Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. It refers to the timeframe of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.[29][30] Ancient history includes the recorded Greek history beginning in about 776 BC (First Olympiad). This coincides roughly with the traditional date of the founding of Rome in 753 BC and the beginning of the history of Rome.[31][32]
c. 512 BC:Darius I (Darius the Great) of Persia, subjugates eastern Thrace, Macedonia submits voluntarily, and annexes the Libyan Kingdom, Persian Empire at largest extent.
509 BC: Expulsion of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, founding of Roman Republic (traditional date).
206 BC:Han dynasty established in China, after the death of Qin Shi Huang; China in this period officially becomes a Confucian state and opens trading connections with the West, i.e. the Silk Road.
149 BC – 146 BC:Third Punic War between Rome and Carthage. War ends with the complete destruction of Carthage, allowing Rome to conquer modern day Tunisia and Libya.
146 BC: Roman conquest of Greece, see Roman Greece.
27 BC: Formation of Roman Empire: Augustus is given titles of Princeps and Augustus by Roman Senate – beginning of Pax Romana. Formation of influential Praetorian Guard to provide security to Emperor.
313:Edict of Milan declared that the Roman Empire would tolerate all forms of religious worship.
316:Emperor Min of Jin executed, with northern China then controlled by various kingdoms founded by non-Han people. The Jin dynasty continues to rule the south.
The date used as the end of the ancient era is arbitrary. The transition period from Classical Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages is known as Late Antiquity. Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the transitional centuries from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world: generally from the end of the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century (c. ACE 284) to the Islamic conquests and the re-organization of the Byzantine Empire under Heraclius. The Early Middle Ages are a period in the history of Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire spanning roughly five centuries from CE 500 to 1000. Not all historians agree on the ending dates of ancient history, which frequently falls somewhere in the 5th, 6th, or 7th century. Western scholars usually date the end of ancient history with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in CE 476, the death of the emperor Justinian I in CE 565, or the coming of Islam in CE 632 as the end of classical antiquity.
^"Beginning in the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, clay tokens are widely attested as a system of counting and identifying specific amounts of specified livestock or commodities. The tokens, enclosed in clay envelopes after being impressed on their rounded surface, were gradually replaced by impressions on flat or plano-convex tablets, and these in turn by more or less conventionalized pictures of the tokens incised on the clay with a reed stylus. The transition to writing was complete W. Hallo; W. Simpson (1971). The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. p. 25.
^Gardiner, Alan (1961). Egypt of the Pharoahs. Oxford University Press.
^Caroline Alexander, "Stonehenge," National Geographic, June 2008.
^Hildebrand, Elisabeth; et al. (2018). "A monumental cemetery built by eastern Africa's first herders near Lake Turkana, Kenya". PNAS. 115 (36): 8942–8947. doi:10.1073/pnas.1721975115. PMC 6130363. PMID30127016.
^Two fragmentary Akkadian versions survive, from the 15th century BCE and from the end of the second millennium BCE: "Its great antiquity and popularity is evidenced by the large number of manuscripts of it that have survived" (Beaulieu in Clifford 2007:4).
^Paris, Raphael, et al., (2022). "A Minoan and a Neolithic tsunami recorded in coastal sediments of Ios Island, Aegean Sea, Greece", in: Marine Geology, Volume 452, October 2022, Abstract: "...tsunami deposits on the coasts of Ios Island, Aegean Sea, Greece...marine sediments and pumices from the ~1600 BCE Minoan eruption of Santorini volcano. This is the first evidence of the Minoan tsunami in the Cycladic Islands North of Santorini."
^Antonopoulos, J. (1992). "The great Minoan eruption of Thera volcano and the ensuing tsunami in the Greek Archipelago". Natural Hazards. 5 (2): 153–68. doi:10.1007/BF00127003. S2CID129836887.
^Flood, Gavin D. (1996). An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press.
^Anthony, David W. (2007). The Horse The Wheel And Language. How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped The Modern World. Princeton University Press.
^Thapar, Romila; Witzel, Michael; Menon, Jaya; Friese, Kai; Khan, Razib (2019). Which of us are Aryans? rethinking the concept of our origins. New Delhi: Aleph. ISBN978-93-88292-38-2.
^Ehret, Christopher (2001). "Bantu Expansions: Re-Envisioning a Central Problem of Early African History". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 34 (1): 5–41. doi:10.2307/3097285. ISSN0361-7882. JSTOR3097285.
^Tishkoff, S. A.; Reed, F. A.; Friedlaender, F. R.; et al. (2009). "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans". Science. 324 (5930): 1035–44. Bibcode:2009Sci...324.1035T. doi:10.1126/science.1172257. PMC 2947357. PMID19407144
^It is used to refer to various other periods of ancient history, like Ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia (such as, Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer) or other early civilizations of the Near East. It is less commonly used in reference to civilizations of the Far East.
^Chris Scarre, The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome (London: Penguin Books, 1995).
^Adkins, Lesley; Roy Adkins (1998). Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-512332-8. page 3.
^Clist, Bernard. (1987). A critical reappraisal of the chronological framework of the early Urewe Iron Age industry. Muntu. 6. 35-62.
^Paul Lane, Ceri Ashley & Gilbert Oteyo (2006) New Dates for Kansyore and Urewe Wares from Northern Nyanza, Kenya, AZANIA: Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 41:1, 123-138, DOI: 10.1080/00672700609480438
^Schmidt, P.; Avery, D.H. (1978). "Complex iron smelting and prehistoric culture in Tanzania". Science. 201 (4361): 1085–89. Bibcode:1978Sci...201.1085S. doi:10.1126/science.201.4361.1085. PMID17830304. S2CID 37926350
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MacMullen, Ramsay (1993). Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN0-691-03601-2.
