From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 8,000 BCE to 300 BCE Timeline

According to one theory about the origins of counting and writing developed by Denise Schmand-Besserat, around 8000 BCE the Palaeolithic notched tallies representing the simplest form of counting—in one-to-one correspondence—are superseded by Neolithic tokens in various geometric forms suited for concrete counting. This invention is thought to have been used for about 5000 years prior to the use of abstract numbers which lead to writing about 3500 BCE, and then to mathematics about 2600 BCE. Tokens follow basic geometric forms, such as spheres, tetrahedrons, cones, cylinders, discs, quadrangles, triangles. They are first kept in baskets, leather pouchs, clay bowls, and later within clay bullas. 

In April 2003 Dr. Garman Harbottle of the Brookaven National Laboratory in New and a team of archaeologists a the University Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province announce that signs carved into what appear to be 8600 year-old-tortoise shells may be the earliest written words. Other authorities urge caution regarding the dating of this material. The symbols may have been recorded in the late Stone Age or Neolithic Age. The symbols also bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynastry (1700-1100 BCE).

"The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols incribed on the tortoise shells.

"The shells were found buried with human remains 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, Western China.

"The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600-6200 BC."

Catal Huyuk, or Çatalhöyük (pronounced [ʧɑtɑl højyk] in Turkish; also Çatal Höyük and Çatal Hüyük, or any of the three without diacritics; çatal is Turkish for "fork", höyük for "mound"), a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, of which the lowest layers date from around 7500 BCE, is the largest and best preserved Neolithic site found to date. It was first discovered in 1961.

A wallpainting found at this site may be the earliest landscape painting known, or it may be a map. However, some archaeologists have suggested that it is more likely a painting of a leopard skin instead of a landscape including a volcano, or a decorative geometric design instead of a map. The painting is preserved in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.

It is thought that Egyptian hieroglyphs evolve from symbols drawn on pottery produced by the Gerzean culture in Egypt.

Created by the Sumerians about 3000 BCE (with predecessors reaching to the late 4th millennium or about the period of Uruk IV; 3300-3100 BCE), cuneiform writing begins as a system of pictographs written with styli in  clay tablets.

Over time, the pictographs will become simplified and more abstract.

The latest use of cuneiform will occur in 75 CE.

The Narmer Palette, found during excavations at Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar) in the 1890s, is one of the earliest surviving records of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The pith of the Papyrus plant is used in Egypt at least as far back as the First dynasty, for boats, mattresses, mats and as a writing surface.

"The English word papyrus derives, via Latin, from Greek πάπυρος papyros. Greek has a second word for papyrus, βύβλος byblos (said to derive from the name of the Phoenician city of Byblos). The Greek writer Theophrastus, who flourished during the 4th century BC, uses papuros when referring to the plant used as a foodstuff and bublos for the same plant when used for non-food products, such as cordage, basketry, or a writing surface. The more specific term βίβλος biblos, which finds its way into English in such words as bibliography, bibliophile, and bible, refers to the inner bark of the papyrus plant. Papyrus is also the etymon of paper, a similar substance."

"The first securely datable mathematical table in world history comes from the Sumerian city of Shuruppag, c. 2600 BCE. The table is ruled into three columns on each side with ten rows on the front or obverse side. The first columns of the obverse list length measures from c. 3.6km to 360 m in descending units of 360 m, followed by the Sumerian word sa ('equal' and/ or 'opposite') while the final column gives their products in area measure. Only six rows are extant or partially preserved on the reverse. They continue the table in smaller units, from 300 to 60 m in 60 m steps, and then perhaps (in the damaged and missing lower half) from 56 to 6 m in 6 m steps. While the table is organized along two axes, there is just one axis of calculation, namely, the horizontal multiplications. Around a thousand tablets were excavated from Shuruppage, almost all of them from houses and buildings which burned down in a city-wide fire in about 2600 BCE, but sadly we have no detailed context for this table because its excavation number was lost or never recorded." (Eleanor Robson, "Tables and tabular formatting in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, 2500 BCE-50" IN: Campbell-Kelly et al [eds]. The History of Mathematical Tables from Sumer to Spreadsheets [2003] 27-29).

