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The Black Death, the plague that killed an estimated third or more of Europe's people in the late 1340s and early 1350s, most likely began in Central Asia. It travelled west along trade routes and reached Sicily on Genoese ships in October 1347.

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The strongest evidence comes from a 2022 study in the journal Nature. Researchers examined two medieval cemeteries in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today's Kyrgyzstan, where gravestones dated 1338 and 1339 record deaths from 'pestilence'. DNA from the teeth of people buried there contained Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and the strain proved to be the direct ancestor of those that later swept Europe. Plague usually spreads through the bites of fleas carried by rats and other animals. By 1346 it had struck the Mongol army besieging Caffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea on the Black Sea, and merchant ships carried it on into the Mediterranean. Estimates of Europe's losses range from a quarter to about 60 per cent of the population.

Türkçe oku
Kara Ölüm adıyla bilinen veba salgını büyük olasılıkla Orta Asya'da başladı. Ticaret yolları boyunca batıya ilerledi, Ekim 1347'de Ceneviz gemileriyle Sicilya'ya ulaştı ve 1350'lerin başına kadar Avrupa nüfusunun üçte birini, belki daha fazlasını öldürdü.

Bu konudaki en güçlü kanıt, 2022'de Nature dergisinde yayımlanan bir araştırmadan geliyor. Araştırmacılar, bugünkü Kırgızistan'da, Issık Göl yakınlarındaki Çüy Vadisi'nde bulunan iki Orta Çağ mezarlığını inceledi. Buradaki 1338 ve 1339 tarihli mezar taşlarında ölümlerin “salgından” olduğu yazıyordu. Gömülenlerin dişlerinden elde edilen DNA'da vebaya yol açan Yersinia pestis bakterisi bulundu ve bu soyun, daha sonra Avrupa'yı kasıp kavuran soyların doğrudan atası olduğu anlaşıldı. Veba çoğunlukla sıçanların ve başka hayvanların üzerinde yaşayan pirelerin ısırmasıyla bulaşır. Hastalık 1346'da Kefe'yi kuşatan Moğol ordusuna ulaşmıştı. Kırım'daki Kefe, Cenevizlilerin Karadeniz'deki ticaret limanıydı; tüccar gemileri hastalığı oradan Akdeniz'e taşıdı. Avrupa'daki kayıplara ilişkin tahminler, nüfusun dörtte biri ile %60'ı arasında değişiyor.

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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 was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

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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In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted almost a thousand years longer, until the Ottomans took the city in 1453.

Romulus Augustulus was a boy, put on the throne by his father, the general Orestes, and he reigned for only ten months. Odoacer did not name a new emperor. He made himself king of Italy and sent the symbols of the western emperor's office to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, as if to say that one emperor, in the East, was now enough. The eastern empire kept Roman law and government, and its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi) to the end; the name “Byzantine Empire” came into wide use only after it had fallen. Its neighbours saw it the same way. Arabs and Turks called its people Rum, “Romans”, and the Ottoman name for the Balkans, Rumeli, “land of the Romans”, comes from the same word. The army of Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

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Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

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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