Articles about culture & ideas across every continent and era, oldest first.
Permafrost under the Pazyryk mounds in the Altai kept felt, wood, horses, tattooed skin, a wagon and a knotted carpet from the 5th to 4th century BC.
· 400 BCAfter the Kalinga war of about 261 BC, Ashoka had edicts cut on rocks and pillars from Kandahar to Karnataka. No one could read them again until 1837.
· 260 BCFound on a royal hunt in 1961 and dug by a French mission until 1978, Ai Khanoum in north Afghanistan held a Greek theater, gymnasium and Delphic maxims.
· 250 BCPolybius says Hannibal told King Antiochus how, at nine, his father had him swear at an altar never to be a friend of the Romans. Livy calls it a story.
· 237 BCIn 2002 a well at Liye, Hunan, gave up the Qin archive of Qianling county, 222 BC to 208 or 210 BC, naming a commandery missing from the Shiji.
· 222 BCHannibal left Spain in 218 BC with 37 elephants; Polybius gives a five-month march and 15 days in the Alps. His numbers and his pass are still argued.
· 218 BCOn August 2, 216 BC, Hannibal's 50,000 let their center bend back and closed around a Roman army of 80,000. Polybius puts the Roman dead at 70,000.
· 216 BCPriests at Memphis honored Ptolemy V in 196 BC in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. In 1822 Champollion read royal names from it and from a Philae obelisk.
· 196 BCTomb 3 at Mawangdui, buried in 168 BC and opened in 1973, held a lacquer box of silk and bamboo texts, among them two Laozi editions and medical works.
· 168 BCFor defending the general Li Ling, Sima Qian was condemned; his letter to Ren An explains why he chose to live and finish the 130 chapters of the Shiji.
· 99 BCOne panel of Sanchi's south gateway names its makers, ivory-carvers from Vidisha. Some 800 other inscriptions name the monks, nuns and bankers who paid.
· 50 BCFrom November 15, 1978, Viktor Sarianidi's team found six unlooted graves at Tillya Tepe, Afghanistan, with a Tiberius aureus and about 20,000 gold objects.
· AD 25Claudia Severa's birthday invitation, tablet 291, is one of the Roman ink letters on thin wood found at the fort of Vindolanda since March 23, 1973.
· AD 100They cleared dark stones off the desert to expose pale ground, scaling up small designs; near-zero rain kept the lines intact for about 2,000 years.
· AD 200Squier and Davis counted 24 mounds at Mound City in 1848. Camp Sherman covered them in 1917; Newark's Octagon left its golf lease on January 1, 2025.
· AD 200Wall paintings found in a trench in March 1920 led to the Yale-Académie digs at Dura-Europos; its synagogue went to Damascus, its baptistery to Yale.
· AD 245The East India Company ordered Ajanta's paintings copied in 1844. Gill's canvases burned at the Crystal Palace in 1866; Griffiths recopied them, 1873-1885.
· AD 470Sogdian merchants from Samarkand and Bukhara, who kept colonies across China from the AD 300s to the 700s and faded after the Arab conquest.
· AD 600Xuanzang recorded Nalanda's gatekeeper and debates; the ASI dug the site in 1915–37 and 1974–82; an Act of September 21, 2010 revived the name.
· AD 629INAH says Bonampak's Structure 1 has three rooms from c. 790-792 showing an heir, a battle with captives, and a ceremony, unseen by outsiders until 1946.
· AD 790Alcuin's two letters and two Anglo-Saxon Chronicle texts record the Lindisfarne raid of 793. Digs since 2016 found graves of adults, children and babies.
· AD 793Four accounts of Christmas Day 800 disagree on who planned it. Einhard wrote Charlemagne would have stayed away; the court annals recorded an acclamation.
· AD 800From 762 to 833 the Abbasid caliphs paid translators in Baghdad to turn Greek, Persian and Indian works of medicine, astronomy and mathematics into Arabic.
· AD 830Tree-ring dating puts the Oseberg ship's timber at about 820 and its burial at 834; Gabriel Gustafson excavated it in 1904 after a farmer's report in 1903.
· AD 834
