative sports, and associated philosophical topics. If you have suggestions for improvement, please let me know. If you think you can do better, please do so.

The periods covered are:

The bibliographies are at:

Online references, a summary of recent changes, and general housekeeping information are found at:

If you prefer reading traditional print format, then please see the abbreviated chronology in Thomas A. Green, Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2001). Meanwhile, if you prefer reading articles arranged topically rather than chronologically, then please see the essays in Green's encyclopedia and the chapters in Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, editors, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Greenwood, 2003).

Finally, if you want to see how Kronos has evolved over time, then please see the first edition, which appears online at http://ejmas.netfirms.com/kronos.

***

About 6 million years ago:

According to some anthropologists, ground-dwelling apes and humans share their last common ancestor, a ground-dwelling hominid called ramapithecus. Other anthropologists, however, say ramapithecus is the ancestor of orangutans, not people, and Creationists deny that either hominid was the ancestor of humans. The Creationist caveat is mentioned in all seriousness, too, as in August 1999 the Kansas State Board of Education voted to eliminate all references to evolution and discussions of the age of the earth from that state’s science curriculum.

About 5.5 million years ago:

By pouring through a 2,600-foot high waterfall near Gibraltar, the Atlantic Ocean forms the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Great Rift forms in east Africa.

About 5 million years ago:

The small ground-dwelling hominids known as Australopithecus afarensis appear in east Africa. According to many anthropologists, these are the oldest known ancestors of modern humans. However, there were at least a dozen large ground-dwelling hominids, all of which had evolutionary branches and dead ends. Therefore the straight-line hypothesis is probably too simple and therefore incorrect, and of course Creationists deny any hominid involvement at all.

About 4.1 million years ago:

Evolutionary changes to their inner ears and knees cause Australopithecus to become habitually bipedal. According to the mainstream scientific theory, Australopithecus lived on the open savanna, and their evolution facilitated omnivorous scavenging. A less accepted theory, however, is that Australopithecus spent most of their time foraging in rivers and lakes, and that the erect stance was simply a way of keeping heads above water. Supporting the latter theory is the observation that few large savanna mammals carry much body fat, whereas most aquatic mammals (and humans) carry rolls of it. Creationists deny both theories.

About 2.7 million years ago:

Hominids known as Australopithecus garhi appear in east Africa. This is the first hominid species known to have used tools to cut food.

About 2.5 million years ago:

The small hominids that Louis Leakey named Homo habilis after 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 australopithecines that had learned to knapp flint. Either way, flintknapping is the world’s oldest documented profession, popular mythology not withstanding. Flint, by the way, is a type of chalcedony (or non-crystalline) quartz. It is useful in two ways. First, it breaks with a sharp edge, thus providing a natural cutting tool. And second, it makes sparks when struck, thereby making it a slow but functional fire-starter.

About 1.7 million years ago:

The hominid species that some anthropologists call Homo ergaster moves from eastern Africa into southwestern Asia. The reason is believed to have been long-legged hunters following game migrations.

About 1.6 million years ago:

Homo erectus, or "the upright man," appears in eastern Africa. Erectus is notable for manufacturing stone cleavers by bifacial flaking. Bifacial flaking involves knapping large flint cores into smaller, more manageable 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, and the best tones come from the lava-extruded rocks today known as phonolites.)

Because erectus did not make stone ax heads or atlatl (spear-thrower) points 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 land mammal. 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, as in 1991, the New Zealand pedestrian Sandra Barwick walked 1,000 miles in just over 302 hours.

Homo erectus also knew how to make and control fire. This technology provided the species with heat, light, and a way of cooking tubers (meat was probably still eaten raw). Later, fire also became hominid species’ first weapon of mass destruction. Early fire hunters were not especially careful. Indeed, they often set forest or grass fires for the purpose of panicking game animals into jumping over cliffs. Of course, as agricultural settlements became more common, then hunters started having beaters 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 800,000 years ago:

A hominid species known as Homo antecessor flourishes in Iberia. The Gran Dolina cavern in the Spanish Sierra de Atapuerca, which contains about thirty 300,000-year-old Homo antecessor skeletons, contains about three-fourths of all known human fossils from the Middle Pleistocene.

About 700,000 years ago:

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis appears in central Europe and the Balkans. Anthropologists still debate whether Neanderthals were species separate from Homo sapiens sapiens or were instead a European sapiens community mistaken for a separate species by nineteenth century anthropologists.

Tool-using hominids spread throughout southern Asia.

About 500,000 years ago:

Hominid skulls are turned into drums, drinking cups, and bowls. The skulls might have belonged to war enemies whose spirits were being mocked or whose proteins were needed. They could have belonged to deceased relatives whose spiritual protection was needed by the still-living. Alternatively, they might have been drums, drinking cups, and bowls.

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 simple wooden spears and throwing sticks surely preceded fire-hardened weapons, these fire-hardened sticks still represent the oldest wooden weapons known to have survived 400,000 years in the ground. Fire-hardened curved sticks also have been found in gravesites in Eastern Europe, but probably these were drumsticks rather than throwing sticks. Why? Because people normally don’t expend a great deal of effort making things meant to be thrown at birds or small mammals. An exception is Australia, where Aborigines started fire-hardening the edges of their curved throwing sticks as early as 25,000 BCE. The reason for using curved sticks most likely has more to do with available materials -- both acacia and bankia species are gnarled, making strong straight pieces hard to obtain -- than preference.

