400 B.C.E.
* Base-60 astronomy flourishes after Chaldaeans invent " symbol for zero
* Achaemenid Empire of Persia at its greatest; Aramaic becomes the lingua
franca of the Near & Middle East and its script is adopted farther east
* Kalashoka convenes Second Buddhist Council and issues edicts of Piety &
Toleration to promote "compassion, liberality, truth, purity, gentleness
& saintliness" and encourages vegetarianism
* Parsee Era begins, using the Egyptian civil calendar for months (389)
* Sacrifices to Aphrodite Anahiti, Goddess of Heaven, established by
Artaxerxes II who invokes her with Ahura Mazda in a trinity with Mithra
[Herodotus]
* Chinese astronomer Gan De detects Ganymede(+) with the naked eye (364)
* Chaldaean astronomer Kidinnu (Cidenas) accurately describes precession
of the lunar orbit, and calculates tropical year to within 5 minutes
* Timoleon's convoy from Corinth to Sicily has a heavenly guide that "came
to his venture's support, and foretold his coming fame and the glory of
his achievements, for all through the night was he preceded by a torch
blazing in the sky up to when the squadron made harbour in Italy." (343)
[Diodorus, Library of History, Book XVI, 24-5.]
* Darius III orders that all of the Avesta and the Zend be put in writing,
one copy for the National Archives, a second for the Royal Treasury
[The Denkart.]
* Carthage is the leading maritime power: turns Alexander's sights towards
softer targets in the East; brings goods & their names to America from
India via 'new' Red Sea canal that extends Spice Route, & vice versa
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* Alexander the Great liberates Egypt from Persian yoke; is declared pharao,
"son of Amun and saviour" by high priest of Memphis, thereby initiating
Hellenism as an ideology in which a Hellenic elite is the master race;
selects as his capital of Egypt a site next to Canopus, named after the
navigator of Menelaus whose fleet made landfall at the NW corner of the
Nile's delta, where Kanopos died & was honored by a monument raised by
his grateful king (thereby the deriviation of eponymous site & star)
[Homer; Syclax]
* Alexander greatly expands into SW Asia, enabling, despite killing many
Magoi & Chaldaeans (Cidenas etc.), its cultural influence to flow farther
west (e.g. philosophy, astrology & associated theories of numbers)
by sending one copy of Avesta & Zend back to Greece, while destroying
the other; after his death, Seleucus Nicator founds the Seleucid empire,
& Era of Alexander begins (as of Treaty of Trisparadisus, 321)
[Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity. v.I, p.22]
* Aristarchus of Samos born; later teaches that the earth: revolves around
the sun (as a star at the centre of the universe) in a circular orbit
small enough to make stellar parallaxes undetectable; is a sphere, whose
rotation about its polar axis makes it seem as if there were a celestial
sphere rotating instead (320)
[Aristarchus, Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (in which he
tells how to measure their relative distances using a geometric method
that is accurate in theory, but not in practice at the time).]
* Lodestone compass, and Newton's Law of Inertia appear in China;
[as well as the first reference to the use of a crossbow:
Sun-tzu, The Art of War. "Use of Energy"]
* Stirrups and paper made in China first
* Buddhism begins to spread beyond southern India
* Emerging artists along the Silk Road in Gandhara start a new art style--
Serindian (later adapted by missionaries to explain Buddhism)
* Chaldaean astronomer Berossos invents hemicyclia & hemispheria sundials
* In treaty with Chandragupta (founder of the Gupta dynasty), Seleucus I
yields the upper Indus, Gandhara & Arachosia to the Gupta Empire (305)
[Mazumdar, Ancient India. p.135]
300 B.C.E.
