The culture of the ancient Greeks, together with some influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, [5] philosophy, society, and education in the Mediterranean and Near East until the Roman imperial period. The Romans preserved, imitated, and spread this culture over Europe, until they were able to compete with it, and the classical world began to speak Latin along with Greek. [6] [7] This Greco-Roman cultural foundation has been immensely influential on the language, politics, law, educational systems, philosophy, science, warfare, poetry, historiography, ethics, rhetoric, art and architecture of the modern world. [8] The East Asian nations adjacent to China were all profoundly influenced by their interactions with Chinese civilisation. Korea and Vietnam were brought under Han rule by Han Wudi in the second century BC, and this rule led to cultural influences on both areas for many centuries to come. [124] Wudi also faced a threat from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people from the Central Asian steppes. Wudi's invasions ended the Xiongnu state. [125] Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (2015). Concise History of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-69453-8. BC – 2270 BC: Akkadian Empire is founded, dating depends upon whether the Middle chronology or the Short chronology is used.

The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age. It was a time about which Greeks of the Classical age had confused and actually false notions. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture. (He does, however, speak of Greece “settling down gradually” and colonizing Italy, Sicily, and what is now western Turkey. This surely implies that Greece was settling down after something.) Thucydides does indeed display sound knowledge of the series of migrations by which Greece was resettled in the post-Mycenaean period. The most famous of these was the “ Dorian invasion,” which the Greeks called, or connected with, the legendary “return of the descendants of Heracles.” Although much about that invasion is problematic—it left little or no archaeological trace at the point in time where tradition puts it—the problems are of no concern here. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept. Thucydides casually but significantly mentions soldiers speaking the “Doric dialect” in a narrative about ordinary military matters in the year 426. That is a surprisingly abstract way of looking at the subdivisions of the Greeks, because it would have been more natural for a 5th-century Greek to identify soldiers by home cities. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. So extreme was this hostility that Dorians were prohibited from entering Ionian sanctuaries; extant today is a 5th-century example of such a prohibition, an inscription from the island of Paros. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer (8th–7th-century BC) and ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Such a wide span of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods. Classical antiquity may also refer to an idealized vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome". [4]Kristiansen, Kristian; Larsson, Thomas B. (2005). The Rise of Bronze Age Society. Cambridge University Press. Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BC–AD 750. The three-age system periodizes ancient history into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, with recorded history generally considered to begin with the Bronze Age. The start and end of the three ages vary between world regions. In many regions the Bronze Age is generally considered to begin a few centuries prior to 3000 BC, while the end of the Iron Age varies from the early first millennium BC in some regions to the late first millennium AD in others. c. 400 BC: Rise of the Garamantes as an irrigation-based desert state in the Fezzan region of Libya. BC: Chandragupta Maurya seizes the satrapies of Paropamisadae (Kabul), Aria (Herat), Arachosia (Qanadahar) and Gedrosia (Baluchistan) from Seleucus I Nicator, the Macedonian satrap of Babylonia, in return for 500 elephants.

Dever, William (2003). Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-0975-9. Parker, Philip (2017). World History: From the Ancient World to the Information Age (Reviseded.). New York: DK. ISBN 978-1-4654-6240-4. The Archaic expansion differed from the Iron Age migrations of the Greek Dark Ages, in that it consisted of organised direction (see oikistes) away from the originating metropolis rather than the simplistic movement of tribes, which characterised the aforementioned earlier migrations. Many colonies, or apoikia ( Greek: ἀποικία, transl. "home away from home"), that were founded during this period eventually evolved into strong Greek city-states, functioning independently of their metropolis. Iron Age Italy [ edit ] Etruscan civilization in north of Italy, 800 BC Gernet, Jacques (1996). A History of Chinese Civilization. Translated by Foster, J. R.; Hartman, Charles (Seconded.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-49781-7.

Many writers have attempted to put a specific date on the symbolic "end" of antiquity with the most prominent dates being the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476, [21] [22] the closing of the last Platonic Academy in Athens by the Eastern Roman Emperor JustinianI in529, [23] and the conquest of much of the Mediterranean by the new Muslim faith from 634 to 718. [24] These Muslim conquests, of Syria (637), Egypt (639), Cyprus (654), North Africa (665), Hispania (718), Southern Gaul (720), Crete (820), and Sicily (827), Malta (870) (and the sieges of the Eastern Roman capital, First Arab Siege of Constantinople (674–78) and Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717–18)) severed the economic, cultural, and political links that had traditionally united the classical cultures around the Mediterranean, ending antiquity (see Pirenne Thesis). [24] The Byzantine Empire in 650 after the Arabs conquered the provinces of Syria and Egypt. At the same time early Slavs settled in the Balkans. See also: Classical antiquity The Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena, located on the Acropolis in Athens BC: The beginning of Shang dynasty in China, evidence of a fully developed writing system, see Oracle bone script. Under PhilipII, (359–336BC), Macedon expanded into the territory of the Paeonians, the Thracians and the Illyrians. Philip's son, Alexander the Great, (356–323BC) managed to briefly extend Macedonian power not only over the central Greek city-states but also to the Persian Empire, including Egypt and lands as far east as the fringes of India. The classical period conventionally ends at the death of Alexander in 323BC and the fragmentation of his empire, which was at this time divided among the Diadochi.