The Instructions of Shuruppak, one of the earliest surviving literary works, are a Sumerian "wisdom" text. This is a genre of literature common in the Ancient Near East intended to teach proper piety, inculcate virtue and preserve community standing.

The text is set in great antiquity by its incipit: "In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years". The precepts are placed in the mouth of a king "Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu": Ubara-Tutu was the last king of Sumer before the universal deluge.

The oldest known copy of the Instructions of Shuruppak was the Abu Salabikh Tablet found at Abu Salabikh, near near the site of ancient Nippur in Central Babylonia (now southern Iraq). It marks the site of a small Sumerian city of the mid third millennium BCE.

Abu Salabikh was excavated by an American expedition from the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1963 and 1965, and was a British concern for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (1975–89), after which excavations were suspended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

"The city, built on a rectilinear plan in Early Uruk times, revealed a small but important repertory of cuneiform texts on some 500 tablets, of which the originals were stored in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, and were largely lost when the museum was looted in the early stages of the Second Iraq War; fortunately they had been carefully published."

Probably the most famous original document of Babylonian mathematics is Plimpton 322,  preserved in the G. A. Plimpton Collection on the history of mathematics at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It contains the only true mathematical table surviving from Old Babylonian mathematics.

"This cuneiform tablet has a table of four columns and 15 rows of numbers in the cuneiform script of the period. The table appears to be a listing of Pythagorean triples, whole numbers that are a solution to the Pythagorean theorem, a² + b² = c², such as (3,4,5)."

"Plimpton 322 is a partly broken clay tablet, approximately 13cm wide, 9cm tall, and 2cm thick. New York publisher George A. Plimpton purchased the tablet from an archaeological dealer, Edgar J. Banks, in about 1922, and bequeathed it with the rest of his collection to Columbia University in the mid 1930s. According to Banks, the tablet came from Senkereh, a site in southern Iraq corresponding to the ancient city of Larsa.^"

". . . based on formatting similarities with other tablets from Larsa that have explicit dates written on them, Plimpton 322 can be dated to the period 1822–1784 BCE."

The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (also Kahun Papyrus, Kahun Medical Papyrus, or UC 32057) is the oldest known medical text of any kind. It was found at El-Lahun by Flinders Petrie in 1889  and first translated by F. Ll. Griffith in 1893 and published in The Petrie Papyri: Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob.

The papyrus concerns women's complaints—gynaecological diseases, fertility, pregnancy, and contraception. "The text is divided into thirty-four sections, each section dealing with a specific problem and containing diagnosis and treatment, no prognosis is suggested. Treatments are non surgical, comprising applying medicines to the affected body part or swallowing them. The womb is at times seen as the source of complaints manifesting themselves in other body parts."

In contrast to the scarcity of original sources for Egyptian mathematics, preserved on the relatively fragile medium of papyrus, our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived from several thousand extremely durable clay tablets written in Cuneiform script excavated since the beginning of the nineteenth century.  "The majority of recovered clay tablets date from 1800 to 1600 BC, and cover topics which include fractions, algebra, quadratic and cubic equations, the Pythagorean theorem, and the calculation of Pythagorean triples and possibly trigonometric functions (see Plimpton 322).

Dating from the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt, the Rhind Mathematial Papyrus is the most significant document of Egyptian mathematics. It was copied by the scribe Ahmes from a now-lost text from the reign of Amenemhat III (12th dynasty). The manuscript  is 33 cm tall and over 5 meters long, and is written in hieratic script. It is dated  Year 33 of the Hyksos king Apophis and also contains a separate later Year 11 on its verso likely from his successor, Khamudi.

"In the opening paragraphs of the papyrus, Ahmes presents the papyrus as giving 'Accurate reckoning for inquiring into things, and the knowledge of all things, mysteries...all secrets'."

Alexander Henry Rhind, a Scottish antiquarian, purchased the papyrus in 1858 in Luxor, Egypt.  It was apparently found during illegal excavations in or near the Ramesseum. The British Museum, where the papyrus is now kept, acquired it in 1864 along with the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll, also owned by Rhind.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the most detailed and sophisticated of the extant medical papyri, is the only surviving copy of part of an ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery. and is the world's oldest surgical treatise. Written in the hieratic script of the ancient Egyptian language,  it is based on material from a thousand years earlier. It consists of a list of 48 traumatic injury cases, with a description of the physical examination, treatment and prognosis of each. It is preserved in the New York Academy of Medicine.

