Humanity

Chronology

1. 1050 BCE – 700 BCE (c.)

   The alphabet spreads across the Mediterranean

   Phoenician traders simplified writing into a small set of consonant signs; Greeks later added vowels, producing the ancestor of most scripts used today.

2. 911 BCE – 609 BCE

   The Neo-Assyrian empire and Nineveh's libraries

   The first true imperial system — professional army, provincial administration, royal roads — ruled from Nineveh, where kings collected tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets.

3. 750 BCE – 100 BCE (c.)

   Babylonian astronomers systematize the sky

   Late Babylonian scribes kept centuries of systematic records of celestial positions and developed mathematical schemes to predict lunar and planetary phenomena.

4. 300 BCE (c.)

   Euclid's Elements

   Euclid organized Greek geometry into axioms, definitions and proven theorems — one of the most reprinted books in history.

5. 295 BCE – 30 BCE (c.)

   The Library of Alexandria

   The Ptolemies built an institution with one aim: collect every scroll in the known world, copy it, and fund scholars to work beside it.

6. 30 CE – 100 CE (c.)

   Christianity emerges from Judea

   The teachings and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, carried by missionaries like Paul across the empire, founded communities that became the Christian church.

7. 325 CE

   The Council of Nicaea fixes a creed

   Emperor Constantine convened bishops to settle the Arian controversy; the resulting creed defined the core of Christian orthodoxy.

8. 529 CE – 534 CE

   Justinian codifies Roman law

   The Corpus Juris Civilis distilled a thousand years of Roman legal writing into an ordered body of statute, commentary and instruction.

9. 751 CE (c.)

   Papermaking crosses into the Islamic world

   After the Battle of Talas, papermaking — traditionally via captured Chinese craftsmen, more likely by gradual diffusion — reached Samarkand, then Baghdad, where mills soon supplied an empire's bureaucracy.

10. 820 CE (c.)

    Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr

    Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.

11. 830 CE – 900 CE (c.)

    Baghdad's House of Wisdom drives a translation century

    Under the Abbasids, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic and pushed the sciences far beyond their sources.

12. 850 CE – 1100 (c.)

    Bimaristans: hospitals as institutions

    Endowed public hospitals — bimaristans — spread through the Islamic world, offering care regardless of creed, with wards, teaching and medical licensing.

13. 1025 (c.)

    Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

    Avicenna's Canon organized all medical knowledge of its day into a systematic encyclopedia of diseases, drugs and clinical method.