400 B.C.E. * Base-60 astronomy flourishes after Chaldaeans invent " symbol for zero * Achaemenid Empire of Persia at its greatest; Aramaic becomes the lingua franca of the Near & Middle East and its script is adopted farther east * Kalashoka convenes Second Buddhist Council and issues edicts of Piety & Toleration to promote "compassion, liberality, truth, purity, gentleness & saintliness" and encourages vegetarianism * Parsee Era begins, using the Egyptian civil calendar for months (389) * Sacrifices to Aphrodite Anahiti, Goddess of Heaven, established by Artaxerxes II who invokes her with Ahura Mazda in a trinity with Mithra [Herodotus] * Chinese astronomer Gan De detects Ganymede(+) with the naked eye (364) * Chaldaean astronomer Kidinnu (Cidenas) accurately describes precession of the lunar orbit, and calculates tropical year to within 5 minutes * Timoleon's convoy from Corinth to Sicily has a heavenly guide that "came to his venture's support, and foretold his coming fame and the glory of his achievements, for all through the night was he preceded by a torch blazing in the sky up to when the squadron made harbour in Italy." (343) [Diodorus, Library of History, Book XVI, 24-5.] * Darius III orders that all of the Avesta and the Zend be put in writing, one copy for the National Archives, a second for the Royal Treasury [The Denkart.] * Carthage is the leading maritime power: turns Alexander's sights towards softer targets in the East; brings goods & their names to America from India via 'new' Red Sea canal that extends Spice Route, & vice versa * Alexander the Great liberates Egypt from Persian yoke; is declared pharao, "son of Amun and saviour" by high priest of Memphis, thereby initiating Hellenism as an ideology in which a Hellenic elite is the master race; selects as his capital of Egypt a site next to Canopus, named after the navigator of Menelaus whose fleet made landfall at the NW corner of the Nile's delta, where Kanopos died & was honored by a monument raised by his grateful king (thereby the deriviation of eponymous site & star) [Homer; Syclax] * Alexander greatly expands into SW Asia, enabling, despite killing many Magoi & Chaldaeans (Cidenas etc.), its cultural influence to flow farther west (e.g. philosophy, astrology & associated theories of numbers) by sending one copy of Avesta & Zend back to Greece, while destroying the other; after his death, Seleucus Nicator founds the Seleucid empire, & Era of Alexander begins (as of Treaty of Trisparadisus, 321) [Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity. v.I, p.22] * Aristarchus of Samos born; later teaches that the earth: revolves around the sun (as a star at the centre of the universe) in a circular orbit small enough to make stellar parallaxes undetectable; is a sphere, whose rotation about its polar axis makes it seem as if there were a celestial sphere rotating instead (320) [Aristarchus, Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (in which he tells how to measure their relative distances using a geometric method that is accurate in theory, but not in practice at the time).] * Lodestone compass, and Newton's Law of Inertia appear in China; [as well as the first reference to the use of a crossbow: Sun-tzu, The Art of War. "Use of Energy"] * Stirrups and paper made in China first * Buddhism begins to spread beyond southern India * Emerging artists along the Silk Road in Gandhara start a new art style-- Serindian (later adapted by missionaries to explain Buddhism) * Chaldaean astronomer Berossos invents hemicyclia & hemispheria sundials * In treaty with Chandragupta (founder of the Gupta dynasty), Seleucus I yields the upper Indus, Gandhara & Arachosia to the Gupta Empire (305) [Mazumdar, Ancient India. p.135] 300 B.C.E.