Years 1 to 1500

Tanzania · c. 1 to 500 CE

The Haya of northwestern Tanzania made carbon steel 1,500 to 2,000 years ago in furnaces that preheated the air blast, a principle not used in Europe until the 19th century.

Philippines · c. 2,000 years ago

The Ifugao people of northern Luzon carved mountain slopes into stone and mud walled pond fields for rice, watered from mountaintop forests. UNESCO lists them as World Heritage.

Egypt · 1st century CE

A hollow sphere spun by jets of steam escaping from bent tubes. It is the first known device to turn steam into rotary motion.

Mexico · by 75 CE

Paper made by soaking and beating the inner bark of trees into sheets, manufactured in Mexico since before European contact. It carried the codices of Mesoamerica and is still made by Otomi artisans.

China · c. 105 CE

A method of forming sheets from pulped bark, hemp, rags and fishnets, reported to the Han court in 105 CE. It gave China a cheap writing surface that later spread worldwide.

China · 132 CE

A bronze instrument that dropped a ball to show that an earthquake had occurred and from which direction, presented to the Han court by Zhang Heng in 132 CE. It is the first known earthquake detector.

Saudi Arabia · 3rd to 5th century CE

The alphabet used for Arabic, which grew out of the Nabataean script. The oldest dated texts in the transitional and early Arabic letter forms, from the 5th century CE, have been found in what is now Saudi Arabia.

Turkey · second half of the 3rd century CE

A waterwheel driving two stone saws through gears, cranks and connecting rods, carved on a tomb at Hierapolis. It is the earliest known evidence of a crank and connecting rod in a machine.

Kyrgyzstan · Early medieval

A three-stringed fretless lute carved from one piece of apricot or juniper wood. It is the best known national instrument of the Kyrgyz people.

Ireland · c. 4th century

An alphabet of strokes and notches cut along the edges of standing stones, used from about the 4th century to write early Irish. It preserves the oldest recorded form of the Irish language.

Ethiopia · 4th century CE

Ge'ez is the script of Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the 4th century, under the kingdom of Aksum, it changed from a consonant alphabet into a system that writes each consonant with its vowel.

India · c. 350 CE

The boiling of sugarcane juice into dry granulated crystals, first documented in ancient India. Crystals could be stored and traded, and the words sugar and candy come from Sanskrit.

Armenia · 405 CE

A phonetic script of 36 letters devised for the Armenian language in 405 CE by the monk Mesrop Mashtots, later extended to 38 letters and still in use.

Georgia · c. 430 CE

Three related alphabets, Mrgvlovani (Asomtavruli), Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli, created to write Georgian and all still in use, with Mkhedruli as the modern standard.

Sri Lanka · 477 to 495 CE

Fifth-century gardens in Sri Lanka whose pools and fountains are fed through buried terracotta pipes by gravity and water pressure. The fountains still work in the rainy season.

Oman · c. 500 CE, possibly far older

Gravity-fed channels that carry groundwater and spring water to Omani villages, with water shared by time. About 3,000 are still in use.

Costa Rica · c. 500 to 1500 CE

More than 300 near-perfect stone balls up to 2.57 meters across, shaped by the chiefdom societies of the Diquís Delta between about 500 and 1500 CE.

Turkey · 537

A great masonry dome carried over a square space on four curved triangular supports. Hagia Sophia, finished in 537, is one of the earliest and largest uses of the pendentive.

Jordan · 542 to 570 CE

A 6th-century floor mosaic in Madaba that holds the oldest surviving original map of the Holy Land, detailed enough to guide modern excavations in Jerusalem.

South Korea · 6th century

A Korean board zither with 12 silk strings and movable bridges, traced by tradition to the Gaya confederacy in the sixth century. It is known as the national instrument of Korea.

El Salvador · c. 600 CE

Intensively cultivated manioc beds at the Maya village of Joya de Ceren, buried by ash about 600 CE. They are the only direct evidence of an ancient manioc farming system in the Americas.

Sri Lanka · 7th to 11th century

A furnace built on west-facing hillsides in Sri Lanka that used monsoon winds, not bellows, to smelt iron and produce high-carbon steel in the first millennium CE.

Nigeria · c. 6th century

A system of several hundred pictographic and abstract signs from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria, one of the oldest writing systems created in Africa.

Peru · 1st millennium CE to 16th century

A recording device made of colored, knotted cords. The Inca tied knots in a decimal positional system to store census, tribute and other data, running an empire without written script.

