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The Great Wall of China is not one wall built at once. Rival states began building walls in the 7th century BC, China's first emperor linked several of them after 221 BC, and later dynasties kept rebuilding. Most of what visitors see today dates from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

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The first walls were built by the rival states of ancient China to guard their borders. After Qin Shi Huang united China in 221 BC, he had the walls between the old states torn down and linked those facing the nomadic peoples of the northern steppe. The Han and later dynasties repaired and extended the system. Early walls were mostly rammed earth, soil pounded hard between wooden boards, with stone in the mountains; the Ming used brick and stone and added thousands of watchtowers against Mongol raids. A Chinese government survey in 2012 put the combined length of all its surviving walls and trenches at about 21,196 km, some 8,850 km of it from the Ming. The Great Wall became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

Türkçe oku
Çin Seddi, tek seferde yapılmış tek bir duvar değildir. Birbiriyle çekişen devletler MÖ 7. yüzyılda duvar örmeye başladı; Çin'in ilk imparatoru MÖ 221'den sonra bu duvarların birçoğunu birleştirdi, sonraki hanedanlar da onları yenilemeyi sürdürdü. Bugün görülen bölümlerin çoğu Ming Hanedanı (1368-1644) döneminden kalmadır.

İlk duvarları, eski Çin'de birbiriyle çekişen devletler sınırlarını korumak için yaptı. MÖ 221'de Çin'i birleştiren Qin Shi Huang, eski devletleri birbirinden ayıran duvarları yıktırdı, kuzeydeki bozkır göçebelerine karşı olanları ise birbirine bağlattı. Han ve sonraki hanedanlar duvarları onarıp uzattı. İlk duvarlar çoğunlukla tahta kalıplar arasında dövülerek sıkıştırılmış topraktan, dağlık yerlerde ise taştan yapılıyordu. Ming Hanedanı tuğla ve taş kullandı; Moğol akınlarına karşı binlerce gözetleme kulesi de ekledi. Çin'in 2012'de yaptığı kapsamlı ölçüme göre, bugün ayakta kalan bütün duvar ve hendeklerin toplam uzunluğu yaklaşık 21.196 kilometredir; bunun 8.850 kilometre kadarı Ming döneminden kalmadır. Çin Seddi 1987'de UNESCO Dünya Mirası Listesi'ne alındı.

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The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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The rivalry peaked in 1274 BC at the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in today's Syria, where neither side won outright. About fifteen years later came the treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Kadesh, although it never mentions the battle. Both kings promised not to attack each other, to help each other against outside enemies and rebels, and to hand back each other's political refugees. The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, was found in 1906 at Hattusa, the Hittite capital, near today's Boğazkale in Çorum province. Two of its tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.

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