All images are sourced from Wikimedia, unless otherwise indicated.
They say a city in the desert lies, the vanity of ancient king
Sting, “Mad About You”
The city lies in broken pieces, where the wolf howls and the vultures sing
These are the works of man–this is the sum of our ambition…
In this, my sixth year of the April blogging challenge, I focused on Ancient Inventions, at the cusp of history and prehistory. I love this challenge that I started doing during COVID because it’s a wonderful way to explore rabbit holes, to dive deep into subjects that I only know a little, and to follow the discipline of daily writing. Oh, and I certainly hope to entertain and enlighten you, dear reader.
This recap is a summary. It will give an overview of the challenge, define my approach, provide links to all 26 posts, and offer some handy reference guides to fill in gaps on ancient history. The links are near the middle.
The Rules of Engagement
The rules for the challenge are straightforward. Write 26 posts on a single theme, one for each letter of the alphabet, in order, during the month of April, finishing by April 30th.
Definitions first. What do I mean by “ancient” and “invention”? “Ancient” means different things to different people. To your teenager, you might be ancient, and ancient inventions could include the rotary phone, the VCR, or even the iPhone 1! For these posts, Ancient means between the Prehistoric Paleolithic to right before the Middle Ages. Prehistoric tens of thousands of years before writing existed. But I include some ancient historical events, too, some which might have required Mesopotamian technology, Mesoamerican knowhow, or Greek science. Most are BCE, though I might mention some after year “zero.”
“Invention” means a basic thing created by early humans. Simple as that. Think of Fire, Art, Beer, or Soap–those happen to be topics covered in the book, Who Ate the First Oyster? by Cody Cassidy, which inspired me to write this series. However, I don’t want to–if you’ll pardon me–re-invent Cody’s Wheel. The inventions I chose are so universal they were created in different forms in different places at different times, and that became an emerging theme, as I’ll explain a little further on.
Every post covers three basic topics:
- Where and when it happened first “around the world”
- A core definition of the “thing”
- How it influenced human development
If you want to understand what “around the world” means or you want some background on ancient cultures, skip past the list and check out the maps. Otherwise, if you just want to browse, here are the links to the finished posts:
Everything, Everywhere, Early On
One of the goals of the series was to focus on where similar people in different spaces had the same idea. In fact, the obsession with “firsts” annoys me. Who ate the first oyster? Who was the first to paint a cave? Who invented calculus? We are a culture obsessed with winning, even in scholarship. Archaeologists and anthropologists twist into pretzels using microscopes, lasers, and radiocarbon dating to prove that their discovery was the earliest, and deploy withering sarcasm to criticize the dating of rival finds. Yet, since we’re talking about thousands or millions of years ago, there’s a lot of speculation involved. Everybody’s guessing–educated guessing–but it’s still guessing.
Not to mention that recent history is full of examples of simultaneous inventions, where the guy with the bigger megaphone gets credit. Edison and Tesla. Newton and Leibniz. Singer and Howe. Lots of people can claim to be first for different reasons. I will provide dates, so there will be a first in each case, but I’m more interested in the bigger picture, and I hope you will be, too.
Biologists have a term “convergent evolution.” Convergent evolution is when different species develop the same capability using different approaches, such how birds, bats, and pterodactyls all developed flight. I think of this view of history as looking at “simultaneous invention.” If the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Chinese all did it, even a few hundred years apart, how were they the same? and how were they different?
For instance, the famous cave paintings in Lascaux, France at the top of this post are some 20-30,000 years old. But so are paintings in Sulawesi, Indonesia, South Africa, and Australia. Which one was exactly first? Who has the best laser microscope? It’s not as if the Paleolithic French and Indonesians were texting ideas to each other. We learn more about each one if we look at more than one.
Where & When: A Primer on Ancient “Civilization”
If you’re a little rusty on your ancient cultures, let me provide a quick and handy guide to some of the key terminology and ideas.
