Alexandria during the third and second centuries BCE

• In the 5th century BCE, Athens housed a significant number of geniuses and innovators, such as the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Thucydides and Herodotus, the physician Hippocrates, and philosophers Socrates and Plato.
• Socrates is known for the Socratic method of inquiry, which uses questions to draw out critical thinking. Plato became the father of idealism and is often thought to be the father of Western political philosophy.
• By the 4th century BCE, philosopher Aristotle was added to the luminaries of Athens. Athens also became home to the forerunners of modern universities, such as Plato's Academy, an institution of higher learning, and the Lyceum, a temple that served as a center for education, debate, and scholarship.

The Acropolis is a distinctive feature of today's Athens that was built in the 5th century BCE. It is a cluster of buildings on a rocky outcrop. The famous Parthenon temple on the Acropolis was built to honor Athena and to serve the city's treasury.

Athens during the 5th century BCE was lively. The heart of Athens was its marketplace, or Agora (a place where people gather.) The structures surrounding the Agora's market stalls included stone benches, various altars, and temples, a building named the Aiakeion where laws and legal decisions were displayed, and various stoas or covered porticos.

The earliest athletic competitions seem to be simple wrestling contests that are represented in cave paintings.

Other popular sports included foot-races, chariot-races, boxing, swimming, and archery. The Ball Game was probably the first sport that resembled modern team ball sports.

Chichen Itza was founded by the Itza, a Mayan tribe, and was once one of the greatest Mayan centers of the Yucatan peninsula. The Mayan civilization created the most highly developed writing system in the Americas before Columbus landed. The Mayans are also known for a sophisticated calendar and huge architecture.

Today Chichen Itza is a sprawling ruined city in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula in modern Mexico. Several prominent stone structures of the city are well-preserved, such as the Warrior's Temple, the Temple of Kukulcan, and the El Caracol - a circular observatory.

It is estimated that the early hunter-gatherers, called ‘Natufians’ settled gradually in this oasis of a city, domesticating dogs and other animals on the way.

Agriculture and farming would have been mostly trial and error, with them noticing the scattered seeds producing edible plants. The ancient figs would probably be the first cultivated crop.

Some archaeological evidence shows that the Natufians enjoyed alcoholic beverages like beer by fermenting cereals, serving as an initial motivation to farm.

This may have led to advanced agriculture in the ancient civilization, with grains and cereals remaining a better choice due to its ability to be stored, unlike the forage for wild animals and fruits.

Humanity has been vulnerable to rapidly spread illnesses because disease propagates more easily in concentrated populations without adequate sanitation.

Advances in sanitation have allowed people to live near one another in cities with less risk to their health, in particular, safe disposal of effluent to spare the water supply from contamination.

The Indus Valley civilization arose in the floodplains of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers around 5000 years ago.

In the largest structure in the city Mohenjo-Dar was an immense, elevated public bathhouse, measuring almost 900 square feet. The status of the bathhouse as the city's largest structure suggests that the people highly valued cleanliness.

In the late 4th millennium BCE, Uruk had 10000 inhabitants which increased to 50000 in the decades after that, making it the largest city in Mesopotamia, and in the Sumerian civilization.

The people of Uruk were highly civilized and worked in various professions like ambassadors, priests, stonecutters, cooks, and jewellers.

Uruk was the first civilization to introduce written record-keeping, using symbols, pictographs, and eventually words. The Sumerians were an innovative civilization and improvised this symbolic language into complex documents, epic poems and literature, along with lists and genealogies.

Writings were mostly on reeds and clay, slowly forming a complex language of letters based on ‘wedge-shaped’ markings, known as cuneiform.

Ancient Rome built sophisticated infrastructure ranging from bridges, amphitheatres, aqueducts and even sewer systems.

The Roman network of roads, called Viae Romanae and meaning ‘Roman Ways’ was a huge breakthrough in quick and easy transportation of trade goods, military supplies, and free movement of civilians and soldiers.

• The first roads were invented in the Bronze Age in 4000 BCE, created by the older Indus Valley Civilization. This was the first time that straight, 90 degree intersecting roads were seen.
• The Roman civilization created advanced road systems that encouraged travel and connection, forming a lifeline of connecting various cultures, institutions and beliefs.
• The Romans managed to create major roadways and highways with traffic segregation, something unheard of before.
• They had 372 roads with 29 major highways. The first major roadway was called the Appian Way, connecting Rome with Capua, back in 312 BCE. This road was used efficiently during the Samnite Wars in the same era.

• Also known as Twenty Squares, this 4500-year-old game, first unearthed in ancient Mesopotamia, is impressive in its complex rules and intricate design.
• The beautiful game board uses twenty squares and has a narrow bridge in the middle part, was played in Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and many other ancient civilizations.
• To finish the game as winners, players had to race their opponent to the opposite end of the board, moving pieces according to knucklebone dice rolls.

• Named after the Egyptian serpentine deity, Mehen is also known as the Egyptian Snake Game and was played between 3100 to 2300 BC.
• Six players could simultaneously play this spiral board, each having a piece crafted in the shape of a lion or a sphere.
• The rules of this game are not very clear because it lost its popularity after the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and is hardly found in archaeological records.

The earliest known heliocentric theory of the solar system came from Aristarchus of Samos (310BC to 230BC). He argued that the Sun was central. He also placed all the then known planets is their correct order of distance around the Sun. His original text was unfortunately lost to history.

Nicolaus Copernicus rediscovered the theory in the 16th century. He acknowledged Aristarchus during the development of his own work.

In one of Aristarchus' books that did survive, he laid out the earliest known attempted calculations of the sizes and distances to the Sun and Moon.

From solar eclipses, where the Moon passes in front of the Sun, they realised that the Sun was further away. Aristarchus estimated that the size of the Moon was approximately one-third that of the Earth, based on the careful timing of lunar eclipses. He was surprisingly accurate in determining the ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon. (the Moon has a diameter 0.27 times that of Earth).

• Early stone inscriptions did not even have the punctuation we all take for granted: The blank space.
• Ancient Greece and Rome had the written word for keeping records of political speeches and texts, which were carefully used by the orator for maximum rhetorical effect and verbal impact.
• In 200 BCE, the Alexandrian Aristophanes worked on easing pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by using small circles to denote pauses, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence.
• The 7th-century encyclopaedist Isidore Of Seville later took up the task of inserting grammar in the same text, inventing the period, the colon and the comma.

• The language in the Quran had cantillation marks written above the line to signify the kind of pause required.
• The 9th Century Torah manuscripts show vowel additions and cantillation marks that help in the recitation of the same.
• Modern Arabic and Hebrew texts have similar punctuation marks as many western languages.

The breaks and sonic links were primarily used to aid singing, sense-making and enhancing the beauty of the verses.

Pizza - pieces of flatbread, topped with savories - was a simple and tasty meal for those who could not afford plates.

• Early pizzas appear in Virgil's Aeneid. Aeneas and his crew ate thin wheaten cakes with mushrooms and herbs scattered on them.
• In the 18th century Naples, pizza as we know it came into being. With a struggling urban economy and a great number of poor inhabitants, they needed food that was cheap and easy to eat. Pizza met this need.

For a long time, pizzas were associated with poverty and scorned by food writers.

In 1831, Samuel Morse described pizza as a ‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer.’