Honduras · c. 600 to 850 CE

Cylindrical vessels carved from single blocks of white marble in the lower Ulua Valley between about 600 and 850 CE, traded as luxury goods across Central America.

China · c. 600 CE

Printing from a text carved in relief on a wooden block, developed in China by about the 7th century. It made books, calendars and receipts reproducible in quantity.

India · 7th century

The treatment of zero as a numeral with its own value and rules of arithmetic, set out by Brahmagupta in 628. It completed the decimal place-value system now used worldwide.

South Korea · 7th century

A 9.17 meter stone tower built in Gyeongju in the seventh century under Queen Seondeok of Silla. It is known as the oldest surviving astronomical observatory in Asia.

Saudi Arabia · c. 638

A purely lunar calendar of twelve months whose years are counted from the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622. Its era was introduced by the caliph Umar in about 638 and it is still used across the Islamic world.

Afghanistan · c. 650 CE

Buddhist murals in the Bamiyan caves, dated to about 650 CE, are the oldest known paintings made with oil-based binders, centuries before the technique appeared in Europe.

Myanmar · c. 7th century

An arched harp with a boat-shaped body and a long curved neck, played in Burma since at least the 7th century and described as the only surviving harp tradition in Asia.

Zimbabwe · Traditional; metal-keyed forms from c. 700 CE

The mbira of the Shona people is a lamellophone with 22 to 28 metal keys on a hardwood board. It is the best-known form of an instrument family that spread worldwide as the kalimba.

China · c. 8th century

A white, translucent ceramic made by firing kaolin-based clay at very high temperatures, developed in China over centuries and achieved in its familiar form by about the 8th century.

Uzbekistan · 8th century onward

Handmade mulberry-bark paper, burnished smooth, produced in water-powered mills at Samarkand. The city became the medieval Islamic world's best known papermaking center after the craft arrived from China.

Japan · 9th century

Two syllabic scripts created in 9th-century Japan by simplifying Chinese characters used for their sound. They made it possible to write Japanese fully phonetically.

Guam · c. 800 to 1200 CE

Two-part stone pillars, a shaft topped by a hemispherical capstone, that the ancient CHamoru of the Mariana Islands set in paired rows to raise buildings off the ground.

Cambodia · 9th century

From the 9th century Khmer engineers built canals, moats and vast reservoirs across about 1,000 square kilometers to supply the city of Angkor. Researchers describe its scale as unlike any other historic water system.

China · 9th century

An explosive mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal first made by Chinese alchemists in the 9th century. It was the first chemical explosive and changed warfare, mining and fireworks.

Iraq · c. 820

A systematic method for solving linear and quadratic equations, set out in Baghdad by al-Khwarizmi. His treatise gave algebra its name and can be considered the first book on the subject.

Iraq · c. 850

A water-powered flute that played melodies set by pins on a revolving cylinder, designed in Baghdad around 850. It appears to have been the first programmable machine.

Bangladesh · Documented from the 9th century

A handwoven cotton cloth of extreme fineness made around Dhaka from the local phuti karpas plant, the most prized textile of its day until it was lost in the 19th century.

Iraq · c. 850

A method of breaking substitution ciphers by counting how often each letter appears. Al-Kindi described it in 9th-century Baghdad, founding the practice of cryptanalysis.

Nigeria · 9th century

Bronze vessels and ornaments cast by the lost-wax method at Igbo-Ukwu in southeastern Nigeria around the 9th century, centuries before European contact on the coast.

Tunisia · 860 to 862

Built between 860 and 862, the Aghlabid Basins are linked settling and storage reservoirs that clarified and held more than 57,000 cubic meters of water for the steppe city of Kairouan.

Bulgaria · Late 9th to 10th century

An alphabet for Slavic languages built on Greek capital letters with added signs, devised in the First Bulgarian Empire. It is now used for more than 50 languages.

Morocco · 10th to 14th century

Mosaic tilework assembled from glazed tiles that are cut by hand into small geometric shapes. Developed in the western Islamic world from about the 10th century, it has been made without interruption only in Morocco.

Bosnia and Herzegovina · 11th to 15th century

A distinct variant of the Cyrillic alphabet that took shape in medieval Bosnia and was used there and in Dalmatia until the nineteenth century.

