From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 30 CE to 500 CE Timeline

Christianity emerges as a religious movement and splits with Judaism.

Unlike the Old Testament, the New Testament is written in a relatively narrow span of time, probably over less than a century. The 27 books of the New Testament are written by various authors at various times and places, probably in Koine Greek, the vernacular dialect in first-century Roman provinces. "Koine Greek is not only important to the history of the Greeks for being their first common dialect . . ., but it's also important . . . for being the first 'international' form of speech, and eventually the chosen medium for the teaching and spreading of Christianity. Koine Greek was unofficially a first or second language in the Roman Empire."

The first Jewish-Roman War ends with destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem. Legions under Titus beseige and destroy Jerusalem, loot and burn Herod's Temple and Jewish strongholds (notably Masada in 73), and enslave or massacre a large part of the Jewish population. This contributes to the numbers and geography of the Jewish Diaspora, as many Jews are scattered after losing their state, or sold into slavery through the empire.

"Estimates of the death toll range from 600,000 to 1,300,000 Jews: there was 'no room for crosses and no crosses for the bodies'. Over 100,000 died during the siege, and almost 100,000 were taken to Rome as slaves. Many fled to areas around the Mediterranean. The Romans hunted down and slaughtered entire clans, such as descendants of the House of David . On one occasion, Titus condemned 2,500 Jews to fight with wild beasts in the amphitheater of Caesarea in celebration of his brother Domitian's birthday."

Approximate date of composition of the canonical Four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. None of the Four Gospels actually identifies its author by name, though the traditions about authorship are based on very early Christian writings that identify them. About 50 Gospels are written in the first and second century C.E., each believed to be accurate by various groups within the early Christian movement.

Date of one of the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements—a fragment of papyrus found among the rubbish piles of Oxyrhynchus in 1896-97 by expedition of B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. It is preserved at the University of Pennsylvania.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroys the Roman coastal city of Herculaneum, preserving in lava the important library of papyrus scrolls in the so-called “Villa of the Papyri”—a magnificent home built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Though it was buried in lava, this remains the only library preserved intact from Roman times.

Probably at the Library of Alexandria Claudius Ptolemaeus writes the Almagest and the Cosmographia. In the Almgagest “Ptolemy compiled the astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greek and Babylonian world; he relied mainly on the work of Hipparchus of three centuries earlier. It was preserved, like most of Classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts (hence its familiar name) and only made available in Latin translation (by Gerard of Cremona) in the 12th century. Ptolemy formulated a geocentric model of the solar system which remained the generally accepted model in the Western and Arab worlds until it was superseded by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus. Likewise his computational methods (supplemented in the 12th century with the Arabic computational Tables of Toledo, were of sufficient accuracy to satisfy the needs of astronomers, astrologers, and navigators, until the time of the great explorations. They were also adopted in the Arab world and in India. The Almagest also contains a star catalogue, which is probably an updated version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus. Its list of forty-eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky (only the sky Ptolemy could see).”

Ptolemy’s Cosmographia “is a compilation of what was known about the world’s geography in the Roman Empire during his time. He relied mainly on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient, Persian empire, but most of his sources beyond the perimeter of the Empire were unreliable.”;

“Ptolemy also devised and provided instructions on how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world (oikoumenè) and of the Roman provinces…Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe.”

The maps in surviving manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography however, date only from about 1300, after the text is rediscovered by Maximus Planudes, a Byzantine scholar working in Constantinople.

The physician Claudius Galen writes Peri ton idion biblion.—Peri tes taxeos ton idon biblion (On his own Writings.—On the Arrangement of his own Writings). This is one of the earliest bibliographies on any subject, and the first auto-bibliography.

The Romance Papyrus (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, cod. suppl. gr. 1294, also known as the Alexander papyrus) is one of the few surviving scraps of classical literary illustration on papyrus. It contains two unframed illustrations about an unknown romance set within the columns of text. The fragment is 340 by 115 mm. It was acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1900.