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 hominid whose descendents would term "intelligent man," appears at various locations in east Africa and southwest Asia. Until recently, anthropologists believed that the biggest difference between Homo sapiens sapiens and other hominids was that Homo sapiens sapiens had a vocal tract that allowed sophisticated speech. Then Neanderthals were found to also have sophisticated hyoid bones. So the real difference may be nothing more than Homo sapiens sapiens’ development of a very large ego (something his descendents certainly have in abundance). On the other hand, there may be something to Julian Jaynes’ theories of bicameral consciousness, with sapiens’ left brain defining consciousness in the sense of "I" and the right brain providing mystical guidance in ways that were then considered divine rather than schizophrenic. If so, then I’d be more inclined to date the development of bicameral consciousness to this era than to the first millennium BCE, as Jaynes did in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

About 170,000 years ago:

According to the human gene research of the late 1990s, modern humankind’s oldest known common female ancestor lives in Africa. The oldest known common male ancestor is also African, and dates to about 59,000 years ago.

About 140,000 years ago:

Hominids (exactly which kind is debated) become the first large placental mammals in Australia. While most prehistorians state publicly that these immigrants walked there from Indonesia or New Guinea via Ice Age land bridges, there is nothing saying that some of them didn’t ride rafts. Either way, Australia becomes modern humankind’s first New World. Reading history backwards and using modern terminology, aboriginal hunting and war parties probably killed individual prey using throwing sticks (boomerang), heavy clubs (nulla-nulla), long spears, and atlatls (woomera). Dogs (or, more precisely, dingoes) don’t arrive until around 6000 BCE, however.

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, some prehistorians say that the Neanderthals invented spiritual concepts, and perhaps even religion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris, on the other hand, suggests that the burials may have been no more than a way of getting stinking, rotting bodies out of the house. 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. Therefore, as with most prehistoric matters, the answer to the question remains speculative rather than certain.

About 90,000 years ago:

People living along coastal regions of the Northern Hemisphere 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 usually gains additional space during band-and-village wars, there is little evidence to support the Victorian belief that skirmishing males ranged widely while gathering females stayed at home to raise the babies. Instead, there is just as much evidence to suggest that the females traveled with the males, gathering, cooking, sewing, and setting up and taking down the tents as they went.

About 50,000 years ago:

Homo sapiens sapiens starts spreading into southern Asia, eastern Europe, and western Africa. (Due to the global cooling that caused the Ice Ages in the Northern Hemisphere, the African ecology would have been more inviting then than now.) Bifacially-flaked tools (the chipping method was percussion) dating to this period include spear points, scrapers, and drills.

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 Amazigh ("Berber") immigrants subsequently discovered these stone weapons, they reportedly believed them to be thunderbolts left by the gods.

Ferrous (iron-rich) clays are mined in southern Africa, probably for use as cosmetics.

The aboriginal inhabitants of Japan reportedly manufacture the world’s oldest known pottery. These pots were not used for cooking, but for holding cosmetics and perfumes. Unfortunately, the archaeologist who announced the discoveries later admitted faking them. Consequently, Japanese pottery remains more reliably dated to perhaps 10,000 years ago.

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. This supposition remains conjectural, not proven.

Tally sticks appear at various locations around Eurasia and Africa. These are notched sticks used to track how many animals someone owns. (The English word "score" originally referred to the notches cut into such sticks, and the marks probably led to the creation of integers such as I, II, and III.). Tally sticks also were used during religious rituals in which participants were called upon in a specific order, and this has been offered as a possible explanation for why most cultures divide their integers into male/female or odd/even. ("Count off by twos; even numbers, stand fast!") 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. Another 20% used base-two and 9% used base-twenty. Base-four was used in less than 1% of the cultures sampled.

About 33,000 years ago:

According to some theories, Homo sapiens sapiens appears along the Pacific coast of South America. This date is not widely accepted, and is instead usually moved forward about 20,000 years. (The oldest verified archaeological site in the Americas, Chile’s Monte Verde, is dated about 14,500 years before the present, and some archaeologists doubt that, too, preferring instead the more recent Clovis site in New Mexico.) The chief argument used against all earlier dates is that the stone artifacts used to claim the greater antiquity are crude, and therefore not obviously human-made. Racism may be an issue, too, as the earlier dates suggest Australoid populations rather than Mongoloid, and there are still some people who do not want to admit the possibility that dark-skinned humans might have beaten light-skinned humans into the Americas.

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis starts becoming extinct. While theories include intraspecies violence and reduced resistance to disease, the real reason may have been interbreeding with Homo sapiens sapiens. Support for the latter belief includes a 24,500-year-old skeleton found in Portugal that shows both human and Neanderthal anatomical features.

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), they are early examples of compound weapons. (A compound weapon is, quite simply, one with parts.)

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 darts thrown by atlatls. On the other hand, atlatls are not known to have existed in Africa.) Anyway, a self-bow is 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 the weapons are not very powerful, self-bow 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 29,000 years ago:

Cordage, nets, and textiles made from woven cloth are manufactured in Central Europe.

