The term apocrypha is used with various meanings, including " hidden ", " esoteric ", " spurious ", " of questionable authenticity ", ancient Chinese " revealed texts and objects " and " Christian texts that are not canonical ".

The ancient Chinese called the substance " dragon's spittle fragrance ".

Examples of early botanical works have been found in ancient sacred texts from India, ancient Zoroastrian writings, and ancient Chinese works.

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.

The 28 lunar mansions are one of the most important and also the most ancient structures in the Chinese sky, attested from the 5th century BC.

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 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.

Although much of Chinese philosophy begins in the Warring States period, elements of Chinese philosophy have existed for several thousand years ; some can be found in the Yi Jing ( the Book of Changes ), an ancient compendium of divination, which dates back to at least 672 BCE.

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.

Yin and yang are ancient Chinese concepts which can be traced back to the Shang dynasty ( 1600 – 1100 BC ).

Yin, Yang, and the five elements are associated with themes in the I Ching, the oldest of Chinese classical texts which describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy.

Nevertheless, the ancient Chinese concept of Qi or chi is believed to be close to that of air.

Water is one of the elements in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Asian Indian system Panchamahabhuta, and in the Chinese cosmological and physiological system Wu Xing.

The Wu Xing, ( 五行 wŭ xíng ) also known as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, and the Five Steps / Stages, are chiefly an ancient mnemonic device, in many traditional Chinese fields.

In 307 BC, King Wuling of Zhao, the ancient Chinese ruler of the former State of Jin territory, ordered his military commanders and troops to adopt the trousers of the nomads as well as practice the nomads ' form of mounted archery to hone their new cavalry skills.

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.

Despite the limitations imposed on ancient Chinese concubines, history and literature have examples of concubines achieving great power and influence.

Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical work and compilation of sporadic materials on the Warring States Period compiled between 3rd century to 1st century BCE.

He believed that the reform of the civil service into a meritocratic system and the disappearance of the ancient Chinese nobility from the bureaucracy constituted a modern society.

In 1453 when the last vestige of ancient Roman power fell to the Turks, the city officially shifted religions -- although the Patriarch, or Pope, of the Orthodox Church continued to live there, and still does -- and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Kyoto is the ancient capital of Japan and still its cultural center.

It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur ( Akkadian: ; Aramaic: ; Hebrew: ; Arabic: ).

* Abila Lysaniou, capital of ancient Abilene, northwest of Damascus, Syria

Nineveh — where Jonah preached — was the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, which fell to the Medes in 612 BC.

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 ).

The oldest sites documented thus far are from around 500 AD including Awdaghust, Kumbi-Saleh the ancient capital of Ghana, and Maranda a center located on a trade rout between Egypt and Gao.

It was founded in AD 330, at ancient Byzantium as the new capital of the Roman Empire by Constantine I, after whom it was named.

Constructed by Gaulish sailors probably in 14 CE, it was discovered in 1710 within the foundations of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, site of ancient Lutetia, the civitas capital of the Celtic Parisii.

Under Fakhr-al-Dīn II ( Fakhreddin II ), the Druze dominion increased until it included almost all Syria, extending from the edge of the Antioch plain in the north to Safad in the south, with a part of the Syrian desert dominated by Fakhr-al-Din's castle at Tadmur ( Palmyra ), the ancient capital of Zenobia.

The concept of diplomatic immunity can be found in ancient Indian epics like Ramayana ( between 500 and 301 BC ) and Mahabharata ( around 4th century BC ) where messengers and diplomats were given immunity from capital punishment.

*, one of numbered east-west streets in the ancient capital of Heian-kyō, present-day Kyoto

*, one of numbered east-west streets in the ancient capital of Heian-kyō, present-day Kyoto

*, one of numbered east-west streets in the ancient capital of Heijō-kyō, present-day Nara

There is reference on a Greek papyrus from 163 BCE to the procedure being conducted on girls in Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, and Strabo ( c. 64 BCE – c. 23 CE ), the Greek geographer, reported it when he visited Egypt in 25 BCE.

Gandhara is the name of an ancient Hindu kingdom from the Vedic period and its capital city located between the Hindukush and Sulaiman Mountains ( mountains of Solomon ), although Kandahar in modern times and the ancient Gandhara are not geographically identical.

It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur ( Akkadian: ; Aramaic: ; Hebrew: ; Arabic: ).

From Mount Emei in Sichuan, a Daoist hermit, a nun known as a " numinous old woman " and " holy physician "— who Temple says was associated with the ' school of the ancient immortals ' and thus most likely specialized in ' internal alchemy '— introduced the technique of inoculation to the capital.

Rishabhnath, the first Tirthankar, was revered and worshipped in the ancient city Pithunda, capital of Kalinga.

* Memphis, Egypt – Administrative capital of ancient Egypt.

* Daorson-the capital of ancient Hellenic community in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.

At the time of the fall of the ancient Siam capital of Ayutthaya in 1767, the invading Burmese troops rounded up thousands of Thais and took them to Burma as prisoners.