Download Bronze Age - Columbia College

An Ancient Timeline…
Bronze Age, 2nd Millennium, 2000-1000 BCE
Events:
 Second dynasty of Babylon
 First Bantu migrations from west Africa
 Hittite Old Kingdom in Anatolia (1900 BC)
 Civilization in Palestine (1800 BC)
 Middle Kingdom in Egypt (2052–1570 BC)
 Egyptian domination over Palestine and Syria
(1600–1360 BC)
 Conquest of Canaan (Palestine) by Israelites
 Mycenaean civilization (c. 1600 BC–1200 BC)
 Athens founded (1235 BC)
 Beginnings of Judaism (1200 BC)
 Olmec civilization in Mesoamerica (1150 BC)
 Fall of Troy (1184 BC)
Significant people:
 Hammurabi, king of Babylon (1792–1745 BC)
 Pharaohs Akhenaton and Rameses II of the
Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt
 Shalmaneser I, king of Assyria (1274–1275 BC)
 Saul, King of Israel
Inventions, discoveries, introductions:
 Indians developed caste system
 Horse domesticated
 Chinese record the earliest known sighting of a
comet
Iron Age, 1st Millennium, 1000 BCE – 0 BCE.
Events
 Egypt declined as a major power
 The Tanakh was written
 Buddhism was founded
 Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and created the
Persian Empire (6th century BC)
 Sparta & Athens fought the Peloponnesian War
 Alexander the Great conquered Greece, Egypt, Persia
and Afghanistan
 Hellenic Greek culture spreads
 China was unified under the Qin Dynasty
 Celts invaded Western Europe
 The Roman Republic rose and fell
 Rome and Carthage fought the Punic wars
 The Maya civilization began
Significant persons:
 David, king of Israel
 Homer, poet
 Buddha and Confucius
 Aristotle, Socrates, Plato: Greek Philosophers
 Pythagoras, Greek mathemetician
 Alexander the Great, Greek conqueror (4th c BC)
 Archimedes (scientist); Euclid (mathematician)
 Julius Caesar, Roman conqueror and dictator
Inventions, Discoveries, Introductions
 Iron use becomes widespread
 Philosophy
 Geometry is developed; Pythagorean theorem proved
 Eratosthenes proves that the earth is a sphere
 The Phoenecians invent the phonetic alphabet
About Writing:
Most scholars accept that writing began with accountancy sometime in the late 4 th millennium BC, when the complexity of
trade and administration in the early cities of Mesopotamia reached a point where it outstripped the power of memory of the
governing elite. The earliest European writing is from pre-Homeric Greece and Crete, written in Linear B script. The development of
full writing, as opposed to the limited, purely pictographic proto writing of North American Indians and others, was the discovery of
the rhebus principle: the idea that a pictographic symbol could be used for its phonetic value. For example, a picture of a bee and a
picture of a leaf could mean “belief” rather than bee – leaf. The earliest Egyptian writing dates from 3100 BC, that of the Indus
Valley from 2500 BC, that of Crete from 1900 BC, that of China from 1200 BC, that of Central America from 600 BC. Some
scholars suggest that phonetic innovations to Egyptian hieroglyphics began to happen around 2000 BC, arguing that the origin of
innovation was with Semitic workers within Egyptian society. They believe the inventors took Egyptian hieroglyphs and applied
new names and phonetic sounds to the images, initially to represent the consonant sounds of a Semitic language. It was inherited by
the Canaanites and Phoenicians, and thanks to the mobility of the Phoenicians, nearly all subsequent alphabets are derived from it or
inspired by it, directly or indirectly. Before the Phoenician phonetic alphabet spread to Greece, Mycenaean was the most ancient
known form of the Greek language, invented and spoken in Mycenae and in Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC (what
Agamemnon would have spoken and used). It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a syllabary script invented on Crete in the
14th century BC. Tablets found in Mycenae and Knossos are mostly lists and inventories, and no prose narrative survives, much less
myth or poetry. After the fall of the Mycenaean civilization around 1200 BC, there was a period of about five hundred years (the
“dark ages”) when writing was either not used, or nothing has survived to the present day. Some say the Greeks “forgot to write.”
Since early classical times, Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician. The Phoenician alphabet spread
into Northern Africa to become the writing system of the Arabs and spread northwest to Greece in the 8 th century (Homer’s time).
The Greek letters were further modified to become the Cyrillic alphabets of Russia and the Balkans, and the Romans, in their turn,
modified the letters into the alphabet we recognize and use, called, sensibly enough, the Roman alphabet.