About 25,000 years ago:

Cave paintings found in France, Spain, and Africa show stars, planets, animals, and people in various poses. Speculations concerning these paintings include the caves being schools or churches into which youths were taken so that they could be trained or initiated in preparation for adulthood. (While older art exists in Australia, no one seems quite as willing to speculate about what it means.) A few cave paintings show men wearing antlered helmets and animal skins. If modern ethnographic data can be safely read backward, then the artists either were apologizing to the spirits of the animals their hunters killed or showing 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.

Fire-hardened J-curved throwing sticks appear in Australia. The returning version known today as a boomerang dates to around 6000 BCE, and was a toy rather than a hunting weapon. (The aerodynamic principles that allow a boomerang to return make it unsatisfactory for striking targets at varying ranges.)

About 22,000 years ago:

Human settlement in Japan is definitively identified. The early settlers may have been Caucasoid (e.g., ancestors of the Ainu), but were more likely Australoid or Melanesian.

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 have traditionally dated 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:

According to the generally accepted theory, large numbers of Siberian hunters, the ancestors of the modern American Indians, cross an Ice Age land bridge into North America. It is possible, however, that there were actually a series of mass migrations into the Americas from elsewhere.

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 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 horticulture 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.

According to one geological theory, an ice comet following a flat northwesterly trajectory explodes high above the Carolina coast of North America. The 1908 explosion in Siberia was due to the explosion of an ice comet, so it is possible that the various ancient stories of the gods using thunderbolts to destroy humanity owe something to this event.

About 11,000 years ago:

Atlatl-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 darts (often misidentified as 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 precise, as it was calculated using rates of carbon-14 decay. All living creatures contain trace elements of radioactive isotopes in their body chemistry. The amount of these isotopes as a percentage of body mass remains roughly constant while the creature lives, but decrease in a predictable way after the creature’s death. This predictable rate of decrease allows for reasonable estimates of the amount of time that has passed since the creature died. That said, all carbon-14 dates before 7400 BCE are speculative. Why? Because 7400 BCE currently represents the longest continuous tree-ring series: carbon-14 in the atmosphere fluctuates from year to year, and without tree ring samples, that fluctuation cannot be precisely determined. Pioneers in radiocarbon dating include Willard F. Libby and Elizabeth Ralph, while pioneers in dendrochronology, as tree ring counting is known, include Andrew E. Douglass and Henry Michael.

Humans spread oil trees of the genus Canarium throughout the rainforests of West Africa.

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.

Humans settle Umnak and Hog Islands in the Aleutians. Although it is not known if these people walked or used boats, by 7000 BCE the Aleuts were fully equipped with the boats, harpoons, and clothes needed to hunt sea mammals.

Dogs are domesticated in North America.

Oats and lentils are domesticated in Europe and southwest Asia.

About 8000 BCE:

Some male Europeans are buried 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 southwest Asia rather than the other way around.

About 7500 BCE:

Cattle are domesticated in southeastern Europe, central Asia, and northern India.

Beans are domesticated in the Americas and southeastern 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 are scholarly debates about 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, inasmuch as the crop does not grow in the wild, the domestication represents the first known genetic modification of plants.

About 7000 BCE:

Chickens are domesticated in southeastern Asia. It is possible that the domestication was originally for fighting rather than domestic purposes.

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

6508 BCE:

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

About 6500 BCE:

Dice are manufactured in Egypt and southwest Asia. The surviving bones -- for that is what they are, sheep anklebones -- are invariably shaved. In other words, they were made for cheaters. This is hardly surprising, inasmuch as men have wagered women, goods, kingdoms, and their lives on the throws of die 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 created in Scandinavia 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 Egyptian churchmen arrived at this conclusion in 284 CE.

About 5500 BCE:

Swollen by melting glaciers, the Mediterranean breaks through a natural earthen barrier at the Bosporous to drown a huge freshwater lake and create the modern Black Sea. Due to this method of creation, below 200 meters, the water in the Black Sea was (and is) without oxygen. The result is a marine archaeologist’s dream: a world where organic material does not decay.

Copper tools begin replacing 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 before its domestication.

5500 BCE:

According to the Greek Orthodox Church, the Lord creates the world. Nicephorus, the future Patriarch of Constantinople, 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. (Note: the Ethiopian calendar also runs approximately eight years behind the Julian and Gregorian calendars.)

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 Roman Martyrology published by the Vatican in 1580, 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.

Cultivation begins along the Nile. The reason may have been a changing climate forcing African farmers to move east and north in search of water.

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. A nugget weighing 1,050 ounces came from the Ural Mountains in 1936, so probably identification of individual nuggets wasn’t all that difficult.

Ceramic pottery appears in the British Isles.

The Chinese are known to be making hemp rope and fishing nets. (Rope and twine rarely survive to be found by archaeologists.)

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 scholar of the third century CE named Censorinus, the Egyptian solar calendar begins. However, if the Egyptian calendar started out corresponding with the seasons, then a more plausible starting date is around 2773 BCE. Furthermore, 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. Still, it was a 365-day calendar, and except for missing the leap years, it worked quite well.

