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Mesopotamia

Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria.

539 BCE

Persia takes Babylon and Mesopotamia stops being the centre of its own story.

626 BCE – 539 BCE

Babylon's last flourish. Nebuchadnezzar destroys the Temple in Jerusalem and deports its people.

911 BCE – 609 BCE

A military state that ruled by terror and deportation, and assembled the first systematic library.

1,700 BCE

The oldest surviving great work of literature, including a flood story that predates the biblical one.

1,754 BCE

Babylon publishes a code of law on a stone stele, so that the terms are fixed and public.

2,100 BCE

A stepped temple-mountain raised in mud brick, still standing four thousand years later.

2,334 BCE – 2,279 BCE

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

2,600 BCE

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

2,800 BCE

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

3,200 BCE

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

3,300 BCE

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