"The text begins by addressing injuries to the head, and continues with treatments for injuries to neck, arms and torso, where the text breaks off. Among the treatments are closing wounds with sutures (for wounds of the lip, throat, and shoulder), preventing and curing infection with honey and mouldy bread, and stopping bleeding with raw meat. Immobilisation was often advised for head and spinal cord injuries, which is still in practice today in the short-term treatment of some injuries. The use of magic for treatment is resorted to in only one case (Case 9).

"The papyrus also describes anatomical observations in exquisite detail. It contains the first known descriptions of the cranial sutures, the meninges, the external surface of the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the intracranial pulsations. The papyrus shows that the heart, vessels, liver, spleen, kidneys, ureters and bladder were recognized, and that the blood vessels were known to be connected to the heart. Other vessels are described, some carrying air, some mucus, while two to the right ear are said to carry the breath of life, and two to the left ear the breath of death. The physiological functions of organs and vessels remained a complete mystery to the ancient Egyptians."

Written in Hieratic, the 110 page Papyrus Ebers is the most extensive surviving record of ancient Egyptian medicine.  "It contains many incantations meant to turn away disease-causing demons and there is also evidence of a long tradition of empirical practice and observation.

"The papyrus contains a "treatise on the heart". It notes that the heart is the center of the blood supply, with vessels attached for every member of the body. The Egyptians seem to have known little about the kidneys and made the heart the meeting point of a number of vessels which carried all the fluids of the body — blood, tears, urine and sperm.

"Mental disorders are detailed in a chapter of the papyrus called the Book of Hearts. Disorders such as depression and dementia are covered. The descriptions of these disorders suggest that Egyptians conceived of mental and physical diseases in much the same way.

"The papyrus contains chapters on contraception, diagnosis of pregnancy and other gynaecological matters, intestinal disease and parasites, eye and skin problems, dentistry and the surgical treatment of abscesses and tumors, bone-setting and burns."

Like the Edwin Smith Papyrus, Edwin Smith bought the Ebers Papyrus in 1862. It was said to have been found between the legs of a mummy in the Assassif district of the Theban necropolis. It remained in Smith's collection until at least 1869 when it was offered for sale in the catalog of an antiquities dealer, described as "a large medical papyrus in the possession of Edwin Smith, an American farmer of Luxor." It was purchased in 1872 by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers. It is preserved in the University of Leipzig Library.

"The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two acrophonic glyphs, found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age (from ca. the 15th century BC), by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician. About a dozen incriptions written in Proto-Canaanite have been discovered in modern-day Israel and Lebanon.

"While a descendant script from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is also the parent script of Phoenician, itself the ancestor of nearly every alphabet in use today, from Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Roman, and Berber in the West to Thai, Mongol, and perhaps Hangul in the East. The Hebrew alphabet remains the closest to its predecessor, as only the form of the letters has been modified—unsurprising, since Hebrew is a Canaanite language and had, in its original pronunciation, roughly the same set of consonants as the dialect that the alphabet was devised for."

The most complete and "standard" Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literary fiction, was written in standard Babylonian, a dialect of Akkadian that was only used for literary purposes, and compiled by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE out of older legends. It was recorded on twelve cuneiform tablets. These were among about 1200 tablets from  the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh discovered by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849. The deciphering of the twelve tablets in 1872 by George Smith at the British Museum, caused this epic to be rediscovered by the world. The tablets are preserved in the British Museum.

Writing begins when it represents sounds and consists of symbols that are able to record language.

"The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; pinyin: jiǎgǔwén; literally 'shell-bone-script'). These were identified by scholars in 1899 on pieces of bone and turtle shell being sold as medicine, and by 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiǎotún (小屯) village at Ānyáng in Hénán Province, where official archaeological excavations in 1928–1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, about 1/5 of the total discovered. The inscriptions were records of the divinations performed for or by the royal Shāng household. The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system, attested from the late Shang Dynasty (1200–1050 BC). Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known oracle bone script logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and thus deciphered by paleographers."