“Translation of the Bible into Egyptian, written in the Coptic Script, dates back to the second century AD. At first, some missionaries translated orally or informally from Greek into Egyptian, certain passages to use in their missionary work. In the last half of the Second Century, Pantaenus, the missionary philosopher, came to Alexandria and became the head of the Theological School. Later on St. Demetrius the first became the Bishop of Alexandria. He was the first known Egyptian to be bishop of that city. The presence of those two sparked a concerted effort to spread Christianity among the Egyptian peasants. Thus the Coptic script was officially christianized for use in translating the Scriptures as needed in the missionary work. This was done to insure the uniformity of the Christian teachings to be given to the new converts.

“The first translations were in the form of passages mainly from the Gospels. Later on, the whole books were translated. Probably the Gospels were translated first, followed by the Acts in the New Testament. Among the Old Testament books, Psalms followed by Genesis was probably the early order of translation. Eventually the entire New Testament was translated, followed by the Books of Moses, the Prophets, the Poetic Books and the Historical Books in that order. . . . This translation process may have lasted about a century or even more. Keep in mind that all the translations were done from the [koine] Greek whether it was Old or New Testament Books. Except on rare occasions, the Hebrew Old Testament was never utilized by the Christians of Egypt.”

The Egerton Gospel papyrus fragment at the British Library is one of the earliest known fragments of any Gospel. This is related to the Saint John Fragment preserved in the John Rylands Library.

A fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches (9 by 6.4 cm) at its widest; and conserved at the John Rylands Library at Manchester, the Saint John Fragment is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text. The front (recto) contains lines from the Gospel of John 18:31-33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains lines from verses 37-38.

" . . .the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among critical scholars. The style of the script is strongly Hadrianic, which would suggest a date somewhere between 125 and 160 CE. But the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows for a range of dates that extends from before 100 CE past 150 CE.

"The fragment of papyrus was among a group acquired on the Egyptian market in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell. The original transcription and translation of the fragment of text was not done until 1934, by Colin H. Roberts. Roberts found comparator hands in papyri then dated between 50 CE and 150 CE, with the closest match of Hadrianic date. Since the contents would unlikely have been written before circa 100 CE he proposed a date in the first half of the second century. Over the 70 years since Roberts' essay, the estimated ages of his particular comparator hands have been revised (in common with most other undated antique papyri) towards dates a couple of decades older; while other comparator hands have subsequently been discovered with possible dates ranging into the second half of the second century." (quotes from the Wikipedia article on Rylands Library Papyrus 52)

Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Imperial Court, reports to the Emperor of China that paper has been invented. Twentieth century discoveries of ancient paper fragments in North and Northwest China have pushed the date of the invention of paper back about two hundred years earlier. By the second century China is producing paper made from rags. Paper is not invented specifically for writing. “It was extensively used in China in the fine and decorative arts, at ceremonies and festivals, for business transactions and records, monetary credit and exchange, personal attire, household furnishings, sanitary and medical purposes, recreations and entertainments and so on.” (Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, V, pt. 1: Paper and Printing [1985] 2).

Completion of the inscription incised at the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome. “This is perhaps the most famous example of Roman square capitals, a script often used for stone monuments, and less often for manuscript writing. As it was meant to be read from below, the bottom letters are slightly smaller than the top letters, to give proper perspective. Some, but not all, word divisions are marked with a dot, and many of the words, especially the titles, are abbreviated. In the inscription, numerals are marked with a titulus, a bar across the top of the letters.” After the invention of printing by moveable type in Europe the mid-15th century, Roman letters, especially from stone inscriptions, will become a constant source of inspiration for letter-cutters and type designers.

“Probably the greatest of the Roman libraries was the Ulpian Library, founded by the Emperor Trajan in 114 A .D. in his Forum. This collection may have been based on the 30,000-volume private library of Epaphrodites of Cheronea, and like other Roman libraries, it was divided into Greek and Latin sections. Early in the 4th century, this library was moved ot the Baths of Diocletian.…This move was apparently only temporary, possibly while the Forum was being repaired, since the library is reported to have been returned at a later date. Trajan’;s library was still in existence in 455 A.D. when a bust of Didonius Apollinarius was placed there by the Emperior Avitus.” (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed. [1999] 58.)

