Greeks found Olbia
A colony of Miletus at the Bug estuary trades with the Scythians
Settlers from Miletus founded Olbia, “the happy one”, on the Bug estuary, one of the first Greek cities on the northern Black Sea. It shipped grain, fish and slaves to Greece and sold wine, oil and painted pottery to the Scythians. Herodotus, who came here in the 5th century BC, described the Scythians around it. The city lasted about a thousand years; its ruins are a reserve near Parutyne in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 6th century BC
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Middle East
- 550 BC Cyrus the Great founds the Achaemenid Empire — same year
- 539 BC Fall of Babylon to Cyrus — 11 years later
Asia
- c. 563 BC Birth of the Buddha — 13 years earlier
- 551 BC Birth of Confucius — 1 year earlier
Alive at the time
- Cyrus the Great (aged 50)
- Pythagoras (aged 20)
- Gautama Buddha (aged 13)
- Confucius (aged 1)
- Thales of Miletus (aged 74)
- Mahavira (aged 49)
- Darius the Great (aged 0)