Thus, while it remains possible that the Babylonians and/or the Pythagoreans may perhaps have had the magic square of three before the Chinese did, more definite evidence will have to turn up from the Middle East or the Classical World before China can lose her claim to the earliest known magic square by more than a thousand years.

His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.

The oldest known caecilian is Eocaecilia micropodia, also from Arizona, while the earliest salamander is Beiyanerpeton jianpingensis from the Late Jurassic of northeastern China.

The earliest known written documentation of the Chinese abacus dates to the 2nd century BC.

The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).

The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, of which the earliest dates from around 720 AD and the latest from 735 AD ( Miller 1971: 3 ).

The earliest Mongolic language of which we have written evidence is known as Middle Mongol.

The afterlife played an important role in Ancient Egyptian religion, and its belief system is one of the earliest known.

The earliest known record of argot was in a 1628 document.

The earliest known Christian monastic communities ( see Monasticism ) consisted of groups of cells or huts collected about a common center, which was usually the house of some hermit or anchorite famous for holiness or singular asceticism, but without any attempt at orderly arrangement.

This violin, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, may have been part of a set made for the marriage of Philip II of Spain to Elisabeth of Valois in 1559, which would make it one of the earliest known violins in existence.

The earliest known sound recording of Advance Australia Fair appears in " The Landing of the Australian Troops in Egypt ", circa 1916, a short commercial recording dramatising arrival of the Australian troops in Egypt en route to Gallipoli.

On 25 May 1824, the town plat was registered with Wayne County as " Annsarbour "; this represents the earliest known use of the town's name.

The earliest known autobiography in English is the early 15th-century Booke of Margery Kempe, describing among other things her pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to Rome.

The earliest known Christian image of an angel, in the Cubicolo dell ' Annunziazione in the Catacomb of Priscilla, which is dated to the middle of the third century, is without wings.

The earliest known representation of angels with wings is on what is called the Prince's Sarcophagus, discovered at Sarigüzel, near Istanbul, in the 1930s, and attributed to the time of Theodosius I ( 379-395 ).

Native Americans were the earliest inhabitants of the land that is today known as the United States and played its first music.

" Paddy on the Railway " is attested as a chanty in the earliest known published work to use the word " chanty ," G. E.

The earliest known personification of what would become the United States was " Columbia " who first appeared in 1738 and sometimes was associated with Liberty.

From the time that the earliest English-speaking settlers arrived, the area has also been known as The Forks, because it is situated at the confluence of the north and south branches of the Kalamazoo River.

The earliest known date for a simple glue is 200, 000 BC and for a compound glue 70, 000 BC.

The earliest known member of the house, Esiko, Count of Ballenstedt, first appears in a document of 1036, and is assumed to have been a grandson ( through his mother ) of Odo I, Margrave of the Saxon Ostmark.

The earliest record of a settlement at Ajaccio having a name ancestral to its name is the exhortation in Epistle 77 written in 601 CE of Gregory the great to the Defensor Boniface, one of two known rectors of the early Corsican church, not to leave Aleria and Adjacium without bishops.

The earliest known literary use of the word assassination is in Macbeth by William Shakespeare ( 1605 ).

Such an analysis speedily reveals why the middle number of the Lo Shu, 5, was so vitally significant for the Chinese ever since the earliest hints that they had a knowledge of this diagram.

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.

" These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.

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.

This formulary was also the earliest Chinese medical text to group symptoms into clinically useful " patterns " ( zheng 證 ) that could serve as targets for therapy.

The earliest Chinese document mentioning a crossbow is in scripts from the 4th – 3rd century BC attributed to the followers of Mozi.

The earliest evidence of the Chinese calendar is found on the oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty ( late second millennium BC ), which seem to describe a lunisolar year of 12 months, with a possible intercalary 13th, or even 14th, added empirically to prevent calendar drift.

The two oldest printed Chinese calendars are dated 877 and 882 ; they were found at the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Dunhuang ; Patricia Ebrey writes that it is no surprise that some of the earliest printed items were calendars, since the Chinese found it necessary to calculate and mark which days were auspicious and which were not.

The Classic of History, one of the Five Classics of Chinese classic texts is one of the earliest narratives of China.

The Spring and Autumn Annals, the official chronicle of the State of Lu covering the period from 722 BCE to 481 BCE, is among the earliest surviving Chinese historical texts to be arranged on annalistic principles.

The Zuo Zhuan, attributed to Zuo Qiuming in the 5th century BC, is the earliest Chinese work of narrative history and covers the period from 722 BCE to 468 BCE.

It contains examples of the earliest Chinese prose.

The " Gong An story " （ 公案小说, literally ：" case records of a public law court "） is the earliest known genre of Chinese detective fiction.

Another method specified by Chinese texts — the earliest dating to 1110 — specified the use of saponin ( from the beans of Gleditschia sinensis ) to extract hormones, but gypsum ( containing calcium sulfate ) was also known to have been used.

The earliest extant Chinese transverse flute is a chi ( 篪 ) flute discovered in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at the Suizhou site, Hubei province, China.

The earliest known Chinese kites were flat ( not bowed ) and often rectangular.

At this battle the Mongols not only used gunpowder in early Chinese firearms but in the earliest grenades as well.

A Chinese alchemical text dated 492 noted saltpeter burnt with a purple flame, providing a practical and reliable means of distinguishing it from other inorganic salts, thus enabling alchemists to evaluate and compare purification techniques ; the earliest Arabic and Latin accounts of saltpeter purification are dated after 1200.

The earliest ( surviving ) examples of Chinese painted artwork date to the Warring States Period ( 481-221 BC ), with paintings on silk or tomb murals on rock, brick, or stone.

Evidence for the earliest Chinese inks, similar to modern inksticks, is around 256 BC in the end of the Warring States Period and produced from soot and animal glue.