Ancient Civilisations

The first apparent record of counting dates from 30,000 years ago. A leg-bone of a wolf was found in France containing fifty-five cuts, arranged in groups of five. It is not known what the cuts represented. [ Ancient Civilisations | Numbers and Measurement ] (source)

The dog was the first animal to be domesticated, around 12,000 years ago.

The comb dates back to Scandinavia, from around 8000 B.C. It is believed that the comb was developed independently by most early cultures. (source)

Over the past 5,000 years, the seemingly worthless Sinai Peninsula, mostly desert, has been the world's most besieged land, having been the battlefield for over 50 invading armies on their way between Africa and the Middle East.

The great Egyptian architect Imhotep, who lived almost 5,000 years ago, is the earliest scientist who is known by name today. We also know the names of other Egyptian architects, scientists, and mathematicians, such as the scribe Ahmes. On the other hand, China, Sumeria, and Babylon did not record the names of their early scientists. [ Ancient Civilisations | Ancient Egypt ] (source)

Damascus, Syria, is the oldest continuously inhabited city, having been inhabited since at least 2,500 B.C. (source)

Assur was the capital of ancient Assyria.

The earliest known example of musical notation was found on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), dated to around 1,800 B.C. [ Ancient Civilisations | Music ]

The number 10 is used as a convenient base to count with, but the Gauls of ancient France, the Mayas of Central America, and other peoples used a base of 20. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, and others after them used a base of 60—convenient because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. The use of base 60 survives in the division of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds, and the division of the circle into 360 (60 × 6) degrees. [ Mathematics and Measurement | Ancient Civilisations | Incas, Aztecs, and Maya ] (source)

In one of the first law codes in history, handed down by Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.), King of Babylonia, the penalty for medical malpractice was to cut off the doctor's hands. Hammurabi's code of laws is one of the greatest ancient codes. The diorite column on which the laws were carved is now in Paris. [ Ancient Civilisations | Medicine | Laws ] (source)

When the troops of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose I invaded Syria and Carchemish on the upper Euphrates in 1525 B.C., they were astounded to see the Nile "falling from the sky" and the river that "in flowing north flowed south." The soldiers had only known the Nile and the cloudless land of Egypt, and so were fascinated to encounter rain (the Nile falling from the sky) and the direction of the flow of the Euphrates, which flows south, which to the Egyptians meant "upstream", so they saw the Euphrates as flowing "backwards". [ Ancient Civilisations | Exploration | Ancient Egypt ] (source)

The first occasion on which humanity "used up" a natural resource was 4,000 years ago, when the supply of tin ore, needed to make bronze, was used up in the Middle East around 2,000 B.C. The rich tin mines of Cornwall, England were dug in the thirteenth century B.C. by Phoenicians looking for tin. In over 3,000 years of mining, around three million tons of tin have been removed from the Cornish mines, and they still have not been exhausted. [ Ancient Britain | Exploration | Ancient Peoples ] (source)

The greatest contribution of the Phoenicians, a group of seafaring Canaanites who lived on the eastern Mediterranean seacost, was an alphabet that was later adapted by the Greeks. [ Ancient People | Ancient Greek Science and Philosophy ]

An interesting innovation of the Assyrians was the use of mass terror. Their armies would literally kill everyone around if they encountered any resistance when invading an area. Because of their reputation for doing so, their enemies often surrendered rather than putting up any resistance. (source)

The first known dictionary appeared in Mesopotamia around 600 B.C. [ Ancient Civilisations | Books and Literature ]

Tyrian purple, a natural dye, was so expensive that its use was restricted to royalty. It was obtained from a small Mediterranean shellfish and produced in the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre. The shellfish were small both in size and in numbers. It was estimated that it took 8,500 shellfish to produce one gramme of dye. Because only small amounts of dye could be produced, the price was very high. Prior to 1856, the only textile dyes available were those that could be found in nature. (source)