4004 BCE:

According to a Biblical commentary published by Bishop James Ussher in 1650 CE, the Anglican God creates the Universe. Ussher’s discovery became precise four years later, when Cambridge vice-chancellor John Lightfoot reported that Creation coincided with the beginning of the British academic year, which was 9:00 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. (In 1925, CE wags at the Scopes Monkey Trial asked if that hour was calculated using Eastern Standard or solar time. While Standard time posits the length of a day as exactly 24 hours, in solar time the period from one noon to the next can vary as much as 14 minutes shorter or 16 minutes longer than 24 hours.)

Around the same time, a black scientist named Yakub uses selective breeding to create the first people who are not black. This is a doctrinal tenet of the Nation of Islam, which was established in Detroit in 1930.

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 east and southwest Asia. Because citrons were sacred to the Sumerian snake-god Enlil, New Age writers have suggested Eve offered Adam citrons in the Garden of Eden. (The story about the fruit being an apple only dates to 405 CE.) However, Jews used citrons in their ritual Feast of Booths, and citrons appeared on Hebrew coins of the early second century BCE. Therefore, Talmudic scholarship usually portrays Eve’s offering as a pomegranate. For their part, Muslims say that the forbidden fruit was a banana. However, bananas are from southeast Asia, and only entered the Middle East after Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. Finally, some modern writers speculate that the forbidden fruit was something used in the production of intoxicants or hallucinogens whose production was originally associated with women. Examples might include grapes, apricots, or soma. Bottom line? Theologians do a lot of speculating.

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" 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. The Sumerian ceramics were often colored with antimony, a metal extracted from stibnite (antimony sulfide, Sb2S3), which is fusible in candle flame and common throughout Central and East Asia.

Farmers begin digging irrigation canals in Iraq.

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, YHWH 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 of 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. However it happened, the smiths’ need for tin (which is rare in southwest Asia, but common in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia) led to the development of long-distance trading. Doubtless, some traders found it easier to steal goods than to manufacture them. Therefore, 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. While some prehistorians conjecture that these potters’ wheels influenced the design of vehicular wheels, log-rollers seem a more likely inspiration, 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 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.

Central Asians begin riding horses. Bridles and bits were made from rope, leather, and bone.

About 3400 BCE:

Opium poppies are cultivated in 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 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 southwest Asian 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. After all, 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 I Ching, or "Classic of Changes." Started as early as the twelfth century BCE, I Ching is the third oldest Chinese text, and the scripture that the Chinese use instead of Bibles and Qur’ans to ward off zombies and soulstealers.

About 3127 BCE:

According to Indian accounts written during the sixth century BCE, Lord Krishna is born at Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh. Lord Krishna spent fourteen years there and another eleven years at a nearby town called Jumna. At the beginning of the Kaliyuga cycle, Krishna 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 due to some 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 ascension 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. By the way, the 432,000-year cycle probably has nothing to do with psychological archetypes, the procession of the equinoxes, or alien transmissions, and everything to do with base-sixty. Lacking zeroes and using base-sixty, the Indians and Babylonians wrote 432,000 as II, and as such, it represented their first very large round number.

About 3100 BCE:

A Sudanese warrior known as Mena or Narmer forcibly unites Egypt and Syria with the Sudan, thereby establishing himself as Egypt’s first Pharaoh. This is known because Egyptian court reporters simultaneously began 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 early 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, some African prehistorians have said that because Mena was Sudanese, writing must have a black African origin. Either way, no one knows who the Egyptian clerks were, nor 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 did not appear until the development of chariot-borne archery during the sixteenth century BCE. Why? Because the armor weighed too much to walk around in.) Magical weapons were also probable, given the Biblical evidence, but are not as easily documented using archaeological sources.

About 3000 BCE:

Copper is smelted in Malaya.

Throughout Eurasia, 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 CE, nor were opium’s addictive qualities described until 1613 CE.

The Phoenicians and Minoans (the latter is 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 waged war using slings, spears, and lances. (Although 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. The percussion implied magical powers and divine intervention, provided amusement during festivals and sewing bees, and gave 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 the years in that 12-year cycle date to the ninth or tenth century CE. The creators of those names were Buddhist astrologers interested in 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 spearheads and axes have been found at archaeological digs throughout China. (Although the green soapstone sold to tourists is fragile, true jade -- that is, nephrite and jadite -- is so hard to break that the Chinese even make anvils of the stuff.) Nevertheless, 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 CE list of "spices" included 288 different items, of which the less-tasty ones included turpentine, frankincense, and gold leaf.

A great flood occurs in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Although not featured in Babylonian writings and the Bible, there was a much larger flood in the Pacific Northwest 16,000 years earlier.

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 2780 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 reconstructed remains of a tower at Jericho that date to around 8350 BCE, and reconstructed temple ruins on Malta that date to around 3250 BCE.

About 2700 BCE:

The Phoenicians give names to the constellations. While the development may have had astrological purposes, it was also a mnemonic system, for as late as the sixteenth century, astrologically based mnemonic systems were common in seafaring European nations.

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. Therefore, yew bows were generally aristocratic hunting weapons instead of war weapons. (Although fourteenth century English kings used Portuguese yew to equip corps of mercenary archers, what people did in the fourteenth century is not necessarily indicative of what people did in more ancient times.)

