Early Bronze Age — Speck in Time Archive

Gojoseon

2,333 BCE – 108 BCE · Korea

The first Korean state, its founding date traditional rather than archaeological.

Sargon builds the first empire

2,334 BCE – 2,279 BCE · Mesopotamia

Sargon of Akkad conquers the Sumerian cities and rules them as one state — arguably the world's first empire.

Stonehenge raised

2,500 BCE · Neolithic Mediterraneans

The large sarsen stones are erected on Salisbury Plain, some hauled from over two hundred kilometres away.

Kerma

2,500 BCE – 1,500 BCE · Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa's earliest urban civilisation south of Egypt, a rival power on the Nile.

The Sphinx and the Great Pyramids

2,600 BCE · Egypt

Built at Giza in a burst of about a century. They were already two thousand years old when Cleopatra was born.

Harappa and Mohenjo-daro

2,600 BCE · India

Grid-planned cities housing tens of thousands, with public baths and covered sewers.

The First Dynasty of Ur

2,600 BCE · Mesopotamia

Royal tombs at Ur reveal enormous wealth — and retainers buried alongside their rulers.

The Old Kingdom

2,686 BCE – 2,181 BCE · Egypt

The age of pyramid building and a centralised god-king state. It ends in drought and fragmentation.

The Minoans

2,700 BCE – 1,450 BCE · Greeks

A palace civilisation on Crete with plumbing, frescoes and a script nobody has read.

The Bell Beaker culture

2,800 BCE – 1,800 BCE · Neolithic Mediterraneans

A distinctive pottery style spreads across western Europe, along with metalworking.

Arithmetic, geometry, algebra

2,800 BCE · Mesopotamia

Scribal schools work out mathematics we still use, including a base-60 system that survives in our clocks.

The Methuselah tree germinates

2,850 BCE · North American First Peoples

A bristlecone pine sprouts in California. It is still alive — the oldest known non-clonal organism on Earth.

The sail invented

3,000 BCE · Austronesians

Austronesians develop the sail and begin expanding out of Taiwan — the start of the greatest maritime expansion in human history.

Longshan culture

3,000 BCE – 1,900 BCE · China

Villages along the Yellow River known for black pottery so thin it is called eggshell ware.

The Angono Petroglyphs

3,000 BCE · Philippines

Conventionally dated to the Late Neolithic, around 3000 BCE. The dating is an estimate, not a measurement.

On a rock shelter wall in Rizal, someone carved 127 human and animal figures — simple outlined bodies, heads, and limbs. It is the oldest known artwork in the Philippines. What the figures were for is not settled; suggestions range from healing rituals to records of children. They are the first thing in this lane made purely to be looked at.

Narmer unites Egypt

3,100 BCE · Egypt

Upper and Lower Egypt are joined under a single ruler, beginning roughly three thousand years of pharaonic state.

The undeciphered Indus script

3,100 BCE · India

Symbols appear on seals and pottery. Nobody has read them, and there may not be enough text to ever try.

Norte Chico

3,200 BCE – 1,800 BCE · Andean Peoples

Cities with monumental architecture but no pottery, no writing and no visual art — a civilisation built on cotton and fish.

The first hieroglyphs

3,200 BCE · Egypt

Egypt begins writing — one of only a handful of places on Earth where writing was invented rather than borrowed.

The first cuneiform

3,200 BCE · Mesopotamia

Marks pressed into clay to track grain and debt become the first writing system.

Writing begins, and so does history

3,300 BCE · Global Turning Points

History as a discipline starts here — not because people became interesting, but because they started keeping records. Everything before this is reconstructed from objects; everything after can be read. The line between prehistory and history is really a line between inference and testimony.

turning-point Read more — History of writing Image source (unverified) auto-matched

The Indus Valley Civilisation

3,300 BCE – 1,300 BCE · India

Vast planned cities with drainage and standardised bricks, and almost no sign of kings or armies.

Bronze, and the wheel already turning

3,300 BCE · Mesopotamia

Bronze comes into use in a society that already has the wheel, the plough and the sail.