“Of the many gospels written in antiquity, exactly four gospels came to be accepted as part of the New Testament, or canonical. An insistence upon a canonical four, and no others, was a central theme of Irenaeus of Lyons, c.185. In his central work, Adversus Haereses Irenaeus denounced various Christian groups that used only one gospel…as well as groups that embraced the texts of new revelations.…Irenaeus declared that the four he espoused were the four pillars of the Church: ‘it is not possible that there can be either more or fewer than four’ he stated, presenting as logic the analogy of the four corners of the earth and the four winds (1.11.8). His image, taken from Ezekial 1, of God’s throne borne by four creatures with four faces—‘the four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and the four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle’— equivalent to the ‘four-formed’ gospel, is the origin of the conventional symbols of the Evangelists: lion, bull, eagle, man. Irenaeus was successful in declaring that the four gospels collectively, and exclusively these four, contained the truth. By reading each gospel in light of the others, Irenaeus made of John a lens through which to read Matthew, Mark andLuke.“

“Following the custom of the Synagogue, the Scriptures of the Old Testament were read at the primitive Christian assemblies. According as the Canon of the New Testament was decided on, certain extracts from it were included in these readings. Justin tells us that in his day, when the Christians met together, they read the Memoirs of the Apostles and the writings of the Prophets (First Apology 67). Tertullian, Cyprian, and other writers bear witness to the same custom; and in the West the order of lector existed as early as the third century. For want of precise testimony we do not know how the particular passages were decided on. Most likely the presiding bishop chose them at the assembly itself; and it is obvious that on the occurrence of certain festivals the Scripture relating to them would be read. Little by little a more or less definite list would naturally result from this method. St. John Chrysostom in a homily delivered at Antioch exhorts his hearers to read beforehand the Scripture passages to be read and commented on in the Office of the day (Homilia de Lazaro, iii, c. i). In like manner other Churches would form a table of readings. In the margin of the manuscript text it was customary to note the Sunday or festival on which that particular passage would be read, and at the end of the manuscript, the list of such passages, the Synaxarium or Capitulare, would be added. Transition from this process to the making of an Evangeliarium, or collection of all such passages, was easy. Gregory is of opinion that we possess fragments of Evangeliaria in Greek dating from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and that we have very many from the ninth century onwards (according to Gregory they number 1072). In like manner, we find Lectionaries in the Lain Churches as early as the fifth century. The Comes of the Roman Church dates from before St. Gregory the Great (P.L., XXX, 487-532." (quoted from the New Advent Encyclopedia article on Evangeliaria).

Pamphilius of Caesarea (d. 409) devotes his life to searching out and obtaining copies of manuscript texts. He establishes a library that may have contained 30,000 manuscripts and a scriptorium at a Christian theological school at Caesarea Palaestina, a town on the coast of Israel between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Because of this library Caesarea is the capital of Christian scholarship in the 3rd century.

The Emperor Diocletian establishes an Imperial Library at Nicomedia, his capital, but little information about this has survived.

The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han dynasty (before 220 CE).

Death of Wei Tan, to whom the Chinese attribute the discovery of ink used for writing, and later for printing. (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd 3ed [1955] 32).

The Heracles Papyrus (Oxford, Sackler Library, Oxyrhynchus Pap. 2331) is a fragment of about the labors of Heracles. It contains three unframed colored line drawings of the first of the Labors, the strangling of the lion set within the columns of cursive text. It was found at Oxyrhynchus (Pap. 2331) and is one of the few surviving scraps of classical literary illustration on papyrus. The fragment is 235 by 106 mm.

The Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century uncial manuscript in Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament is one of the two extant 4th century texts of the Old and New Testament in the form used by the early Christians, the other being the Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Vaticanus lacks pages 1519-1536 containing Hebrews 9:14 through Revelation which were lost and replaced by a 15th century minuscule supplement. The manuscript has been housed in the Vatican Library, founded in 1448, for as long as it has been known, appearing in the Vatican Library's earliest catalogue in 1475.

