Articles about culture & ideas across every continent and era, oldest first.
Cave 17 at Mogao held manuscripts from the 4th to the early 11th century until Wang Yuanlu opened it in 1900. Stein and Pelliot bought much of it from 1907.
· 1000In 1896–97 Solomon Schechter emptied the Ben Ezra Synagogue's geniza in Fustat. Cambridge counts 193,000 fragments, Bible leaves to a Maimonides letter.
· 1100Francisco Álvares measured Lalibela's rock-hewn churches twice in the 1520s, giving names, spans and a tradition of who built them.
· 1200Minhaj's Tabaqat-i Nasiri records Iltutmish naming his daughter Raziyya heir over his sons. She ruled Delhi 1236-1240 and died near Kaithal in 1240.
· 1236The Archaeological Survey of India calls Konark's Sun Temple a stone chariot with twelve pairs of wheels and seven horses; its hall held sand until 2022.
· 1250A Franciscan friar entered the Mongol capital on May 7, 1254, sized it against a village near Paris, and described a silver fountain and Mongke's creed.
· 1254Rukn al-Din Khurshah surrendered to Hülegü on November 19, 1256. Juvayni, Hülegü's secretary, then sorted the Alamut library, keeping some books and burning the rest.
· 1256In 1939 Jim Eyles, 13, found a burial site at Wairau Bar with moa eggs and tools. Radiocarbon dates the graves to the 1200s-1300s; 42 koiwi came home in 2009.
· 1300No record gives a weight; the 100 camels and 12,000 slaves are report, not record. Al-Umari, 12 years on, wrote that the gold mithqal fell from 25 dirhams to 22.
· 1324He left Tangier on June 14, 1325; dictation ended in Fez on December 9, 1355. Delhi's salary and Mali's court are recorded; the Bulghar ride is invented.
· 1325A one-line colophon dates the Jikji's metal-type printing to 1377 at Heungdeoksa in Cheongju. Its only surviving volume is at the BnF in Paris.
· 1377A notary's record of November 6, 1455, is the only contemporary source for the Gutenberg Bible, printed at Mainz in about 180 copies; 49 are known.
· 1455The colophon reads Basel, Oporinus, June 1543. Vesalius's Fabrica gave the sternum three parts, not Galen's seven. His annotated 1555 copy surfaced in 2007
· 1543Akbar ruled Mughal India from 1556 to 1605 by ranking Hindu and Muslim officers in one service, ending the jizya tax in 1564 and outranking his clerics.
· 1575Morocco took Timbuktu in 1591 and exiled its scholars in 1594. In 2016 the ICC sentenced Al Mahdi for ten sites wrecked in 2012. The books are online.
· 1591Shells in the ahu of marae Taputapuātea on Ra'iatea date to AD 1503 to 1722 at the earliest. The World Heritage text says 14th to 18th centuries.
· 1600British troops took thousands of brass plaques and heads from the Oba's palace in Benin City in 1897; since 2021 museums have begun to return them.
· 1600Thomas Roe first saw Jahangir at Ajmer on January 10, 1616, with a coach and virginals. He left in 1618 with farmans, not the sealed treaty he had drafted.
· 1616The Sher-Dor madrasa in Samarkand carries a portal mosaic of a beast chasing deer under a human-faced sun, built for governor Yalangtush Bahadur by 1636.
· 1636Thunberg put Dejima at about 600 feet by 120. Nagasaki merchants built it in 1634–1636 and let it to the Dutch East India Company from 1641 to 1859.
· 1641How many died in Lisbon on November 1, 1755? Pombal told his governors 6,000 to 8,000; NOAA lists 50,000, then 60,000 to 100,000. No register was kept.
· 1755He came aboard Endeavour on July 13, 1769, at Banks's request, spoke to Māori for Cook in New Zealand, drew a chart of islands and died at Batavia in 1770.
· 1769Cook's journal records a musket fired between two Gweagal men at Botany Bay; Banks put the number of spears taken afterward at forty or fifty.
· 1770Britain fought China from 1840 to 1842 after Lin Zexu destroyed British opium at Canton. The Treaty of Nanjing opened five ports and ceded Hong Kong.
· 1840