"The late Shāng oracle bone writings, along with a few contemporary characters in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, which is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as Shāng writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script. It is also the oldest member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts."

Discovered by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet in 1923 in Jebeil, the historic Byblos, the Ahiram Sarcophagus is the oldest known evidence of the Phoenician alphabet. It is preserved in the National Museum of Beirut. 

"Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved. Many modern writing systems thought to have descended from Phoenician cover much of the world. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as well as the Brāhmī script, the parent writing system of most modern abugidas in India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels."

The low relief carved panels of the Ahiram Sarcophagus "make it 'the major artistic document for the Early Iron Age' in Phoenicia. Associated items dating to the Late Bronze Age either support an early dating, in the thirteenth century BC or attest the reuse of an early shaft tomb in the eleventh century BC. The major scene represents a king seated on a throne carved with winged sphinxes. A priestess offers him a lotus flower. On the lid two male figures confront one another with addorsed seated lions between them, read by Glenn Markoe as a reference to the father and son of the inscription. Egyptian influence that is a character of Late Bronze Age art in northwest Canaan is replaced here by Assyrian influences in the rendering of figures and the design of the throne and a table."

A tablet of soft limestone inscribed in a paleo-Hebrew script, the Gezer Calendar is one of the oldest known examples of Hebrew writing, dating to the 10th century BCE. It was discovered in excavations of the Biblical city of Gezer, 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem, by R.A.S. Macalister in his excavations between 1902 and 1907, and it is preserved in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul.

"The calendar describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting or tending specific crops.

"It reads:

"Two months of harvest

"Two months of planting

"Two months are late planting

"One month of hoeing

"One month of barley-harvest

"One month of harvest and festival

"Two months of grape harvesting

"One month of summer fruit

"Scholars have speculated that the calendar is either a schoolboy's memory exercise or perhaps the text of a popular folk song, or child's song. Another possibility is something designed for the collection of taxes from farmers."

A writing tablet in Greek/Phoenician dating from this time is thought to be "the oldest European alphabet, the oldest writing tablet extant, and part of the world's oldest book in codex form. The other old writing tablets are 2 from Nimrod, one ivory, the other walnut wood, dated 707 - 705 BC., in addition to a 8th c. BC Neo-Hittite wood tablet. (Roberts/Skeat: The Birth of the Codex, pp. 11-12.) Apart from the present MS the oldest Greek inscription of any length is the Dipylon oinochoe from Athens, ca. 740 BC. The oldest short inscriptions are dated ca. mid 8th c. BC. A tablet originally bound with the present ones is: "The Würzburger Alphabettafel", published by A. Henbeck: Würzburger Jahrbücher für Altertumswissenschaft, 12, pp. 7-20, 1986. The codex originally consisted of at least 5 tablets. . . .The Alphabet is repeated over and over, and contains the North Semitic (Phoenician) number of letters (22), ayin/aleph to taw/tau in Phoenician and Greek order, written in continuous retrograde lines. It represents the earliest and most complete link between Greek letter forms and the North Semitic parent forms. . . ." (Schoyen Collection MS 108).

Scholars generally agree that the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, products of the oral tradition, undergo a process of standardization and refinement out of older material around this time. The standardization may have been caused by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Classicists will later argue that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text.

"Most Classicists would agree that, whether there was ever such a composer as 'Homer' or not, the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets, aoidoi. An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases? Millman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words are 'oral' and 'traditional.' Parry started with 'traditional.' The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language 'formulas.'

"Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the 'transcription hypothesis', wherein a non-literate 'Homer' dictates his poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century or earlier. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as 'scripture' did not exist until the Hellenistic period."

In the mid-eighth century BCE the Greeks are thought to inherit the use of wax tablets and the leather scroll for writing, and the Phoenician alphabet, and to develop their writing system. The earliest surving examples are tablets written on metal.

