These texts were either freshly translated or distributed in Greek, in printed books. And for people who couldn't afford all the new books, the new availability of inexpensive paper spurred an explosion of notebooks called zibaldoni, in which regular people wrote down excerpts of books they had read, things they had heard, or discoveries they had made themselves

Zheng He’s first expedition left China in July 1405 with 62 large ships, over 200 smaller ships, and 28,000 soldiers. The largest ships were 425 feet long, over six times the length of the 65-foot caravels the Spanish and Portuguese would use on their explorations nearly a century later.

After gaining control of the fabled wealth of the Delhi Sultans, Timur stripped the city of not only gold and jewels, but of architects, masons, and other artisans whom he took back to Samarkand to build monuments.

Like Europe, China lost up to half its population, or about 40 million people. And like Europe, the Chinese population had already been hard hit by famines in the decades before the plague arrived.

Caravans and official travelers could cover up to 200 miles per day, and for the first time, people from each end of the long trade route, such as the Polos, were able to visit the other endpoint and return home to tell tales of exotic cultures.

Often, wealthy members such as Lübeck, Hamburg, and Danzig were not that interested in paying for poorer members’ defense. And in their first attempt, going to war against Denmark in 1361 after the sack of Visby, a lack of full participation resulted in a humiliating defeat.

Genghis was born on the steppe near Lake Baikal and rose to power after a legendary boyhood during which he was abandoned by his tribe, was captured and enslaved, rescued his wife from kidnappers, and engaged in a series of brilliant alliances, betrayals, and wars with the Mongol and Turkic tribes.

Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) was a poet and geographer from Valencia in al-Andalus (Spain) who wrote an account of his Hajj from 1183 to 1185. He sailed on a Genoese ship from Ceuta to Alexandria and visited Cairo during the reign of Saladin (for whom he had great praise) on his way to Mecc

He described the Rūsiyyah as perfect human specimens but found their hygiene and sexual practices disgusting and shameless.

Despite military vulnerabilities, the Song era lasted over 300 years until conquest by the Mongols under Kublai Khan in 1279 CE.

In the 860s, a Greek monk (Saint) Cyril and his brother (Saint) Methodius developed an alphabet for the Slavic language which ultimately became Cyrillic.

The crusade unfolded in two main phases. The "People's Crusade" began in 1096, led by charismatic preachers like Peter the Hermit, with poorly organized peasants and minor nobles who marched ahead, committing atrocities that included attacks on Jewish communities in the Rhineland before they ever left Europe.

The monks and scholars at these monasteries used a new writing system called Carolingian Miniscule that, unlike earlier script, began using lower-case letters, spaces between words, and punctuation. This allowed them to transcribe three or four pages in a day, rather than just one. As a result, over a thousand volumes survive using the new technique, versus just fifty from the previous Merovingian system.

writing at least 260 books about geometry, medicine, philosophy, logic, and physic

"House of Wisdom" where  Muhammad al-Khwarizmi published a book on mathematics now known as "Algebra"

The Ka'ba in the Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca, during the 2018 Hajj season.Muhammad's revelations continued and were written down in what became the Qur'an. The focus on social justice, submission (islam) to god, and monotheism echoed elements of Judaism and Christianity, and Muhammad's followers described their new faith as a continuation of a tradition that began with Abraham and accepted the Hebrew prophets, including Jesus.

Emperor Wen and his son, Emperor Yang, ruled until 618 and set the stage for the Tang Dynasty

Gothic and Byzantine battle in Italy

The lack of imperial endorsement weakened Theodoric's daughter and her son, and in 535, Justinian invaded Italy

Theodoric advanced into Italy between 489 and 493,

The Huns reached their peak under Attila (c. 406-453), who ruled from 434 until his death. He crossed the Danube River twice and invaded Anatolia in 441 but failed to conquer Constantinople, although he did extract 6,000 pounds of gold in tribute from the city

The history of early christianity taught within the religion often focuses on the sacrifices of martyrs who refused to renounce their faith even when threatened with torture and violent death.

Christianity was especially attractive to people who lacked social standing and wealth

A Roman legion built eight forts and a 6.5 mille wall around the fortress and began a siege that lasted about nine months. In the summer and fall of 72, 10,000 workers carried stones up sheer cliffs to build a 1,400 foot ramp. In April 73, when the Romans stormed the walls via the ramp, they found 960 bodies. The defenders had committed mass suicide, except for two women and five children who had hidden in a cistern, who told the tale. Masada, in the Judean Desert, with the Dead Sea in the distance

Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE) was one of the final Egyptian pharaohs.

