An independent, ad-free reference on world history, organised by continent and era.
| Ancient world 3500 BC – 800 BC | Classical world 800 BC – AD 500 | Medieval world 500 – 1500 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 6 | 7 | · |
| West Asia | 9 | · | · |
| Europe | · | 9 | · |
| East Asia | · | 5 | 3 |
| South Asia | 2 | · | · |
| The Americas | · | 2 | · |
As a boy of about nine, Hannibal is said to have sworn at an altar never to be a friend to Rome — an oath his father Hamilcar Barca set in him after Carthage's defeat in the First Punic War, told by the historian Polybius.
· 237 BCThe Lighthouse of Pharos — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — stood in Alexandria, capital of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty. Roughly 100 meters tall and built in three tiers, its summit fire guided ships across the Mediterranean into the harbor, completed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus around 280 BC.
· 280 BCThe Epic of Gilgamesh's Tablet XI tells of a god-sent flood and a man, Utnapishtim, who builds a boat and survives — a story carved in clay before the biblical account, and one of several ancient Near Eastern flood traditions (Ziusudra, Atrahasis).
· 1800 BCNaram-Sin of Akkad, grandson of Sargon, ruled humanity's first empire and — after crushing a great revolt — placed the divine sign before his name and wore the horned crown, one of the earliest cases of a living Mesopotamian king declaring himself a god.
· 2250 BCIn 1922 Howard Carter peered by candlelight through a sealed door in Egypt's Valley of the Kings and said 'wonderful things' — the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the only nearly-intact pharaoh's tomb ever found.
· 1922The largest empire in history was not Rome. By contiguous land, the 13th-century Mongol Empire — some 24 million km² from the East Sea to Eastern Europe — was the biggest ever, though the British Empire was larger by non-contiguous total.
· 1279