"The first appearance of writing tablets in written Greek appears in Homer— the single Homeric example in which writing is referred to— in the narrated tale of Bellerophon (Iliad vi.155–203) which introduces the trope of the 'fatal letter', with its message sealed within the folded tablets: "Kill the bearer of this". The written tablets are an anachronism in a narrative of an event that is meant to have transpired generations before the Trojan War, and incidentally help date the earliest possible recension of the epic that we read to the mid-eighth century."

In an effort to collect all knowledge, Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria during these years, collects a library at Nineveh, of 20,000–30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform script. Of this library approximately 1200 texts remain, mostly preserved in the British Museum. The library was discovered at Nineveh in 1849, and is considered the earliest systematically collected library.

To deter thieves, Ashurbanipal has the following curse written on many of his tablets. It is the earliest known book curse: “I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who had gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land.“ (quoted by Drogin, Anathema! [1983] 52-53.)

The library includes 660 cuneiform tablets that concern medicine. These were published in facsimile for the first time by Reginald C. Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923).

King Ashurbanipal records his rebuilding of Ezida, the temple of Nabû, the god of writing on a limestone slab in Neo Assyrian cuneiform script.

"TO NABÛ, EXALTED LORD, WHO DWELLS IN EZIDA, WHICH IS IN NINEVEH, HIS LORD: I ASHURBANIPAL, KING OF ASSYRIA, THE ONE LONGED FOR AND DESTINED BY HIS GREAT DIVINITY, WHO, AT THE ISSUING OF HIS ORDER AND THE GIVING OF HIS SOLEMN DECREE, CUT OFF THE HEAD OF TE'UMMAN, KING OF ELAM, AFTER DEFEATING HIM IN BATTLE, AND WHOSE GREAT COMMAND MY HAND CONQUERED UMMAN-IGASH, TANMARIT, PA'E AND UMMAN-ALTASH, WHO RULED OF ELAM AFTER TE'UMMAN. I YOKED THEM TO MY SEDAN CHAIR, MY ROYAL CONVEYANCE. WITH HIS GREAT HELP I ESTABLISHED DECENT ORDER IN ALL THE LANDS WITHOUT EXCEPTION. AT THAT TIME I ENLARGED THE STRUCTURE OF THE COURT OF THE TEMPLE OF NABÛ, MY LORD, USING MASSIVE LIMESTONE. MAY NABÛ LOOK WITH JOY ON THIS, MAY HE FIND IT ACCEPTABLE. BY THE RELIABLE IMPRESS OF YOUR WEDGES MAY THE ORDER FOR A LIFE OF LONG DAYS COME FORTH FROM YOUR LIPS, MAY MY FEET GROW OLD BY WALKING IN EZIDA IN YOUR DIVINE PRESENCE"

(Schoyen Collection MS 2180)

Under King Nebuchadnezzar II, the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament, the restoration and enlargement of the ziggurat in Babylon is completed after 43 years of labor. The ziggurat was originally built around the time of Hammurabi. It has been calculated that for its construction at least 17 million bricks had to be made and fired. Some of these bricks are stamped with inscriptions in cuneiform. Later the ziggurat will be known as the Tower of Babel and the few bricks from this that survive are known as "Tower of Babel bricks" or Nebuchadnezzar II bricks.

“Babylon with the ziggurat was captured by Kyros 538 BC, Dareios I 519 BC, Xerxes ca. 483 BC, and entirely destroyed by Alexander I the Great in 331 BC. It is this tall stepped temple tower which is referred to in Genesis 11:1-9, and became known as ’The Tower of Babel’. The bricks are specifically mentioned in Genesis 11:3: ’Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire. — For stone they used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen’. The black bitumen is still visible on the back of the present baked brick. These bricks are considered so important and interesting that British Museum had their copy on exhibit with special handout descriptions, from where parts of the present information is taken. For a stele illustrating The Tower of Babel,see MS 2063. Nebuchadnezzar II was the founder of the New Babylonian empire. He captured Jerusalem in 596 and 586 BC, burnt down the temple and all of Jerusalem, carried its treasures off to Babylon, and took the Jews into captivity (2 kings 24-25). Nebuchadnezzar II is the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament. Daniel 1-4 is almost entirely devoted to the description of his greatness and reign, his rise and fall, and submission to God.” (Schoyen Collection MS 1815/1).