2697 BCE:

According to documents written between the sixth century BCE and the third century CE, Wang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, rules China. Wang-ti is subsequently credited inventing many things, including the animistic philosophy known as Taoism and modern sports such as archery, wrestling, swordsmanship, and football. Legends aside, Taoism is more conclusively dated to the sixth century BCE, perhaps as part of the folk response to the more rigid philosophies known as Confucianism and Legalism. The link to sport meanwhile was only established in 1926, three years before the Smithsonian Institute began the first archaeological digs in China. The creator of the latter stories was Professor Gunsun Hoh of Peking’s Tsing Hua College. In 1939, L.K. Kiang repeated Hoh’s claims almost verbatim, and they have since been accepted uncritically by most students of the East Asian martial arts.

2640 BCE:

According to tradition, silk is domesticated in China. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that this traditional date is 600 years too early.

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. Although astrologers claim that base-sixty was due to Sumerian astrologers’ knowledge of lunar cycles, surviving Sumerian arithmetic problems included questions such as "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?" (Three years, two hundred eighty-seven days.) Therefore, it seems more likely that base-sixty was really owed to Sumerian merchants combining some existing base-five and base-twelve counting system.

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. Therefore, a more likely source for the story of Icarus is an 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:

By making his sons into regional governors and his daughters into the high priestesses of the Moon-Goddess, the Akkadian warrior known as Sharru-kin ("Legitimate King") creates Mesopotamia’s first important military dynasty. Sharru-kin (known today as Sargon the Great) is also famous for being the first southwest Asian 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) supported by militia raised 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 dating puts the Flood about 800 years after the last archaeologically verifiable massive flooding of the Euphrates. Ancient Babylonian accounts say that after the latter flood, the Earth Goddess punished the mischievous male god who caused it, but if Ussher was aware of these stories, doubtless he dismissed them as mere superstition.

2333 BCE:

In October, Tan’gun Wang’gom, the legendary progenitor of the Korean people, ascends to heaven. The name translates as "the most honorable chief who descended from heaven and assumed human form." The base document is called Samguk Yusa, and the oldest known copy dates to 1279 CE.

About 2300 BCE:

A map depicting the Mesopotamian city of Lagash is carved into a stone tablet held in the lap of a Sumerian god. Equivalent maps were also made at Luxor, in Egypt, about the same time, or perhaps a little earlier.

Donkey-mounted couriers begin carrying written messages about Iraq and Iran. Originally, these imperial messengers, called angaros in 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. As about 2,000 meteorites fall on earth during the typical year, meteoric iron is common throughout the world. While the Ka’bah in Mecca is probably the world’s most famous iron meteorite, the largest was found near Grootfontein, Namibia, in 1920. For those who were wondering, the latter is a 60-65 ton block of iron shale measuring about 9 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 3-1/4 feet thick.

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 Noah’s sons lived 40-60 years rather than the 400-600 years described in the genealogies, 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. For example, 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.

Silver begins to be separated from lead ores. At the time, the lead was probably the more valuable industrial metal.

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, northern Chinese farmers were reliably reported playing head-butting contests during the third century BCE, and similar head-butting games are still played in 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 known wrestling manual appears as frescoes 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. Although often called a Celtic construction, the Gallic Celts did not arrive in southern England until the sixth century BCE. Likewise, the story about it being a Druid temple only dates to the seventeenth century; before that, the English believed it some Roman or Saxon construction. Meanwhile, an unidentified culture places 167 large stones in an ellipse at Mzoura, Morocco, about 30 miles southwest of Tangier. Prehistorians speculate that both constructions served astronomical functions. For example, Stonehenge is said to measure the 19-year cycle of lunar eclipses while Mzoura is said to align with the setting sun during spring and autumn. However, given enough stones and a little imagination, anything can be made to align with anything. Consequently, these alignments might just be examples of the Law of Small Numbers, which mathematician Underwood Dudley defines as "Coincidences happen."

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.

1829 BCE:

According to the twelfth century CE Irish Book of Invasions, the Tailltenn Games are established near modern Telltown, Ireland. These games featured singing, wrestling, and racing, took place about August 1, and commemorated Tailltu, the mother of a pre-Christian sun god named Lugh (pronounced Lew, but nonetheless sometimes anglicized as Lammas).

About 1800 BCE:

Sumerian astronomers, many of whom were female, are reported trying to predict and control the weather. Their meteorological methods are a subsequent root of Hellenistic astrology, as are their 60-minute hours and 360-degree circles. Hellenistic, by the way, is more accurate than "Greek," as the people known as the ancient Greeks spoke various languages, many of which were not Greek. Macedonian, for example, is a Slavonic language. Additionally, many Hellenes did not live in Greece. Troy, for example, is on the Dardanelles coast of Turkey. Nevertheless, these people shared a common culture. Accordingly, historians use the word "Hellenic" to describe the very insular pre-Alexandrian Greek culture, and the word "Hellenistic" to describe the more cosmopolitan post-Alexandrian Greek culture. (For convenience, historians date the change to 337 BCE, when Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon, united the previously antagonistic Hellenic city-states behind an invasion of Iran.) In addition, while it is commonly said that Sumerian astrology influenced Vedic, or Indian astrology, this is probably ethnocentrism rather than documented fact. Moreover, even if they did, the Indian methods clearly diverged. To give just one example, Vedic astrologers divide the day into 60 parts (nalika) each having 24 minutes rather than the other way around.