Zimbabwe · 11th to 15th century

Monumental granite walls built without mortar by ancestors of the Shona between the 11th and 15th centuries, forming the largest stone complex in Africa south of the Sahara before the modern era.

Tanzania · 11th to 12th century

Copper coins minted by the sultans of Kilwa Kisiwani from about the 11th century, a local currency for everyday exchange on the Swahili coast.

Palestinian Territory · c. 10th century

A hard soap made in Nablus from olive oil, water and lye, boiled in vats, poured on the floor, cut by hand, stamped and cured.

Iran · about 1,000 years ago or earlier

A mill whose sails turn on a vertical shaft that drives the millstone directly. Historians trace the windmill to the windy plains of eastern Iran.

China · early 11th century

Printed paper notes that circulated in place of heavy iron coins in Song dynasty Sichuan and were taken over by the state in 1024. Numismatists regard jiaozi as the first paper money.

Myanmar · 11th century

A rounded abugida used to write Burmese and several other languages of Myanmar, attested in inscriptions from the 11th century.

China · 1041-1048

Individual reusable characters of baked clay set on a plate to print a page, devised by Bi Sheng in Song dynasty China between 1041 and 1048, four centuries before Gutenberg.

Algeria · 11th to 14th century

A network of weirs, channels and openings built by the Mozabites of the M'zab Valley to capture rare desert floods and divide the water among palm groves. It has been run by the same customary rules for centuries.

Iran · 1079

A solar calendar fixed to the March equinox and to the Sun's passage through the zodiac. It is the basis of the calendar Iran uses today.

Mexico · c. 1100

Raised fields built from lake mud and vegetation in the shallow lakes of the Valley of Mexico. They fed the Aztec capital and are still farmed in Xochimilco.

Nepal · by the 12th century

Handmade paper from the inner bark of Daphne shrubs that grow in the high hills of Nepal. Its fibers are tough and naturally repel insects, so documents on it last for centuries.

Nepal · c. 1100

An ornate Brahmic writing system developed in Nepal around 1100 CE by the Newar people to write Sanskrit and Newar. It became a sacred calligraphic script in Buddhist monasteries from Tibet to Japan.

India · by the 12th century

The production of metallic zinc by heating ore in sealed clay retorts and condensing the vapor, carried out on a large scale at Zawar in Rajasthan centuries before Europe.

South Korea · mid-12th century

A ceramic technique in which designs cut into the clay are filled with white or black slip under a celadon glaze. Goryeo potters began using it in the mid-twelfth century, and it became the signature of Korean celadon.

Iran · late 12th century

Pottery painted with colored enamels over an already fired glaze and then fired again. It was the first ceramic ware to use overglaze enamels.

Mexico · by 1185

The farming and curing of the pods of a climbing orchid, practiced by the Totonac people of Veracruz since at least 1185. It gave the world one of its most used flavorings.

Uganda · 13th to 16th century

A non-woven cloth made by the Baganda of southern Uganda by beating the inner bark of the mutuba fig tree, harvested so that the tree regrows its bark.

Mongolia · 13th century

A two-stringed bowed fiddle with a carved horse head and horsehair strings, central to Mongolian nomad culture and attested since the Mongol empire.

Micronesia · c. 1200 to 1500 CE

A complex of more than 100 artificial islets off Pohnpei, walled with columnar basalt laid in a header and stretcher pattern, built as the ceremonial center of the Saudeleur dynasty.

Guinea · Early 13th century

The Sosso-Bala is a 13th-century balafon, a wooden xylophone with gourd resonators, kept at Niagassola in northern Guinea. Tradition holds it to be the original instrument from which the Mandinka balafon descends.

Mongolia · c. 1204

A vertical alphabet adapted from the Old Uyghur script in the early thirteenth century, the first writing system made for the Mongolian language.

Turkey · 1206

Some fifty machines described and drawn in a book finished in 1206 at the Artuqid court in Diyarbakır, including clocks, automata and water-raising machines.

Vietnam · 13th century

Chu Nom is the first writing system known to have been used for the Vietnamese language. It combined borrowed Chinese characters with thousands of locally invented ones.

Vietnam · By the 13th century; first written record 1770

The dan bau is a Vietnamese zither with a single string, played in harmonics while a flexible rod bends the pitch.

Thailand · 13th to 14th century

Sangkhalok ware is the glazed stoneware of the Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai kilns in north-central Thailand, including green celadon, exported across Southeast Asia from the 14th century.