Nebuchadnezzar II completes the restoration of the Ziggurat, which was originally built around the time of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE). The Tower of Babel Stele, of which two of the original three parts are preserved in the Schoyen Collection (MS 2063), presents an image of the tower contemporary with Nebachadnezzar's restoration, along with a simple building plan.

"The missing part of the stele's back, was in a religious institution in U.S.A., the present whereabouts unknown. The stele was found in a special hiding chamber, broken into 3 parts in antiquity, at Robert Koldewey's excavations of the site of the Tower of Babel in 1917. Its importance was immediately recognised. A photograph was taken with 3 archaeologists standing next to the stele. With the imminent danger of war breaking out in the area, they decided to rescue it, and each archaeologist carried one part out of the war zone. One part was taken to Germany, one part to Jordan and then London, the third part to U.S.A."

Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed and the Jews are exiled into the Babylonian Captivity.

The DUENOS inscription found on a vase on Quirnal Hill in Rome, is inscribed with the second earliest known Old Latin text. Old Latin, the precursor of classical Latin, is known from non-book writing such as stone inscriptions.

After the overthrow of Babylonia by the Persians, King Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great) permits various religious groups, including perhaps 40,000 Jews, to return to their native land. Upon conquering Babylonia, Cyrus issues a declaration inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on a clay cylinder which was discovered in in Babylon in 1879. Known as the Cyrus Cylinder, it is preserved in the British Museum. On the cylinder Cyrus announces a number of reforms that he made after conquering the country. These include arranging for the restoration of temples and organizing the return to their homelands of a number of people who had been held in Babylonia by the Babylonian kings. The Cyrus Cylinder has been called the earliest known document in the history of religious toleration.

After the return of the Jewish people from the Babylonian captivity, Ezra the Scribe introduces public reading of the Torah.

Having taken 4 months to walk from Babylon to Jerusalem, the Jews begin construction of the Second Temple. Missing from the Second Temple are the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments.

Panini, an Indian grammarian from Gandhara, composes his formulation of 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology known as Ashtadhyayi. This is the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics. It includes the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root, and metarules, transformation, and recursion.

In Chhandah-shastra, a Sansrit book on meters, or long syllables, “Pingala presents the first known description of a binary numeral system. He described the binary numeral system in connection with the listing of Vedic meters with short and long syllables. His work also contains the basic ideas of maatraameru (Fibonacci number) and meruprastaara (Pascal’s triangle.)”

Servius Tullius. the sixth legendary king of ancient Rome, and the second king of the Etruscan dynasty, introduces the Roman census to determine taxes. Conducted every five years, it will provide a register of citizens and their property.

By the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 BCE) the Persian Royal Road runs some 2,857 km from the city of Susa on the lower Tigris to the port of Smyrna (modern Izmir in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea. The Royal Road is a highway built by the Persian king Darius I. Darius built the road to facilitate rapid communication throughout the Persian Empire. The road will be protected by Persian rulers and later used by the Romans. On this road couriers, riding in relays, may travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) in seven or nine days.

Herodotus wrote, “There is nothing in the world that travels faster than these Persian couriers.” Herodotus’ praise for these messengers — “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents them from accomplishing the task proposed to them with the very utmost speed” — is the inspiration for the unofficial motto of postal carriers. By having fresh horses and riders ready at each relay, royal couriers may carry messages the entire distance in 9 days, though normal travelers take about three months. This Royal Road links into many other routes in the overall trade network known as the Silk Road. Some of these, such as the routes to India and Central Asia, are also protected, encouraging regular contact between India, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. There are accounts in the Old Testament book of Esther of dispatches being sent from Susa to provinces as far out as India and Cush during the reign of Xerxes (485-465 BCE).

Until the development of effective optical telegraph systems at the end of the 18th century, messengers on horseback riding over a good road system will remain the fastest method of sending a message overland.

Because the numbering systems of the Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans are not convenient for extensive calculation, it is believed that they used some sort of mechanical calculating device. The simplest form of calculating device is a kind of table or tablet on which calculation can be written in sand or dust, and then easily erased. This is the "sandboard abacus". One derivation of the Latin word abacus comes from the Greek abakos from the Hebrew word abaq, meaning dust.

