Agriculturalism ( 農家 / 农家 ; Nongjia ) was an early agrarian social and political philosophy in ancient China that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism.

In ancient China it was customary to burn amber during large festivities.

The peoples of the Tarim Basin in northern China are now known to be Caucasian and there were widespread attempts to keep western archeologists from testing samples such as deliberately replacing the mummies or decapitating them, even defacing ancient cave painting depictions of these people with large amounts of body hair and features such as red colored hair and blue eyes.

Although amaranth was cultivated on a large scale in ancient Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, nowadays it is only cultivated on a small scale there, along with India, China, Nepal, and other tropical countries ; thus, there is potential for further cultivation in those countries, as well as in the U. S. In a 1977 article in Science, amaranth was described as " the crop of the future.

Aeronautics also finds mention in ancient China where people were flying kites thousands of years ago.

Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the nine great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, China, Rome, India, the Celtic peoples, and Maya.

The practice was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke's failed assassination of King Qin Shi Huang ( 227 BC ).

* Go, an ancient strategic board game originating in China

The earliest tin-alloy bronzes date to the late 4th millennium BC in Susa ( Iran ) and some ancient sites in China, Luristan ( Iran ) and Mesopotamia ( Iraq ).

The Indus Valley Civilization and ancient China are two other areas with major indigenous urban traditions.

The growth of the population of ancient civilizations, the formation of ancient empires concentrating political power, and the growth in commerce and manufacturing led to ever greater capital cities and centres of commerce and industry, with Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia of the Hellenistic civilization, Pataliputra ( now Patna ) in India, Chang ' an ( now Xi ' an ) in China, Carthage, ancient Rome, its eastern successor Constantinople ( later Istanbul ).

In ancient China, large canals for river transport were established as far back as the Warring States ( 481 – 221 BC ), the longest one of that period being the Hong Gou ( Canal of the Wild Geese ), which according to the ancient historian Sima Qian connected the old states of Song, Zhang, Chen, Cai, Cao, and Wei.

The written history of China can be found as early as the Shang Dynasty ( c. 1700 – 1046 BC ), although ancient historical texts such as the Records of the Grand Historian ( ca.

The Xia Dynasty of China ( from c. 2100 to c. 1600 BC ) is the first dynasty to be described in ancient historical records such as Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and Bamboo Annals.

Although the People's Republic of China has been historically hostile to the philosophy of ancient China, the influences of past are still deeply ingrained in the Chinese culture.

Similar lists existed in ancient China and Japan.

The element air also appears as a concept in the Buddhist religion which has an ancient history in China.

The adoption of massed cavalry in China also broke the tradition of the chariot-riding Chinese aristocracy in battle, which had been in use since the ancient Shang Dynasty ( c. 1600 BC-1050 BC ).

According to Needham, though there is no way of answering the question of whether the crossbow first arose among the cultures neighboring ancient China before the rise of Chinese culture in their midst, or whether it spread outwards from China to all the environing peoples, the former seems the more probable hypothesis given linguistic evidence, which posits that the Chinese word for ' crossbow ' came from an Austroasiatic language.

At times under some other dynasties in ancient China, the month with the winter solstice was the 12th or the 1st month.

The earliest accounting records were found amongst the ruins of ancient Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria, which date back more than 7, 000 years.

The Book of Mormon is the earliest of the unique writings of the Latter Day Saint movement, the denominations of which typically regard the text not only as scripture but also as a historical record of God's dealings with the ancient inhabitants of the Americas.

The earliest known detailed discussion of binomial coefficients is in a tenth-century commentary, due to Halayudha, on an ancient Hindu classic, Pingala's chandaḥśāstra.

The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists.

Parallels to the earliest Babylonian ( Sumerian ) star catalogues suggest that the ancient Chinese system did not arise independently from that of the Ancient Near East.

The ancient Ur of Sumer, in present day Tell el-Mukayyar in Iraq is one of the world's earliest сities.

The findings at Anyang include the earliest written record of Chinese past so far discovered: inscriptions of divination records in ancient Chinese writing on the bones or shells of animals – the so-called " oracle bones ", dating from around 1200 BC.

The museum houses an impressive collection associated with ancient Delphi, including the earliest known notation of a melody, the famous Charioteer, golden treasures discovered beneath the Sacred Way, and fragments of reliefs from the Siphnian Treasury.

Kottabos is one of the earliest known drinking games from ancient Greece, dated to the 5th to 4th centuries BC.

In ancient Japan, the earliest titles for the sovereign were either ヤマト大王 / 大君 ( yamato ōkimi, Grand King of Yamato ), 倭王 / 倭国王 ( waō / wakokuō, King of Wa, used externally ), or 治天下大王 ( amenoshita shiroshimesu ōkimi, Grand King who rules all under heaven, used internally ).

The Avesta is believed to have been composed possibly as early as 1800 BC and written in ancient Ariana ( Aryana ), the earliest name of Afghanistan which indicates an early link with today's Iranian tribes to the west, or adjacent regions in Central Asia or northeastern Iran in the 6th century BC .< ref >

The letter is quoted or mentioned by the earliest of sources, and is included in every ancient canon, including that of Marcion.

: Bopp's researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication.

Pronouns show distinctions in person ( 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ), number ( singular, dual, and plural in the ancient language ; singular and plural alone in later stages ), and gender ( masculine, feminine, and neuter ), and decline for case ( from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language ).

The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to early peoples, who discovered obtuse triangles in the ancient Indus Valley ( see Harappan Mathematics ), and ancient Babylonia ( see Babylonian mathematics ) from around 3000 BC.

The earliest known written magical incantations come from ancient Mesopotamia ( modern Iraq ), where they have been found inscribed on various cuneiform clay-tablets excavated by archaeologists from the city of Uruk, and dated to between the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

The earliest chronologies date back to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, though no historical writers in these early civilizations were known by name.

The earliest known systematic historical thought in the Western world emerged in ancient Greece, a development which would be an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region.

The history of the petroleum industry in the United States goes back to the early 19th century, although the indigenous peoples, like many ancient societies, have used petroleum seeps since prehistoric times ; where found, these seeps signaled the growth of the industry from the earliest discoveries to the more recent.

These include the Antikythera mechanism and the astrolabe from ancient Greece ( c. 150 – 100 BC ), which are generally regarded as the earliest known mechanical analog computers.

Hercules was among the earliest figures on ancient Roman coinage, and has been the main motif of many collector coins and medals since.

Among the earliest kingdoms known to have been based in what is now Malaysia is the ancient empire of Langkasuka, located in the northern Malay Peninsula and based somewhere in Kedah.

The Ebers papyrus also provides our earliest possible documentation of ancient awareness of tumors, but ancient medical terminology being badly understood, cases Ebers 546 and 547 for instance may refer to simple swellings.