Dating terminology. No, I’m not talking about swipe right. I want to highlight that historians now use BCE–Before Common Era–rather than BC–Before Christ. And, for dates after year zero, they now use CE–Common Era–rather than AD–Anno Domini. This lets everyone refer to a common timeline without linking to a single culture or religion.
Hominids. By 30,000 BCE, give or take a few thousand years, evolving forms of hominids called Homo this-and-that had migrated over to the Americas, much of Polynesia, as well as covering Africa, Asia, and Europe. Hominids were the group that split off from the primates nearly three million years ago. If you want a primer of how those earliest humans became Homo sapiens, check out my prequel post here.
The “Lithics”—lith means stone and paleo means earliest. The Paleolithic is the term for early civilizations, i.e. the Stone Age, because the tools humans used were pointed stones. That is, the earliest tools humans used which were later found by archaeologists. Wood and leaves rarely survive thousands of years, but they were probably also used. Wherever and whenever we look, we always have to talk about what evidence exists, whether it was first or not. Still, it may surprise you what some creative Paleolithic people were able to do before even the development of agriculture and writing.
The Fertile Crescent–the place where the rivers meet in modern-day Iran and Iraq was called Mesopotamia, and is referred to as the “cradle of civilization.” This is because large-scale cities, governments, and public works, like ziggurats, emerged here first. Civilization blossomed in several ways, so we’ll see references to Assyria, Sumeria, and Babylonia, places which invented accounting, pyramids, and the wheel. They had mathematics; they used base 60…but we’ll get to that in letter C.
Egypt and the Flood of Nile Cultures –While some core ideas like writing and the wheel came out of Mesopotamia, by 3000 BCE, a culture flourished along the Nile that would rival the cities along the Tigris and Euphrates. Maybe the Assyrians had it first, but the Egyptians took it often to higher levels, so it can be interesting to compare the visions of these parallel worlds.
The Cold North–Much of the scholarship available to me in English tends to focus first on European cultures: Spain, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and England. Type “Stone Age map” and, all of a sudden, it appears that Europeans were at the center of the universe, rather than emigrants out of the desert. Still, there were things created in the colder climates that were a unique take on invention, simply because humans were required to be creative in a different way in the wet and cold. There’s a reason so many of them lived in caves. Suffice it to say, that those who study Linear Pottery have their own intricate categorization scheme to add to the others.
The Sophisticated East —The world history taught when I was in school was Western Civilization, which meant Europe and the Mediterranean. Very rarely did someone mention China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, or any of the Pacific Islands, even though these cultures were often as robust. In China, even by 2000 BCE, the Zhou Dynasy had its own hierarchy of multiple states across hundreds of miles brought under an emperor’s wing, their own view of who counted at the time as belonging to the dyntasy and who were “barbarians.”
The New World Had Old Cultures–There’s still debate about how humans came to the Americas. Did they cross a land bridge at the Bering Strait or sail down the West Coast of British Columbia? We’ll leave the anthropologists to their bits of charred wood and radiocarbon; the fact is that Paleolithic humans arrived in the Americas independently and developed their thriving cultures separately. The Olmecs, Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs had geographic challenges that the Mesopotamians didn’t have, though they did have a number of crops that allowed them to build population centers in similar ways. That’s why I have been deliberate in my research to seek out the first examples of invention X in Mesoamerica, along with Polynesia, India, and elsewhere outside the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Europe. The results make for intriguing comparisons.
Overall, doing these posts was a little crazy and frighteningly ambitious, but I was thrilled to be able to get it all in during April 2025. Meanwhile, I hope we can benefit by thinking about the inventiveness of humanity as a species, regardless of where they found themselves, rather than thinking of civilization as a dash to be first.
Our ancient forebears hoped that future generations could build on what they started. To honor them, we should continue that chain, hoping to do better, learning from them, and teaching successive generations.
Happy reading!
Damn! I love smart women who write smart stuff!
Good luck with the challenge. Greetings from Australia where it is already tomorrow 😉
https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2025/04/01/a-is-for-agnes/
Thank you! Good luck with yours, which also looks fascinating!
This sounds like a very interesting topic.