civilization.foundation
c. 9500 BCE–1995

Timeline

21 moments that made civilization what it is. Each one is a publication, a first or a decision that can be looked up.

  1. c. 9500 BCEFarming begins in the Fertile Crescent. At Göbekli Tepe, foragers raise enclosures of carved stone pillars.
  2. c. 7400 BCEÇatalhöyük, in Anatolia, begins: eventually several thousand people in one settlement, with no streets and no obvious public buildings.
  3. c. 3500 BCEUruk grows into what is usually called the first city, though Tell Brak in northern Mesopotamia became urban about as early. The earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles dates from about this time.
  4. c. 3300 BCEAccounting tablets at Uruk: the earliest writing. Bronze comes into use in the Near East.
  5. c. 3100 BCEUpper and Lower Egypt are unified under one ruler.
  6. c. 2600 BCEThe cities of the Indus Valley reach their mature form. Monumental building is under way at Caral in Peru.
  7. c. 2560 BCEThe Great Pyramid is built at Giza.
  8. c. 2100 BCEThe code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest surviving written law.
  9. c. 1754 BCEThe code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon.
  10. c. 1250 BCEThe earliest surviving Chinese writing, on oracle bones of the Shang dynasty.
  11. c. 1200 BCEThe Late Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. The Olmec centre of San Lorenzo flourishes in Mexico.
  12. c. 1050 BCEThe Phoenician alphabet, ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts.
  13. c. 600 BCEThe first coins are struck in Lydia.
  14. 1756The word “civilisation” first appears in print in its modern sense, in French, in the Marquis de Mirabeau’s L’Ami des hommes, dated 1756 and issued in 1757.
  15. 1822Jean-François Champollion announces the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  16. 1936Gordon Childe describes the “Neolithic revolution” in Man Makes Himself.
  17. 1949Willard Libby’s team publishes the first radiocarbon dates: absolute dating that works wherever organic remains survive.
  18. 1950Childe publishes “The Urban Revolution”.
  19. 1952Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B and shows that it records an early form of Greek.
  20. 1988Joseph Tainter publishes The Collapse of Complex Societies.
  21. 1995Excavation begins at Göbekli Tepe under Klaus Schmidt.