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important hand-written ancient copies of the Greek Bible. Written in the 4th century, in uncial letters, most of it is preserved in the British Library. Originally it contained the whole of both Testaments. The Greek Old Testament (or Septuagint) survived almost complete, along with a complete New Testament, plus the Epistle of Barnabas, and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas.

"Along with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most valuable manuscripts for establishing the original text of the Greek New Testament, as well as the Septuagint. It is the only uncial manuscript with the complete text of the New Testament, and the only ancient manuscript of the New Testament written in four columns per page which has survived to the present day."

Roman Emperor Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, commonly known as Diocletian, orders the publication of his first "Edict against the Christians." The edict orders the destruction of Christian scriptures and places of worship across the Empire, and prohibits Christians from assembling for worship. This is the beginning of The Diocletianic Persecution (303–311), the Roman empire's "last, largest, and bloodiest official persecution of Christianity." (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Diocletian)

According to chroniclers such as Eusebius, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge between the Roman Emperors Constantine I and Maxentius, marks the beginning of Contantine's conversion to Christianity. Eusebius recounts that Constantine and his soldiers had a vision that God promised victory if they daubed the labarum on their standards. Constantine won the battle and started on the path that led him to end the Tetrarchy and become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The Arch of Constantine, erected in Rome in celebration of the victory, certainly attributes Constantine's success to divine intervention, but whether it was specifically at the hands of the Christian God is left ambiguous.

The Emperor Constantine, who rules the Eastern parts of the Roman Empire and the Emperor Licinius. who rules the Western parts, sign a letter known as the Edict of Milan. It proclaims religious toleration throughout the Roman Empire, and is responsible for the reduction of persecution of Christians and  tolerance of the spread of Christianity.

The Emperor Constantine begins the formation of the Imperial Library of Constantinople by having the Judeo-Christian scriptures copied from papyrus onto the more permanent medium of parchment or vellum. His son, Constantius II, aware of the deterioration of texts written on papyrus scrolls, will continue and expand the project.

The person in charge of the library under Constantius II is thought to have been Themestios, who directed a team of scribes and librarians who copied the texts of papyrus scrolls onto parchment codices. It is probable that this library preserved selected texts that survived burning of the Library of Alexandria, though the historical accounts of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library are contradictory.

The Imperial Library of Constantinople will eventually grow to about 100,000 manuscript volumes.

The earliest Egyptian printed cloth dates from the 4th century.

"In his Natural History, Pliny states that this technique [printing on textiles] was particularly utilized in Egypt. Printed material is only represented by fabrics of the fourth century at the earliest and continues until the Arab period.  In those days, there were great textile centers such as Alexandria, Panopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Tinnis and Damietta, but regrettably we know this only from texts, because any trace of weaving shops and their fragile wooden looms has vanished.  However, by studying the fabrics themselves, scholars are often able to derive their origins. 

"Actually, only two groups of fabrics have been dated with any certainty. One group was a pair of medallions and a band of flax and purple wool coming from a tomb in Hwara in the Fayoum Oasis, which were found together with a coin dated to 340 AD. These medallions are adorned in a manner that is virtually identical with that of painted Egyptian shrouds of the Roman period and fabrics discovered in Syria. Next to the body of Aurelius Colluthus, in his tomb at Antinoe, were discovered sales contracts and his will, all written in Greek between 454 and 456 AD. He was wrapped in a large tapestry with an upper tier showing two busts under arcades supported by two large columns. A geometrical network with florets and leaves covers the space between the columns, which is a composition very similar to the decorations in paintings and mosaics of the same period."

The Charioteer Papyrus, preserved at the Egypt Exploration Society, London, is a fragment of an illustration from an unknown work of literature. "It is one of the finest surviving fragments of classical book illustration. Unlike other surviving illustrated fragments of papyrus, such as the Romance Papyrus and the Heracles Papyrus, which have illustrations that are little more than mere sketches, the Charioteer Papyrus is sensitively drawn and finely colored. It shows portions of six charioteers in red or green tunics. Although there is not any text on the fragment, it undoubtedly served an illustration for a literary work, perhaps serving as an illustration for the chariot race at the games at the funeral of Patroclus in the Iliad."