The Wusun reciprocated, sending twenty envoys back to China with Zhang, bearing horses and furs. These elite "heavenly horses" from the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan) were probably ancestors of the Akhal-Teke breed, valued for their intelligence, speed, and endurance. The descendants of these horses revolutionized Han's archer cavalry.

The Silk Road was not a single highway, but a series of overland routes that connected China with the Mediterranean, Europe, and Africa.

Han Wu (156-87 BCE) was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty, who ascended the throne at age fourteen and ruled for 54 years.

Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) was born into an influential patrician family in Rome.

While the Greeks and Phoenicians had been expanding across the Mediterranean, a city on the west-central coast of Italy was steadily growing in prominence. Founded according to legend in 753 BCE by orphan brothers Romulus and Remus who had been raised by wolves, the early city was ruled by seven kings (some legendary and some real).

Zeno saw the universe as a divine entity, with humans sharing its rational spark. His Republic, written as a response to Plato's book of the same name, imagined a stateless community, which shocked Athenian elites

5th-century BCE Athenian coin, featuring Athena and her symbol, the owl.

It is harder and holds a sharper edge than copper alone, which makes bronze useful for both practical tools such as knives, axes, plows, and sickles;

Egyptian Book of the Dead: Anubis weighing a dead man's heart against a feather.

Possibly the oldest is called "The Instructions of Shuruppak". Written in Sumerian about 4,600 years ago, it is structured as the advice of a father named Shuruppak, a mythical sage and ruler, to his son Ziusudra (hero of the Sumerian flood myth)

. (Note: there is a persistent rumor that Sumerian is a mysterious language that has never been deciphered. This is not true, although it is an isolated language and not part of the Semitic language group, like Akkadian.)

One of the interesting mysteries of the Minoans is that none of their surviving art seems to depict a ruler.

The most famous and recognizable remnants of ancient Egypt, of course, are the pyramids

By about 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, agricultural techniques including farming and herding had spread from the places they had developed into surrounding regions.

19th-century American painting of Native American men hunting bison on the Great Plains. Big game hunting in the northeastern woodlands was similarly a male profession.

So if we imagine a culture of people who hunted, fished, gathered, and began cultivating valuable food plants near their camps, we would be thinking of people who supported themselves in a similar way to the woodland Native American tribes of the Northeast.

One explanation scholars have proposed for the building of monuments like Gobekli Tepe) and Karahan Tepe, and later Stonehenge, is that these sites may have been important meeting places for ancient people.

The money used along the Silk Road included Abbasid gold dinars, Tang silver ingots, and Samanid (Bukhara) silver dirhams. Copper coins were not used in long-distance trade because they were too heavy.

The earliest known Maya pyramid may be the Temple of the Masks in Uaxactun.

about the Chinese Empire: it continued (under several dynasties) until 1911. Life-size ceramic sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, buried with him in 210–209 BCE

The new city (its name literally means New City) was located about fifteen miles from the older settlement at Utica. The Tunisian coast lies directly across the Mediterranean from Sicily, at a narrow spot that all ships traveling from east to west would have to pass. Two large harbors were built; one for the city's powerful navy and the other for commerce. C

The object of the battle had been control of the Mediterranean coast, which Egypt had lost during the problematic reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who had tried to shift the polytheistic Egyptian religious system to a monotheism focused on Aten (or Amun-Ra), the solar deity.

Enkidu confronts Gilgamesh and they fight in the streets of Uruk. The wrestling match ends in a stalemate, since the two are evenly matched.

Cassava trees are native to central Brazil, where they were first domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Although the starch of the cassava tree, called manioc, is only familiar to most North Americans as tapioca or in bubble tea,

The Central Americans created the single-stem, large-eared maize plant we are familiar with, by very gradually improving a native grass called teosinte. Year after year farmers saved seeds from the best plants with the biggest seed heads

domesticated, animals need to be willing to accept a human as the leader of their herd.

. While we can’t say for sure that cousins such as Neanderthals did not share this interest and ability to create and to think symbolically, what we do know is that by 35,000 to 20,000 years ago, people were painting the walls of caves in places like France, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, and Africa. In addition, bone flutes dating from 35,000 to possibly 60,000 years old have been found in France, Germany, and Slovenia.

Nearly all people whose ancestors were not sub-Saharan Africans got about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals.

Pre-sapiens humans such as Homo erectus left Africa about 1.8 million years ago and spread as far as China and Java.