The first cities, the first writing, the first kings who called themselves gods. These articles cover Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and the Bronze Age world that connected them.
Tajikistan's physical-technical institute dates Sarazm's first dig to 1976; Roland Besenval's 1987 paper says Isakov discovered the site in 1979.
· 3500 BCGermany's archaeological institute calls Uruk one of the world's earliest metropolises: 200 hectares, perhaps 40,000 people, writing from about 3300 BC.
· 3300 BCA 2017 PNAS paper dated ten dams and the Tangshan Levee at Liangzhu to 5,200–4,800 years ago, older than the 300 ha walled city they protected.
· 3000 BCCaral, in Peru's Supe valley, raised pyramids by 2627 BC with no pottery or maize; its farmers grew cotton for fishing nets and traded it for fish.
· 2600 BCKhufu's pyramid lies within six arcminutes of true north. No Egyptian text says how; Glen Dash of AERA weighed four methods, from shadows to star transits.
· 2560 BCEgyptian crews fed by the state, not slaves, built the Giza pyramids. A town for the workers, their cemetery and gang names inside the pyramid show it.
· 2560 BCMineral grains in the Altar Stone match rock in northeast Scotland, 750 km away. The sarsens came from 25 km north, the bluestones from west Wales.
· 2500 BCAt Mohenjo-daro almost every house had a bathing area draining to covered street drains big enough for workmen to enter; only two brick toilets are known.
· 2500 BCPowder from 61 skeletal samples at the Rakhigarhi cemetery gave one usable ancient genome. Cell published it on September 5, 2019, with no Steppe ancestry.
· 2500 BCA 2026 Ministry of Culture post calls Dholavira's ten-sign gypsum inscription the world's oldest-known signboard, at a city ASI excavated under R.S. Bisht.
· 2500 BCThe Indus cities of 2600–1900 BC left no identified palace or royal tomb. J. M. Kenoyer proposes rule by competing elites and calls 'Great Bath' a guess.
· 2500 BCAbout 4,000 Indus texts survive, averaging five signs, with no bilingual text and no agreed language, so no decipherment has been accepted since the 1870s.
· 2500 BCS. R. Rao called the brick basin at Lothal the earliest dock in the world. Lawrence Leshnik measured its sill, channel and stones in 1968 and saw a tank.
· 2400 BCCharred millet, wheat and barley from cremation cists at Begash and Tasbas in Kazakhstan date to about 2300 BC; their excavators later doubted what they show.
· 2300 BCIn 1975 Sapienza excavators found Ebla's palace archive at Tell Mardikh, Syria. Scarpa counts over 15,000 pieces in one room, ASOR over 18,000 tablets.
· 2300 BCSargon's daughter Enheduanna, priestess at Ur, names herself in the Exaltation of Inana. Most copies are 500 years later, so her authorship is debated.
· 2300 BCSargon's inscriptions say he captured Lugalzagesi of Uruk and took lands from the sea to Mari and Ebla. Three later tales disagree on where he came from.
· 2279 BCA copper statue from Bassetki says Naram-Sin won nine battles in a year, and the people of Agade asked eight gods to make him their city's god.
· 2250 BCThirteen rammed-earth pillars at Taosi, Shanxi, dug in 2003–04, were read as a sunrise observatory of the 21st century BC. A 2025 paper queries it.
· 2100 BCArkaim reserve records say dam work began in November 1986; a 1987 survey found a ringed Bronze Age settlement, and the reservoir was canceled in April 1991.
· 2000 BCAt Kuk Swamp in Papua New Guinea's Wahgi Valley, people grew bananas on mounds by 6950 to 6440 cal BP and dug drainage ditches by about 4000 cal BP.
· 2000 BCA Soviet expedition found the Gonur oasis in Turkmenistan's Karakum desert in 1974. Its Bronze Age city traded with the Indus; its dates are disputed.
· 2000 BCSeveral editions of the Gilgamesh epic existed by about 2000 BC. A king of Uruk loses his friend Enkidu, seeks eternal life and loses the plant of youth.
· 2000 BCSeiichi Izumi's University of Tokyo team dug up two crossed-hands clay reliefs at Kotosh, Peru, in 1960 and 1963; sources disagree on their age.
· 2000 BC
