The earliest known owner of the Beowulf manuscript is the 16th-century scholar Laurence Nowell, after whom the manuscript is named, though its official designation is British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. XV because it was one of Robert Bruce Cotton's holdings in the Cotton Library in the middle of the 17th century.

The Greek scholar Heron of Alexandria created the earliest known automatic door in the 1st century CE during the era of Roman Egypt.

The earliest forms of the name enabled place-name scholar William J. Watson to show that the name originally meant something like " yew-place ".

However, the earliest known idea to indicate the possibility of diseases spreading by yet unseen organisms was that of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in a 1st century BC book titled On Agriculture in which he warns against locating a homestead near swamps:

In the case of Macbeth, mainstream scholar A. R. Braunmuller, in the New Cambridge edition, finds the post-1605 arguments for the play inconclusive, and argues only for an earliest date of 1603.

Francesco Petrarca ( 20 July 1304 – 19 July 1374 ), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar and poet, and one of the earliest humanists.

Tycho later wrote that when he was around age two, his uncle, Danish nobleman Jørgen Thygesen Brahe, " without the knowledge of my parents took me away with him while I was in my earliest youth to become a scholar ".

He also investigated the use of lenses as projectors and should be credited as the earliest inventor, developer and designer of the Magic Lantern rather than German scholar Athanasius Kircher who merely used much of Huygens research ( often quite inaccurately ) to document and publish on the subject.

Though he does not regard himself as a Historical Jesus scholar, he suggests that Jesus was a wandering sage, similar in style to the Greco-Roman cynics, and that the earliest " Jesus Movements " followed a similar model.

The earliest known advocates of British Israelism include M. le Loyer, an early 16th-century French Huguenot magistrate ; Adriaan van der Schrieck, a Flemish scholar ( d. 1621 ); Vincenzo Galilei ; the English antiquarian Henry Spelman ; Jakob Abbadie ; and John Sadler.

The scholar Helmut Koester considers him the earliest surviving witness of this tradition.

One of the earliest descriptions of a food chain was described by a medieval Afro-Arab scholar named Al-Jahiz: " All animals, in short, cannot exist without food, neither can the hunting animal escape being hunted in his turn.

Hu Shih, literary scholar and then Ambassador to the United States, wrote in the Introduction to Waley's 1942 abridgement, Monkey, that the people of Wu's hometown, attributed it early on to Wu, and kept records to that effect as early as 1625 ; thus, claimed Ambassador Hu, Journey to the West was one of the earliest Chinese novels for which the authorship is officially documented.

The earliest surviving commentaries appear to be those of the 10th-century Kashmirian scholar Vallabhadeva.

He was a Cambridge scholar and renowned horticulturalist ; George Simonds Boulger writes of Uvedale in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 58: As a horticulturist Uvedale earned a reputation for his skill in cultivating exotics, being one of the earliest possessors of hothouses in England.

It is the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to the kingdom of Israel ( the " House of Omri "), it bears the earliest certain extra-biblical reference to the Israelite god Yahweh, and, if French scholar André Lemaire's reconstruction of a portion of line 31 is correct, the earliest mention of the " House of David " ( i. e., the kingdom of Judah ).

Ludovico Antonio Muratori ( October 21, 1672 – January 23, 1750 ) was an Italian historian, notable as a leading scholar of his age, and for his discovery of the Muratorian fragment, the earliest known list of New Testament books.

The earliest works on " the social organization of ants " and " animal communication and psychology " were written by al-Jahiz, a 9th century Afro-Arab scholar who wrote many works on these subjects.

Having been a scholar and minor fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Thomas Robinson gained his earliest diplomatic experience in Paris and then went to Vienna, where he was English ambassador from 1730 to 1748.

The earliest scholar is probably Ibn Ishaq ( died 767 ), who was grandson of a Christian.

The earliest references to Kapisa appear in the writings of fifth century BCE Indian scholar Pāṇini.

The Qieyun zhizhangtu, incorrectly attributed to the 11th century scholar Sima Guang, was believed to be the oldest of the rime tables, and was used in the earliest reconstruction efforts.

Dr. Crumley was a classical scholar who also was one of Ohio's early state foresters, who managed the purchase of the original land for Zaleski State Forest and Hocking State Forest, and who wrote one of the earliest practical handbooks on forestry.

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 ).