World Timeline (Up to 1500s)
Despite witnessing the electrical power in the form of amber’s attraction, lightning and electric fish people made little scientific progress in understanding this mysterious force. In contrast, the rest of the world was changing rapidly during this era, from the rise of the first cities to voyages that eventually circumnavigated the globe.
Below is a visual timeline of major developments from this period. You may skip this section and move directly to the next period (1600s), but it is recommended if you want a broader, global perspective on how science and civilization were evolving alongside these early electrical mysteries.
Agricultural Revolution and the First Cities
Around this time, many human groups began to settle near fertile rivers like the Tigris–Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yellow River. People learned to grow crops and keep animals, which created extra food. This surplus allowed villages to grow into some of the world’s first great cities, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia and Memphis in Egypt, where tens of thousands of people lived together.
Invention of Writing in Sumer and Egypt
History began when we started writing it down. The Sumerians pressed reeds into wet clay (Cuneiform) to count grain, while the Egyptians carved sacred symbols (Hieroglyphs) into stone. This allowed knowledge to be stored outside of the human brain and passed down for centuries.
Bronze Age
After the Stone Age, people in many parts of the world learned to make a new metal called bronze. Bronze is made by mixing copper with a small amount of tin, which makes it harder than either metal alone. Smiths used bronze to make stronger swords, axes and spearheads, as well as durable tools like plows. These better weapons and tools helped kings build powerful armies, control more land and grow richer through farming and trade.
Great Pyramids and Stone Circles
In Egypt and Europe, ancient builders used simple tools to move huge stones and build monuments like the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge. Their careful planning and alignments with the sun and stars show that early people understood shapes, measurement and the changing seasons.
Code of Hammurabi: Early Written Laws
The Babylonian king Hammurabi decided that justice shouldn’t be a guessing game. He carved 282 laws onto a massive stone pillar for all to see. It introduced the concept of “an eye for an eye” and established that the law applies to everyone, a foundation for modern justice.
Iron Age Begins
People learned to smelt iron from ore, making metal that was stronger and more common than bronze. Cheaper iron tools and plows helped farmers grow more food, and iron weapons changed how wars were fought.
Axial Age of Thought
New ways of thinking arose in several parts of Eurasia. In China, Confucius and other teachers stressed ethics and proper conduct. In India, the Buddha taught a path to end suffering. In Persia, Zoroaster spoke of the struggle between good and evil. These teachings shaped many religions and philosophies that still guide people today.
Birth of Natural Philosophy
Around 600 BCE in Greece, thinkers like Thales began to look for natural causes instead of blaming events on the gods. Thales suggested that water was the basic substance of the world and noticed that rubbed amber could attract light objects. These questions and observations were early steps toward scientific thinking.
Rise of Rome
Rome began as a small city on the Tiber River and grew into a vast republic and then an empire. Roman engineers built long, straight roads, aqueducts that carried water over many kilometres, and huge buildings like the Colosseum. Roman law, first written in the Twelve Tables and later expanded, became a model for many modern legal systems.
Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World
Around 330 BCE, Alexander the Great led his Macedonian army from Greece through Persia and as far as north‑west India. His conquests linked many regions by trade and government. Greek language, art and ideas mixed with Persian, Egyptian and Indian traditions, creating a connected Hellenistic world.
Golden Age of Geometry
In Hellenistic Greece and Egypt, Euclid wrote The Elements, a clear textbook that organised geometry and was used for about 2,000 years. Soon after, Archimedes used geometry to measure volume (his “Eureka!” discovery in the bath) and designed powerful machines, showing how maths could solve real‑world problems.
Great Wall and Silk Road
The Qin dynasty (from 221 BCE) united much of China and standardised writing, money, weights and measures. To guard the northern frontier, they joined and extended long earthen and stone walls, forming early sections of the Great Wall. Under the Han dynasty, traders began using the Silk Road, a network of routes that carried silk, spices and new ideas between China, Central Asia and the Mediterranean world, including Rome.
Spread of Christianity
Christianity began as a small Jewish movement in Judea and spread through the cities and roads of the Roman Empire. In the early 300s CE, Emperor Constantine ended persecution and supported the new faith, and by the late 4th century it had become the empire’s official religion, shaping the culture of Europe for centuries.
Invention of Paper
Around 105 CE, the Han‑dynasty official Cai Lun improved a way of making paper from mulberry bark, hemp, old rags and fishing nets. His light, cheap sheets replaced heavy bamboo slips and costly silk, making it much easier to write, store and share knowledge across China.