In his Histories Herodotus of Halicarnassus, written about this time, states that the Egyptians "write their characters and reckon with pebbles, bringing their hand from right to left, while the Greeks go from left to right." D.E. Smith, in his History of Mathematics II, p. 160 quotes this statement by Herodotus and writes, "Right to left order was that of the hieratic script and there is probably some relation between this script and the abacus. No wall pictures thus far discovered give any evidence of the use of the abacus, but in any collection of Egyptian antiquities there may be found disks of various sizes which may have been used as counters."

What we call “Arabic numerals” are invented in India by the Hindus. Because the Arabs will transmit this system to the West after the Hindu numerical system finds its way to Persia, the numeral system will become known as “Arabic”. Arabs themselves call the numerals they use “Indian numerals”, أرقام هندية, arqam hindiyyah)".

The library of Aristotle may be the first private library concerning which there is considerable discussion among early commentators. It is impossible to know how much of the discussion has basis in fact. Harris provides the following summary: “Upon his [Aristotle’s] death, this library was inherited by Aristotle’s teaching successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos… Theophrastus in turn enlarged the library and later bequeathed it to his nephew Neleus [of Scepsis]. Neleus was not a successful teacher, and in his later years withdrew from the school, taking his library with him to Scepsis in Asia Minor. His descendants, apparently unlettered but aware of the value of the books, saved them by burying them, according to the geographer Strabo, to keep them out of the hands of the Attalid kings of Pergamum who were building up their famous library.

“Finally, about 100 B.C., the mildewed and worm-eaten remnants of Aristotle’s library were sold to Appellicon of Teos, a minor Athenian military leader and book collector. Apellicon tried to restore the damaged volumes but only succeeded in damaging them further when he made incorrect ‘corrections’ for missing fragments of pages and otherwise edited the works. After his death, Athens was captured by the Roman general Sulla, who carred the library off to Rome, where it eventually became a part of Tyrannion’s library. Another account relates that Ptolemy II (285-246 B.C.) acquired Aristotle’s library directly from Neleus and brought it to Egypt to become a part of the great Alexandrian library. It is possible that both stories are partially correct, and it is quite probable that copies at least of Aristotle’s library reached Alexandria eventually.” (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 40-41)

According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Aeneas Tacticus, one of the earliest Greek writers on the art of war, invents the hydraulic telegraph about this time. It is a semaphore system used during the First Punic War to send messages between Sicily and Carthage.

"The system involved identical containers on separate hills; each container would be filled with water, and a vertical rod floated within. The rods were inscribed with various predetermined codes.

"To send a message, the sending operator would use a torch to signal the receiving operator; once the two were synchronized, they would simultaneously open the spigots at the bottom of their containers. Water would drain out until the water level reached the desired code, at which point the sender would lower his torch, and the operators would simultaneously close their spigots."

A quarter-inch thick copper plate in the Hebei Provincial Museum at Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, bears the world’s oldest map clearly marked with distances. The 2,300-year-old map marks the locations of buildings in the five mausoleums of Wang Cuo (344-313 B.C.), his queen, and his concubines. It is called the Zhao Yu Tu (“map of the area of the mausoleum”). “It is not only the oldest map ever found in China but the oldest numeral-bearing map in the world,” says Du Naisong, a researcher with the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Thirty-seven inches long and 19 inches wide, the map marks more than 70 locations, and symbols, numerals, and epigraphs are inlaid with gold and silver. Unlike modern maps, the Zhao Yu Tu has south on top and north on the bottom. One-half inch equals 16.5 feet on the map’s scale.

Euclid of Alexandria, a teacher at the Alexandrian Library under the reign of Ptolemy I, writes the Elements, “in which he summarized the preceding two centuries of mathematical research. Now known as the founding document of mathematics, the Elements was the standard textbook for mathematical education in ancient times, in the Islamic world, and in Europe through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and until almost the present day. The system of thought presented by the Elements, in which knowledge was distilled in the form of theorems and then given a written proof, inspired fields as diverse as law and physics. Indeed, Newton’s Principia, which marked the beginning of modern physics, took Euclid’s work as its intellectual and stylistic model.”