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.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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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.
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.
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.
Chronology
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.
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.
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.
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.