Ptolemy Maps the World
Around 150 CE in Roman Egypt, Claudius Ptolemy wrote Geography, using a grid of latitude and longitude to plot more than 8,000 places on maps of the known world. In another work, the Almagest, he argued that Earth sits at the centre of the universe, a geocentric model that guided astronomy in Europe and West Asia for over a thousand years.
Fall of the Western Roman Empire
In 476 CE, the Western Roman Empire ended when the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was removed from power.
After this, Western Europe broke into smaller kingdoms, and political control became more local and fragmented.
Islamic Golden Age
From about the 8th to the 13th century, many cities in the Islamic world—especially Baghdad and also centres in Spain—became major places of learning. Scholars translated important Greek works into Arabic and made new advances in mathematics, medicine, astronomy and geography. This learning was later shared with other regions through trade and contact.
Invention of Algebra
In 9th‑century Baghdad, the scholar Al‑Khwarizmi wrote a famous book on solving equations. He called this method al‑jabr (restoring/balancing), and from this word we get “algebra.” Algebra gave mathematics a clear way to work with unknown numbers and rules for solving many practical problems.
Zero and the Decimal System
Indian mathematicians made a brilliant leap: they treated “nothing” as a number. The concept of Zero and the decimal system (0-9) traveled to the Arab world and eventually to Europe, replacing the clunky Roman numerals.
Gunpowder
In China, alchemists experimenting with chemicals discovered that mixing saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal makes a powder that burns fiercely and can explode. It was first used for fireworks and signals, but later it was used in weapons, changing warfare and the balance of power in many regions.
Magnetic Compass
In China, people learned that a magnetized needle tends to line up in a north–south direction, which can be used to find direction at sea. As such technologies spread through trade and contact across regions, navigation became more reliable, helping sailors travel farther even when land was not visible.
First Universities in Europe
From about the 11th to 13th centuries, Europe saw the rise of universities—new centres of higher learning in big towns. Places like Bologna, Paris and Oxford organised teachers and students into formal institutions and taught subjects such as law, medicine, theology and “natural philosophy” (early science).
Genghis Khan & The Mongols
In the early 1200s, Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and began conquests that later created a vast empire stretching across much of Asia into parts of Europe. Although Mongol wars were destructive, the long period of Mongol rule later helped make overland travel and trade more secure in many regions, which increased connections across Eurasia. The Silk Road was a network of routes that linked distant societies through trade and cultural exchange.
The Black Death (Bubonic Plague)
In 1347 CE, a deadly plague reached Europe and spread widely across Eurasia. It moved faster because many regions were already linked by long‑distance trade routes and travel networks. The huge loss of life created labour shortages, weakened parts of the feudal system, and brought major social and economic changes.
The Printing Press
Around 1440 CE, Johannes Gutenberg in Germany developed movable metal type and a printing press. This made books much faster and cheaper to produce than hand copying. As a result, ideas about religion, science, and society spread to more people in less time.
Columbus Reaches the Americas
In 1492 CE, Christopher Columbus sailed west from Europe to find a sea route to Asia but reached the Americas instead. This voyage linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas more directly than before, starting large-scale travel, trade, and colonisation. It also began the “Columbian Exchange,” in which plants, animals, diseases, and ideas moved between the Old World and the New World.
The Renaissance
From about the 14th to the 16th century, a new interest in art, learning, and human abilities grew in Italy and later spread across Europe. Scholars studied the old books and ideas of Greece and Rome, and many people began to question traditional beliefs. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci observed nature and the human body closely, which led to more realistic painting and new ideas in science and design.
Sun‑Centered Universe
In 1543 CE, Nicolaus Copernicus published the idea that Earth is not the center of the universe and that it moves around the Sun. This challenged the older geocentric model, which placed Earth at the center and had strongly shaped astronomy for many centuries.
Vesalius Maps the Human Body
In 1543 CE, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica, a detailed, illustrated book based on careful human dissections. By checking the body directly, he corrected several old anatomical errors that had come from relying too much on Galen’s writings (often based on animal dissection), and this helped lay the base for modern anatomy.
First circumnavigation of the globe
From 1519 to 1522, a Spanish expedition led first by Ferdinand Magellan sailed west and completed the first circumnavigation of Earth, returning to Spain in 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano after Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521. The voyage greatly improved Europeans’ understanding of the world’s geography—showing the vastness of the Pacific and supporting a more concrete idea of Earth’s size and the connectedness of oceans through real travel.
The Gregorian Calendar
Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar to fix a drift in the seasons. He introduced the “Leap Year” system we still use today to keep our time in sync with the Earth’s orbit.