Note: This is a work in progress.
Here are the last 60 centuries and some of what each one has given us. That makes it a largely technocentric history, yet I want some sort of overview at a century-by-century level.
Note: Older dates are often just a rough date of the oldest known case. Dates for plants and animals are when they became useful to humans. I use the middle value of ranges. My sources are Eurocentric.
The stuff in italics came from Europe or its diasporas.
One picture for every thousand years, one line for every hundred years:
Tools of Otzi the Iceman, Italy, circa -3300.
-3900s: horse.
-3800s:
-3700s:
-3600s: silk, popcorn.
-3500s: cities, brick (fired), wheel and axle, cart, sail, donkey, zoo, metal casting.
-3400s: Egyptian mummies, bronze.
-3300s: Otzi the Iceman.
-3200s:
-3100s: writing.
-3000s: yam, oil palm, sorghum, potato, cassava, oven, bell, paper, cotton, shekel.
The Great Sphinx, Egypt, -2500s.
-2900s: Egypt, Jerusalem, dam.
-2800s: chair, book, page numbers, soap, 365-day calendar, yin and yang.
-2700s: tea, button, wire, acupuncture.
-2600s: Pyramid of Djoser, library.
-2500s: Great Sphinx, welding, carpet, iron, glass, sewer, ink, oranges, arch.
-2400s:
-2300s: empire, Stonehenge, beekeeping, courier service, chicken, dictionary.
-2200s:
-2100s: tunnel.
-2000s: alphabet, ship, umbrella, dice, lock, bathroom, hour, minute, sling.
Olmec head, Mexico. They were made between -1500 and -400.
-1900s: chocolate, watermelon.
-1800s: pork as taboo. “Epic of Gilgamesh”.
-1700s: smallpox, water pipes.
-1600s: leavened bread, rubber ball.
-1500s: Greek, Sanskrit, Hinduism, Rigveda, flag, steel, boot, first Olmec heads.
-1400s: rudder.
-1300s: King Tut’s tomb, concrete, Yahweh.
-1200s: Chinese language, chopsticks, Judaism, Hebrew, tobacco.
-1100s: trousers.
-1000s: Beijing, abacus, sandwich, kite, camel, knitting, magnet.
Great Wall of China, started in the -600s.
-900s: Book of J, Hebrew alphabet, Aramaic.
-800s: “Book of Songs”, “Iliad”, “Odyssey”.
-700s: Rome, Olympics, pulley, buckle, Book of Isaiah (1-39), Psalms.
-600s: coin, world map, Roman alphabet, the beginning of the Great Wall of China.
-500s: Delhi, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Greek philosophy, Tao-te-Ching.
-400s: Parthenon, Book of Job, hammock, compass, history.
-300s: Alexandria, “Analects”, saddle, stirrup, Tollund Man, mouldboard plough.
-200s: China, windmill, Bhagavad Gita, Paris, nail, pipe organ.
-100s: watermill, the news, Book of Daniel, latitude and longitude.
-000s: zero.
Roman Colosseum, Italy, completed in +80.
000s: London, Halloween, Christianity, church, gospel, bound books, Colosseum.
100s: Mumbai, horseshoe, dome, north as “up”.
200s: wheelbarrow.
300s: Malay, Arabic, sugar, Christmas, ocean travel, the West.
400s: Japan, Vulgate.
500s: AD, English, Arabic numerals, toilet paper, article, quill pen, chess.
600s: Koran, Islam, mosque, English alphabet.
700s: BC, Baghdad, Japanese, German, mechanical clock, porcelain, velvet.
800s: Russia, French, gunpowder, printing, paper money, playing cards, Sufis.
900s: Hindi, Swahili, Spanish, Bengali, rocket, canal lock, lens, fork.
Taj Mahal, India, 1600s.
1000s: Yiddish, movable type, tower clock, Islamophobia, “Beowulf”.
1100s: Timbuktu, Maori, grand jury, Cantonese, cannon, fireworks.
1200s: Easter Island statues, Portuguese, glasses, bomb.
1300s: Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mexico City, gun.
1400s: Machu Picchu, Sikhism, printing press, 12-hour clock, drinking coffee.
1500s: Sao Paulo, Shakespeare’s plays, Protestantism, Gregorian calendar, crowns.
1600s: Taj Mahal, New York, NYPD, racism, KJV, newspaper, Western science.
1700s: blackface, metric system, chemistry, Fahrenheit, Britannica, Monticello.
1800s: electricity, bus, car, rail, bicycle, telephone, The Economist, film, blue jeans.
1900s: plastic, Mount Rushmore, motel, television, atom bomb, hip hop, Internet.
– Abagond, 2015.
Sources: Mainly: “1001 Inventions That Changed the World” (2009), Jack Challoner, general editor; “The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History” (2003) by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill; “1000 Inventions & Discoveries” (2002) by Roger Bridgman; Wikipedia (2015).
See also:
- also in this series:
- The last 13,000 years:
- Proto-Indo-Europeans
- The world
- The largest cities in history
- technocentric history
- demographically weighted world history
Abagond 
Here’s a little surprising detail. They found tattoos on Otci, the Ice man who was found in the Italian alps, marking the spots of acupuncture points. Somebody was confident enough to state that.. If that’s true, then it would imply that acupuncture had arisen more than three thousand years before Christ. Some might want to say it arose in Europe. What occurred to me was that it was widespread way back then.
LikeLike
Interesting. “2600s [BC] “Gilgamesh”, library”??? The oldest texts only date to the 600s BC.
“Great Wall of China, mostly built between the -600s and -200s.”
This is another myth. Most of what we now know as the Great Wall of China was built in the 1300s-1400s AD. Sure there was a “wall” before, but not anything close to what the “Great Wall” is today.
LikeLike
@resw77
I wouldn’t call that a myth. The Great Wall of China has been built, extended and rebuilt over a period of over 2300 years up to today. Some of it was built well before 200 BC, although little of it remained by the Ming Dynasty (when the majority of the wall was built). It would not be wrong to state that the beginning of the (Great) Wall of China was a few centuries BC.
It is still being rebuilt in the 2000s, at least selected portions of it.
LikeLike
Fascinating article.
LikeLike
@jefe
The problem I had was ” mostly built between the -600s and -200s” That is simply not true. It was “mostly built” under the medieval Ming dynasty.
LikeLike
Has the post been rewritten? I don’t see the “mostly built”
LikeLike
@ resw77 @ jefe
I changed the caption to “Great Wall of China, started in the -600s.”
LikeLike
@ resw77
Thanks! My mistake. I was thinking of the person, not the epic. I moved it to the -1800s as “Epic of Gilgamesh”:
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh
The Wikipedia cites its source as
T.C. Mitchell. The Bible in the British Museum, The British Museum Press, 1988, p.70.
LikeLike
After the inventions of guns, atom bombs, sticky fire (napalm), pepper spray, chemical weapons, tear gas, and mass production of them – along with racism, that’s some scary times.
LikeLike
@ Pumpkin
The late 300s in Alexandria, Egypt. It was an age of book burning in the Roman Empire. I would save as many as I could.
In particular, in 391 I would save (steal) as many books as I could from the Serapis branch of the Library of Alexandria before it was burned down (and as it was being burned down). I would hide them in a cave in Egypt right next to the Nag Hammadi books so that they would be discovered in 1945. Or maybe in several caves so that different ages would discover different books.
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2006/09/15/library-of-alexandria/
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2006/04/28/nag-hammadi-library-2/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hm. It took a year, but let me be the first one to compliment you with your last comment, Abagond.
LikeLike