The Vergilius Vaticanus (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Cod. Vat. lat. 3225, also known as the Vatican Virgil) is an illuminated manuscript containing fragments of Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics produced in Rome  It is one of the oldest surviving sources for the text of the Aeneid, and is the oldest of three surviving fifth century lllustrated manuscripts of classical literature. The two are the Vergilius Romanus and the Ambrosian Iliad.

"Even as the Roman empire collapsed, literate men acknowledged that the Christianized Virgil was a master poet.. . . . The Aeneid remained the central Latin literary text of the Middle Ages and retained its status as the grand epic of the Latin peoples, and of those who considered themselves to be of Roman provenance, such as the English. It also held religious importance as it describes the founding of the Holy City. Virgil was made palatable for his Christian audience also through a belief in his prophecy of Christ in his Fourth Eclogue. Cicero and other classical writers too were declared Christian due to similarities in moral thinking to Christianity.

"In the Middle Ages, Virgil was considered a herald of Christianity for his Eclogue 4 verses (Perseus Project Ecl.4) concerning the birth of a boy, which were read as a prophecy of Jesus' nativity.

"Also during the Middle Ages, as Virgil was developed into a kind of magus, manuscripts of the Aeneid were used for divinatory bibliomancy, the Sortes Virgilianae, in which a line would be selected at random and interpreted in the context of a current situation."

The Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis is a codex of the New Testament dating from the fifth-century. It is written in an uncial hand on vellum and contains, in both Greek and Latin, most of the four Gospels and Acts, with a small fragment of the Third Epistle of John. "Written with one column per page it has 406 leaves (26 na 21,5 cm), out of perhaps an original 534, and the Greek pages on the left face Latin ones on the right."

"The manuscript is believed to have been repaired at Lyon in the Ninth century as revealed by a distinctive ink used for supplementary pages. It was closely guarded for many centuries in the monastic library of St Irenaeus at Lyon. The manuscript was consulted, perhaps in Italy, for disputed readings at the Council of Trent, and was at about the same time collated for Stephanus's edition of the Greek New Testament. During the upheavals of the Wars of Religion in the 16th century, when textual analysis had a new urgency among the Reformation's Protestants, the manuscript was taken from Lyon in 1562 and delivered to the Protestant scholar Theodore Beza, the friend and successor of Calvin, who gave it to the University of Cambridge, in the comparative security of England, in 1581, which accounts for its double name." (quotations from the Wikipedia article on the Codex Bezae Cantabridgensis).

The Codex Bezae is preserved at Cambridge University Library

The oldest surviving consular diptych is one commissioned by Anicius Petronius Probus, consul in the western empire in 406. It is unique not only for its extreme antiquity but also as the only one to bear the portrait of the emperor (Honorius in this instance, to whom the diptych is dedicated in an inscription full of humility, with Probus calling himself the emperor's "famulus" or slave) rather than consul. It is preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aosta.

A diptych is a pair of linked panels, generally in ivory, wood or metal with rich sculpted decoration. A diptych could function as a wax tablet for writing. More specifically a consular diptych was also intended as a deluxe commemorative object, commissioned by a consul ordinarius and then distributed to reward those who had supported his candidature as rewards and to mark his entry to that post.

[Whether the designs of the covers of consular diptychs bear any resemblance to early bookbindings might be a topic worth researching.]

"The chronology of such diptychs is clearly defined, with their beginnings marked by a decision by Theodosius I in 384 to reserve their use to consuls alone, except by an extraordinary imperial dispensation, and their end marked by the consulship's disappearance under the reign of Justinian in 541. Even so, great aristocrats and imperial civil-servants bypassed Theodosius's ban and produced diptychs to celebrate less important posts that the consulship - Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, for example, distributed some to commemorate his son's quaestorian then praetorian games in 393 and 401 respectively."