Ancient Civilizations: Mesopotamia to Rome

It lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in modern-day Iraq.

Cuneiform

One of the earliest written law codes, issued by King Hammurabi of Babylon around 1754 BCE. Punishments often followed “an eye for an eye” and varied by social class.

The Nile

Through the Rosetta Stone, which had the same decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Jean-François Champollion cracked it in 1822.

Khufu, around 2560 BCE, during the Old Kingdom

Known for grid-planned streets, standardized bricks and covered drainage systems. Its script is still undeciphered.

Animal bones and turtle shells used for divination in Shang dynasty China. Their inscriptions are the earliest known Chinese writing.

The Mandate of Heaven

Became China's first emperor and standardized writing, coins, weights and measures; linked earlier walls into an early Great Wall; and was buried with the Terracotta Army.

Trade along the Silk Road Invention of paper A civil service based on Confucian learning

Confucius

The Phoenicians

Monotheism: belief in one God. Judaism later influenced Christianity and Islam.

Cleisthenes, whose reforms around 508 BCE gave power to an assembly of male citizens.

Sparta was a military state: boys trained as soldiers from age 7 and it was ruled by two kings and a council of elders. Athens focused on trade, the arts and direct democracy.

The Spartan stand at Thermopylae came just before Salamis, also in 480 BCE.

Athens and its Delian League against Sparta and its allies. Sparta won.

The period after Alexander the Great's conquests (died 323 BCE) when Greek culture blended with Persian, Egyptian and Indian cultures.

Two consuls elected each year, a Senate of patricians and assemblies of citizens. The plebeians later gained tribunes to protect them.

The Twelve Tables

Rome against Carthage (264–146 BCE). Rome won and destroyed Carthage, despite Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants in the Second Punic War.

His adopted heir Octavian later became Augustus.

Augustus (from 27 BCE). His reign began the Pax Romana, about 200 years of relative peace.

Issued the Edict of Milan (313 CE), legalizing Christianity, and founded Constantinople as a new capital.

476

Ashoka, who spread Buddhist ideas through edicts carved on pillars and rocks.

Advances in math (the concept of zero, the decimal place-value system), astronomy, medicine and art.

The Olmec