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 legend dating to 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 Central Asian victory over Chinese armies circa 1523 BCE. Either way, Shang armies, like those of the Eastern Mediterranean, consisted of several dozen chariot-mounted aristocrats and some unarmored servants. Archaeological discoveries show that Shang 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 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 the mountain of spare parts and feed needed to support each vehicle. Moreover, 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 this theory sounds plausible, Atlantis also has been sited in Greece, Turkey, South America, and Plato’s imagination. For what it’s worth, the prophet of sunken Atlantis in modern times was Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, who published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, in 1881.

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 animals. The gods were then tempted to change their minds through the sacrifice of certain parts to sacred flames. 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, the priests and aristocrats got the good cuts, and the 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. Since industrious men could produce 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.

Baltic amber becomes a major trade commodity throughout Europe. Called elektron by the Greeks, the 40 million-year old fossilized pine resin was thought to possess magical powers. Therefore it was often worn as a bead or amulet, or made into rosaries.

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 (an alloy of copper and zinc) 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 Iliad, some prehistorians speculate that the boxing was part of some Minoan funeral ritual. But that is not certain, especially since the Iliad was written 700 years later by people from another culture, and much "Minoan" artwork is forged. 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 a spirit being, thereby earning the title of "Israel," or "wrestler with God." There is some controversy about Jacob’s winning technique. The Christian Bible, for example, credits Jacob’s victory to his refusing to give in even after his opponent grabbed him by the genitals ("the sinew which shrank, that is upon the hollow of the thigh"). The Jewish tradition, however, has Jacob continuing despite an injury to his sciatic nerve, which in turn explains why the sciatic nerve is discarded during kosher preparation of meat. The nature of Jacob’s opponent is also debated. For example, Christian theologians typically say it was an apparition of God. Jews, on the other hand, say that it was the guardian angel of Jacob’s brother Esau, and that the victory symbolizes Jacob’s spiritual victory over Esau.

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, Syria, 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 Olmec culture arises around Tabasco and Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Olmec means "people of the region of rubber" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. Accordingly, it is a historiographical term created by Marshall Saville in 1929 rather than a name these people used for themselves. Indeed, what they called themselves is not known. Many Olmec sculptures have "African features" (that is, everted lips and flat noses). Therefore, 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 have speculated that Shang-era refugees were simultaneously introducing Chinese culture and artifacts to Peru and Costa Rica. For his part, Charles Wicke claims that the Olmecs were originally from Oaxaca and Guerrero on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, and only gradually moved east. Finally, Mexican art historians state that the artists were Mayans. To them, the Olmec statues depict kings as manifestations of the jaguar god. All this is to say that nationalism often colors historians’ interpretations.

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 to introduce 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 people rooting through the remains of wind-driven fires making the discovery. (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.

Swords (that is, metal blades that are more than twice as long as their handles and equally usable for cutting, thrusting, and guarding) are made 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 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 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.

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 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.) The pharaohs often prided themselves on their archery, too. 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 funerary supplies. These slings were several feet long and were made of plaited linen. Their purpose was probably to scare birds from heavenly fields, as the story of David and Goliath notwithstanding, the military use of slings in the region was militarily uncommon until the seventh century BCE. The advent of military slings was owed in part to the development of aerodynamically efficient missiles made of cast lead. The weight of these projectiles was typically a couple of ounces, or 20 to 50 grams. Effective range was around 200 yards, while maximum range was around 400. Rhodians and Balearic Islanders were particularly famous for their skill with slings.

Around 1345 BCE:

A Hittite horse trainer ("Kikkuli") describes a new method for training chariot horses. As his technical terms were Mittani (an Iranian people living in Mesopotamia and Syria), 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.

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 southwest Asia. 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 Rig Veda ("Knowledge Hymn") provides a textual reference to hereditary castes in India. In these documents, 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. Purusha’s two thighs became wealthy merchants and landowners (vaishya) and his two feet became farmers and artisans (shudra). The Rig Veda also reported the god Indra defeating the demon Vrtra by attacking his vital spots. This is the first known description of vital point striking. But as no particular details are provided, the description may be legendary.

About 1275 BCE:

To keep their calendar in step with the seasons, Chinese astrologers add intercalary months to their lunar calendars. The mathematical calculations involved are not simple, and as late as the seventeenth century errors were still being corrected. Accordingly, Chinese dates earlier than the ninth century BCE that are not supported by archeological data should be treated with suspicion, and all dates that are not supported by external data should be treated with caution.

An Egyptian army commanded by the 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," "runners," and "strong-arm boys." (Shooters were dismounted archers used to protect remudas or chase guerrillas through the mountains. "Runners" were the light infantrymen who followed the chariots. Strong-arm boys were the men who protected noblemen and their supplies.) The rest were engineers, support personnel, and camp followers. A speculation: did the entertainment provided by 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 Akkadian root-word hepiru means "vagrants," and refers to the Semitic peoples who served as mercenaries in the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Hittite armies.