The Phoenician navigator Hanno was likely the first to circumnavigate Africa, around 500 B.C. He observed that, at the southern end of Africa, the noonday sun shone in the north. This observation sounded ridiculous to the Greek historian Herodotus, who reported the tale, but this report shows that Hanno likely either did circumnavigate Africa, or or at least made a good attempt to do so. He likely wouldn't have been able to imagine the sun shining in the "wrong" part of the sky if he hadn't seen it. [ Exploration | Ancient People ] (source)

Slavery was a universal institution throughout ancient times. For instance, it was never questioned in the Old Testament or New Testament. [ Ancient Civilisations | Slavery ] (source)

Around 600 B.C., a Greek athlete named Protiselaus threw a discus 152 feet from a standing position. That distance was not exceeded until over 2,500 years later, when Clarence Houser threw a discus 155 feet in 1928. [ Sports and Games | Ancient Civilisations ] (source)

Herostratus burned down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on July 21^st, 356 B.C., just so that his name would live forever in the history books. After his execution, the officials of Ephesus tried to thwart his plan, obviously without success, by obliterating his name from all records. (source)

The Egyptians attacked the Jews on a holy day in 320 B.C. An army led by Ptolemy I of Egypt attacked Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Unlike the Israelis in 1973, the ultra-pious Jews did not fight, even in self-defense, on the Sabbath, and Ptolemy easily captured Jerusalem. (source)

Because there were virtually no tides in the Mediterranean Sea, the ancients knew almost nothing about them. The first Greek to mention tides was the explorer Pytheas, who explored the North Atlantic in 270 B.C. However, when Julius Caesar invaded Britain over two hundred years later, he lost a large number of ships after not beaching them high enough, as he didn't take tides into account. [ Ancient Civilisations | Ancient Britain and Ireland ] (source)

There is only one recorded battle in which both sides used elephants. In the Fourth Syrian War, in 217 B.C., Antiochus III of Syria used Asian elephants when attacking Ptolemy IV's Egyptian army with its smaller North African elephants (now extinct). While the Asian elephants were victorious, the Egyptian army would go on to win a smashing victory at Raphia on the Egyptian border. [ Ancient Civilisations | Animals ] (source)

The ancient city of Troy is located in what is now Turkey. It wasn't a large city, being a village of around 7 acres' size. (source)

King Mithridates VI (132-63 B.C.) of Pontus (a kingdom composing parts of Asia Minor and the Black Sea coast), took small doses of poison throughout his life to develop a resistance in case an attempt was made to poison him. He built up such a strong immunity that when he tried to take his own life to escape capture by the Romans, the poison had no effect. He had to order a slave to kill him with a sword. (source)

In the Pampa Colorada (Red Plain) in the Peruvian Desert, there are large line-drawings of geometric shapes, animals and plants on the desert soil. These drawings are known as the Nazca lines. These were likely drawn by the Nazca Indians approximately 2,000 years ago. These figures are only fully comprehensible from the air. In fact, in 1937, before flight was commonplace, a highway was constructed through the Nazca lines, as no-one was yet aware of the lines' significance. It is unknown how the drawers achieved such geometrical precision in their art, or why they would draw figures that they could not view. [ Strange But True | Ancient Civilisations ] (source)

At Carnac in Brittany, France, stand some 3,000 upright stones (or menhirs) between 18 inches and 20 feet high and laid out in parallel lines. These rows of local stone were created around 4,000 B.C., and stretch almost three miles across open country side. No one knows why these stones were placed at Carnac. However, it is thought that the stones may be monuments to the dead, and it has been suggested that the stones may have formed some kind of lunar observatory. (source)

In 1992, a troop of Les Eclaireurs de France (a French Protestant youth group similar to the Boy Scouts) went to la Grotte des Mayrières Supérieures, a cave in the Tarn-et-Garonne region of southern France, to clean off graffiti that covered the cave walls. However, after having removed the graffiti, they discovered that the "graffiti" had actually been prehistoric cave paintings between 10,000 and 15,000 years old, the only such paintings that had ever found in that part of France. (source)