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Ancient History
Grain can be stored, and stored grain has to be counted, guarded and taxed. Within a few centuries the same answer appears along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow River — and further west, Greece and Rome turn the same problem into law, philosophy and empire.
These six civilisations barely knew of one another's existence for most of this span, yet they kept arriving at strikingly similar tools — writing, a calendar, a code of law — to solve strikingly similar problems: how to feed a city, and how to justify who gets to run it.
Ancient Egypt
3100 – 30 BCE
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Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylon, Assyria)
3500 – 539 BCE
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Ancient India
3300 BCE – 550 CE
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Ancient China
1600 BCE – 220 CE
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Ancient Greece
800 – 146 BCE
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Ancient Rome
753 BCE – 476 CE
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