According to the story of Jason and the Argonauts, a Lakedaimonian (Spartan) 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, weaved, and feinted, and ultimately battered the larger man into bloody submission. While a fine story, the strategies and techniques described may reflect the boxing of the third century BCE, when Apollonius Rhodius put Jason’s tale into its final form, rather than the thirteenth. Nevertheless, the story may describe Europe’s first recorded gold rush – according to Strabo, Hellenic sluice boxes were hollowed trees and their separators were sheepskins. Hence, the Golden Fleece.

Mycenaean funeral rites are described as including high-stepping dances performed by 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 BCE. 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 rather 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, namely "Thou shalt not kill," evidently did not apply outside the community. 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 Hebrew practice involved removing the penises of uncircumcised enemies and the right hands of circumcised enemies.) Similar practices remain popular in Lebanon. For example, in 1976 the French photographer Catherine Leroy observed Palestinian and Lebanese fighters routinely castrating still-living prisoners.

About 1210 BCE:

According to Homer, the Fates give Achilleus, golden-haired 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 Iliad. This dilemma has recurred throughout history, and as recently as 1991 it was suggested that the Chinese American actor Bruce Lee chose an early death and cinematic fame to a long life and historic oblivion. (Another recurring theme is the hero’s mother not being so pleased by the son’s decision.)

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 a Hellenic Volkwanderung, and called the raiders the "peuples de la mer." Although never really proven, by the 1920s, Maspero’s theories were accepted as scientific fact. Consequently, the "Sea Peoples" are often 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. In 1942, Gordon Childe suggested that the destruction had a technological basis. (He believed it was owed to Anatolian smiths discovering a method for making cheap iron swords and arrowheads.) However, in 1968 Jane Waldbaum showed that 96% of twelfth century eastern Mediterranean weapons were made of bronze instead of iron. Therefore, metallurgy wasn’t the answer. Accordingly, Robert Drews argued in 1993 that the destruction was 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. My reasoning is that the ancient Kirghiz were known as the Wooden Horse people, after their practice of traveling about on skis. While the Finnish epic Kalevala describes a magic elk built of timber and willow branches, the Kalevala was only collected during the nineteenth century. Be that as it may, while Homer attributed the causes of the Trojan War to the wrath of Achilleus and the beauty of Helen, modern scholars usually 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 receive mementos of the dead. George MacDonald Fraser wrote 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. Geoffrey’s story was particularly popular during the fourteenth century, a time when it seemed that Britain 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:

According to tradition, King Wan and his son, Tan, the Duke of Chou, patronize the publication of I Ching ("Classic of Changes"). King Wan is also attributed with increasing the number of the linear diagrams shown in I Ching from their original eight to their modern sixty-four. Modern accounts often attribute the Dukes of Chou with introducing wrestling and archery. However, as these claims are based on documents written centuries later, this may represent temporal compression. Ceremonial archery exhibitions, for example, do not seem to have been common in China until after 600 BCE.

1122 BCE:

According to tradition, a Chinese prince called Chi-tzu establishes the Choson Dynasty in what is now North Korea. However, the tradition does not appear in written sources until after the Chinese Han Dynasty invaded Korea during 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 the astrologers were using a base-sixty mathematical system.

Arab women start riding dromedary camels. Pre-Islamic Arab society was matristic, and the 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, apparently to train 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 northern Chinese Duke 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, Duke Wu 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. The 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 five stones and a sling to slay a Philistine named Goliath. David’s weapon may have been similar to the Palestinian tribal slings of the 1930s, which were about 30 inches long and made from woven wool. The slinger hooked his right forefinger through a loop while holding the other end with his finger, and then wound the sling as if it were the propeller on a rubber-powered airplane. With a two-ounce projectile, maximum range was about 200 yards, and effective range was about 60. The general belief that Goliath was a giant is probably owed to confusion with I Chronicles 11:22-23, where Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, slew an Egyptian who was seven and a half feet tall using the Egyptian’s own spear. II Samuel 21:19 adds that Goliath carried a spear "like unto a weaver’s beam. " However, this was Goliath the Gittite, and his killer was Elhanan, son of Jarre-Oregim. Goliath the Gittite’s unusual weapon may have been a sling-launched javelin. (Although sling-launched javelins were unusual in Judea, they were used in Thessaly and there were Hellenic mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean world.) Maximum range for sling-launched javelins is over 200 yards, but due to the size of the projectile, effective range was about 30.

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 called Herakles (Latin: Hercules).

Caravans link India with Tibet and sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean. While archaeological proof for caravan routes between China and Iran only becomes certain during the first century BCE, earlier trade is likely there, too.