Iran · 1247

A geometric device in which a circle rolling inside one twice its size turns two circular motions into straight-line motion. It reshaped planetary models.

Thailand · 1283

The Thai script is credited to King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai, whose inscription of 1292 is the earliest surviving text in Thai. It is the basis of the scripts used in Thailand today.

Italy · c. 1286

Two lenses joined in a frame and worn before the eyes to correct sight. They first appeared in northern Italy in the late 13th century.

Cyprus · 14th century

A hand embroidery and cutwork technique on linen from the village of Lefkara in Cyprus, dating to at least the 14th century and inscribed by UNESCO in 2009.

Syria · 1371

In 1371 the Damascus astronomer Ibn al-Shatir built a marble sundial for the Umayyad Mosque with a gnomon parallel to the Earth's axis, so that it showed equal hours all year.

South Korea · 1377

Printing from individually cast metal characters, used at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju in 1377 to print Jikji. The book is the oldest surviving example of movable metal type printing in the world.

Croatia · 1377

A legally required isolation period for people and ships arriving from plague areas, first enacted by the Republic of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, on July 27, 1377.

Ghana · c. 1400 to 1900

A standardized system of small cast brass weights, scales, spoons and boxes used by Akan traders to measure gold dust, which served as currency in what is now Ghana until 1899.

Ethiopia · By the 15th century

The coffee plant Coffea arabica is native to the forests of southwestern Ethiopia. Seeds taken from there to Yemen became the basis of the world's coffee crop.

Portugal · 15th century

A light sailing ship with triangular lateen sails that could sail well against the wind. The Portuguese developed it in the 15th century to explore the coast of Africa.

Tanzania · 15th to 18th century

A network of stone-lined canals and terraced fields that watered about 20 square kilometers at the foot of the Rift escarpment from around the 15th century to the 18th.

Peru · 15th century

A suspension bridge made of grass braided into thick cables and slung across a gorge. The Q'eswachaka bridge over the Apurimac River is still rebuilt every year by Quechua communities using Inca techniques.

India · c. 1400

Power series for trigonometric functions and for pi found by Madhava of Sangamagrama in Kerala around 1400, more than two centuries before their rediscovery in Europe.

Madagascar · 15th century

An Arabic-derived script adapted to write the Malagasy language, kept by Antemoro scribes of the southeast coast and the first writing system used for Malagasy.

Maldives · 15th to 18th century

The writing system of the Maldivian language, written right to left, whose consonants were derived from Arabic and local Indic numerals and whose vowels come from Arabic vowel marks.

Uzbekistan · 1420s-1437

A 15th century observatory in Samarkand built around a giant meridian sextant. Its 1437 star catalogue, the Zij-i Sultani, listed 1,018 stars and was the most accurate of its era, surpassing Ptolemy.

South Korea · 1434

A water clock made for King Sejong in 1434 that announced the hours automatically with a bell, gong and drum. It served as the standard timekeeper of the Joseon dynasty.

Germany · c. 1440-1455

A mechanized press for printing from movable metal type, built by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz. It made it possible to produce books in large numbers at low cost in Europe.

South Korea · 1441

A standardized cylindrical rain gauge introduced in Joseon Korea in 1441 and 1442. Identical gauges and rulers at government offices gave the court comparable rainfall records from across the country.

South Korea · 1443

The alphabet of the Korean language, created under King Sejong in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. Its letters reflect how sounds are made, and it replaced Chinese characters as the everyday script of Korea.

Portugal · c. 1470

A heavy brass ring with a sighting rule, cut away to resist wind, used to find a ship's latitude from the height of the sun or a star. Portuguese navigators brought it into use at sea in the late 15th century.

Turkey · c. 1480

A hard white ceramic made of quartz, glass frit and clay, coated in white slip and painted under a clear glaze. Potters at İznik developed it in the late 15th century.

Cabo Verde · Late 15th century

An indigo and white cotton cloth woven in narrow strips on Santiago and Fogo, joined six strips wide, which grew from West African looms and served as trade currency on the African coast.

Montenegro · 1493-1496

A printing press set up in Zeta, in present-day Montenegro, that finished the Octoechos of the First Tone in January 1494, the first book printed in Cyrillic in the Balkans.

Chile · before the 1860s, possibly 15th century

An undeciphered script of carved glyphs from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). If it predates European contact, it is one of the few independent inventions of writing.