Articles about inventions & science across every continent and era, oldest first.
In 196 BC the Rosetta Stone recorded a decree honoring Ptolemy V in three scripts — hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. Found in 1799, its readable Greek let Champollion decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs around 1822, reviving a dead script.
· 196 BCThe Classic Maya (and their Mesoamerican neighbors) wrote zero as a shell glyph in a place-value system by at least 36 BC — over five centuries before India's conventional date, and independently.
· 36 BCVesuvius turned the Villa of the Papyri library into charcoal in AD 79. X-ray scans and AI now read the scrolls without opening them; the first passages came in 2023-24.
· AD 79Without a telescope, the Classic Maya tracked Venus for generations and calculated its cycle at 583.92 days — within 0.01 days of the modern value — recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, by naked-eye observation and base-20 math.
· AD 900