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

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," northern 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. Furthermore, 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, male historians often say 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. 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. (His training methods were subsequently immortalized in the movie Rocky.) 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. Hausa dambe boxers are predominantly young men belonging to the butchers’ guild. Gurkhas test their khukuris and their strength by slicing bulls’ necks during Hindu festivals. The bulls killed in Iberian bullfights are taken to slaughterhouses and butchered, and the father of the Spanish matador Francisco Rivera Paquirri (gored to death during a fight televised in Spain on September 26, 1984) was a butcher. In 1952, the Korean professional wrestler Mas Oyama was filmed karate-chopping an ox outside a Japanese slaughterhouse. And on it goes. Smiths, meanwhile, are associated with sword dances. For example, smiths organized the Marcusbrüdern and other medieval European fencing guilds, and as recently as the seventeenth century medical texts urged that one treat the sword with the same salve as the injury. Therefore, there may be some sympathetic magic going on here. 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. Smiths meanwhile made those implements of death, and therefore may feel some remorse about the way that they are used. (The animals know what is coming and don’t like it much.) Anyway, I believe this theory fits the facts better than any alternatives that I’ve seen. For instance, while flagellants beat themselves and Aztec priests augured the future using 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 also do not seem to apply. (Typical peasant recreations included football, wrestling, foot racing, and drinking.) Nor do nomad recreations, for usually tribal people 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 is left? Butchers and smiths. Of course, all this 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 Roman historians writing in the second century CE, the Phoenician Queen Dido establishes Carthage (near modern Tunis). Carthage became the Phoenician capital following the fall of Byblus, Sidon, and Tyre to Alexander the Great five centuries later, and was the scene of epic 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 may been created by different poets. The truth is probably unknowable. (Our modern versions only date to the third century BCE, by which time they were already legendary.) Nonetheless, these two epics created Western literature’s prototypical soldier-kings, namely "The Man of Pain (Odysseus) and the "Heroic Failure" (Achilleus).

According to tradition, an unnamed scribe records the words of the Boeotian poet Hesiod, whose work Theogony described the Hellenic deities. However, the surviving texts appear to be gleaned from various sources rather than prepared by one scribe and poet.

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 was 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 immunity from all types of weapons. Since Hanuman did stay celibate and loyal, he eventually became the patron saint of many subsequent Indian soldiers and wrestlers. This celibacy probably gave rise to the Indian saying, langoot ka saccha, "Be true to your trunks."

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

King Midas of the golden touch dies in what is today central Turkey. There does not seem to have been great sadness at his passing, as the mourners at the sealing of the Phrygian king’s tomb spilled enough grape wine, barley beer, honey mead, and food to give archaeologists insight into the menu. (Barbecued sheep and goat, lentils, and olive oil, among other things.)

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. Furthermore, 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:

Swords appear in China. These early Chinese weapons were generally made of hammered bronze. While the Chinese worked terrestrial iron from about 1000 BCE, until the fourth century BCE they used it mainly for tipping plows.

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 similar games held at 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 promachoi [dueling nobles] were 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 (who, with Amos, was among the earliest Hebrew writers). 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 apparently 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 becomes 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.

701 BCE:

The Assyrian army withdraws from Israel without conquering Jerusalem. Although the Hebrews attributed their salvation to divine intervention, the Assyrians probably attributed it to the timely arrival of an Egyptian army. The Egyptian general, Taharqa, was born in southern Sudan, and like most of his soldiers, he was black African. The Kushite military included cavalry, chariots, javelin men, and archers.

About 700 BCE:

A Chinese text written in the sixth century BCE ranks wrestling as a military skill on a par with archery and chariot racing. Early Chinese wrestling was called shuai chiao ("leg-bone wrestling"), and it consisted of standing jacket wrestling combined with elbow locks. As far as can be determined, 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.

Ancestors of the Mayans establish the city of Tikal in central Guatemala. The reason probably had to do with a local 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 southwest Asian cultures 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 possible that they danced because simply because they enjoyed it.

An Iranian people known as the Scythians uses 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 after 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 dambe boxing, 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 also appeared 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:

On the eleventh day of the second month of the lunar calendar, Jinmu, grandson of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, declares the inauguration of Imperial rule in Japan. This story first appeared in a Chinese-language text published in Japan in 720 CE, and from 1600-1945, it was widely accepted as fact.

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. Unfortunately the latter attribution is not certain, as the oldest statue honoring an Olympic pankratiast was only dated 536 BCE. In pankration, competitors were allowed to punch, kick, or wrestle. Although twentieth century Germans said that pankration was a fight to the death, contemporaries said that the sport 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.

632 BCE:

According to a fourth century BCE Chinese text, the Prince of Chin has dreams of wrestling. The oldest archaeological evidence of Chinese wrestling, however, only dates to the Warring States Period (403-256 BCE).

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 ("The Old Camel Man") flourishes in Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. While the dating is suspect, the Zoroastrian faith featured powerful invisible gods pitted against equally powerful foes called satans ("adversaries") and described those gods as speaking to men from burning bushes. (Cynics note that natural gas fires are common throughout the area frequented by Zoroastrians, and as recently as the 1890s, hallucinatory schizophrenia caused at least 7% of men and 12% of women aged 20-29 to hear voices or see apparitions.) 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, which included many oral traditions, is the source of many of the legendary tales of early China.

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 with 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 covered with 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.) Accordingly, 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 represent the oldest surviving Biblical inscriptions.

585 BCE:

According to accounts written many years after the fact, the Hellenic mathematician Thales of Miletus becomes the first person to predict a solar eclipse. Ten years later, Thales also was said to be the first Hellenic philosopher to discuss whether water, air, fire, or earth provided the underlying principle for the cosmos. (In Greek, Kósmos means "order".) 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, Zoroastrian influence is possible.

About 580 BCE:

Women are reported