Iron Age
8 recorded milestones at this point in the record.
City-states such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos built cedar ships and ran regular routes across the Mediterranean, trading dye, glass, timber and metals.
Why it mattered
Phoenician shipping carried the alphabet west and made the Mediterranean a single commercial world.
The Zhou overthrew the Shang and justified their rule with the idea that heaven withdraws its mandate from unjust kings.
Why it mattered
It gave East Asia a political theory in which rulers can legitimately be replaced — a template used for three thousand years.
Fixed silver weights circulate as money across the Near East.
Why it mattered
Abstract, transferable value made complex trade possible.
Sub-Saharan smiths built shaft furnaces producing steel-grade bloom iron.
Why it mattered
An independent African iron tradition with distinctive high-temperature furnaces.
Teachers in the Ganges plain composed dialogues probing the self, consciousness and the nature of reality beyond ritual practice.
Why it mattered
These texts founded a philosophical tradition that shaped Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism alike.
Iron-shod ards and later heavier ploughs cut the damp, root-bound soils of temperate Europe that bronze and wood tools could not work.
Why it mattered
Farming spread off light river soils into forested land, raising population across the continent.
The prophet Zarathustra taught a cosmos shaped by a struggle between truth and lie, with individual moral choice deciding the outcome.
Why it mattered
It is among the earliest ethical monotheisms and influenced later Jewish, Christian and Islamic ideas of judgement.
Stone-walled andenes turned steep slopes into stable, frost-buffered fields.
Why it mattered
Made dense highland populations possible.
Sign in to amend this page or add a milestone — every edit is signed and kept in the record.
China
Arabia
Levant
Iran
Andes
Mesopotamia