but all too many observers have been misled by this fact into minimizing the degree of change which took place in the early first millennium.

no strikingly effective element of speech in the extant poems can with assurance be said not to have been a commonplace in the vaster epic corpus that may have existed at the beginning of the first millennium before Christ.

Speakers of the Akkadian language seem to have already been present in Mesopotamia at the dawn of the historical period, and soon achieved preeminence with the first Dynasty of Kish and numerous localities to the north of Sumer, where rulers with Akkadian names had already established themselves by the 3rd millennium BC.

During 248 AD, Philip the Arab celebrated Rome's first millennium, together with Ludi saeculares for Rome's alleged tenth saeculum.

During the later part of first millennium BC the use of brass spread across a wide geographical area from Britain and Spain in the west to Iran, and India in the east.

The worship of deities symbolized by the female breast in Greece became less common during the first millennium.

During the middle of the first millennium BC, Greek culture experienced a gradual change in the perception of female breasts.

The absence of native British literature during the early part of the first millennium means that Britain owes its knowledge of Boudica's rebellion solely to the writings of the Romans.

According to ancient Chinese, Indian and Javanese manuscripts, western coastal cities of Borneo had become trading ports, part of their trade routes, since the first millennium.

In ancient Greece, beginning in the early 1st millennium AD, there emerged independent city-states that evolved for the first time the notion of citizenship, becoming in the process the archetype of the free city, the polis.

In the first millennium AD, an urban tradition developed in the Khmer region of Cambodia, where Angkor grew into one of the largest cities ( in area ) of the world.

Beginning in the first millennium AD, groups of Amerindians developed a political system, the cacicazgo, a pyramidal power structure headed by a cacique.

However, the origins of the modern city is generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium.

The three finds push back the date of the invention of the crank and connecting rod back by a full millennium ; for the first time, all essential components of the much later steam engine were assembled by one technological culture:

This corresponds closely with the position of the Pharisee school of thought led by Shammai, at the start of the first millennium, with which Jesus would have been familiar.

The emergence of metallurgy occurred first in the Fertile Crescent, where it gave rise to the Bronze Age in the 4th millennium BC.

During the first millennium BCE in India, many texts were composed which attempted to codify aspects of daily life.

Docetism largely died out during the first millennium AD.

West Cornwall, around Mount's Bay, was traditionally thought to have been visited by metal traders from the eastern Mediterranean During the first millennium BC trade became more organised, first with the Phoenicians, who settled Gades ( Cadiz ) around 1100 BC, and later with the Greeks, who had settled Massilia ( Marseilles ) and Narbo ( Narbonne ) around 600 BC.

Thus, it is estimated that the Korean dolmens were built in the first millennium BC.

It has been used as an honored academic title for over a millennium in Europe, where it dates back to the rise of the first universities.

Approximately at the turn of the first millennium the Romans conquered the area and incorporated it into the province of Rhaetia.

Central areas of Eritrea and most tribes in today's northern Ethiopia share a common background and cultural heritage in the Kingdom of Aksum ( and its successor dynasties ) of the first millennium ( as well as the first millennium BC kingdom of D ’ mt ), and in its Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church ( today, with an autocephalous Eritrean branch ), as well as in its Ge ' ez language.

On the occasion of a pestilence in the 430s BCE, Apollo's first temple at Rome was established in the Flaminian fields, replacing an older cult site there known as the " Apollinare ".

The oldest undisputed evidence of the use of astrology as an integrated system of knowledge is therefore attributed to the records of the first dynasty of Mesopotamia ( 1950 – 1651 BCE ).

Mail, sometimes called " chainmail ", made of interlocking iron rings is believed to have first appeared some time after 300 BCE.

This is a euphemism replacing an earlier ' Inhospitable Sea ', Pontos Axeinos, first attested in Pindar ( early fifth century BCE ,~ 475 BC ).

The first, termed Proto-Isaiah ( chapters 1 – 39 ), contains the words of the 8th-century BCE prophet with 7th-century BCE expansions ; the second, Deutero-Isaiah ( chapters 40 – 55 ), is the work of a 6th-century BCE author writing near the end of the Babylonian captivity ; and the third, the poetic Trito-Isaiah ( chapters 56 – 66 ), was composed in Jerusalem shortly after the return from exile, probably by multiple authors.

The first was the late 7th century Deuteronomistic reform of official Judean religion under king Josiah, who banned many elements of the old polytheistic cult from the Temple, and the sudden collapse of Assyria and the rise of Babylon to take its place ; the second was exile of the royal court, the priests and other members of the ruling elite following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem c. 586 BCE.

It is dated to the second to first century BCE.

Haggai reports that three weeks after his first prophecy, the rebuilding of the Temple began on September 7 521 BCE.

In 538 BCE, the famous Edict of Cyrus was released, and the first return took place under Sheshbazzar.

In around 500 BCE, after the Zhou state weakened and China moved into the Spring and Autumn Period, the classic period of Chinese philosophy began ( it is an interesting fact that this date nearly coincides with the emergence of the first Greek philosophers ).

The first traces of therapeutic activities in China date from the Shang dynasty ( 14th – 11th centuries BCE ).

The earliest evidence for acupuncture in this sense dates to the second or first century BCE.

The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, the oldest received work of Chinese medical theory, was compiled around the first century BCE on the basis of shorter texts from different medical lineages.

Records of the Grand Historian is the first among Twenty-Four Histories, a collection of Chinese historical books covering a period of history from 3000 BCE to the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century.

The stars of Ursa Major were all circumpolar in Athens of 400 BCE, and all but the stars in the Great Bear's left foot were circumpolar in Ovid's Rome, in the first century CE.

Led by Cleisthenes, Athenians established what is generally held as the first democracy in 508-507 BCE.

The word energy derives from the Greek, which possibly appears for the first time in the work of Aristotle in the 4th century BCE.

According to current thinking, a first draft ( the Yahwist ) was probably written in the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian exile ; this was supplemented and completed as a post-Exilic final edition ( the Priestly source ) at the very end of the 6th century or during the 5th century, and further adjustments and minor revisions continued down to the end of the 4th century.

But it is the elegists of the mid-to-late first century BCE who are most commonly associated with the distinctive Roman form of the elegiac couplet.

The first in the city of Rome was the extraordinary wooden Amphitheatre of Gaius Scribonius Curio ( built in 53 BCE ).

The first part-stone amphitheatre in Rome was inaugurated in 29 – 30 BCE, in time for the triple triumph of Octavian ( later Augustus ).

Hence sectarians and followers of gnosticism were first rejected by the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean ( see the Notzrim 139 – 67 BCE ), then by the Christian communities and finally by the late Hellenistic philosophical communities ( see Neoplatonism and Gnosticism ).