Twenty-three years after the Western Roman Empire fell, India's Aryabhata wrote that the sky only appears to move — it is the Earth that rotates.
The events
- Aryabhatiya499 · Kusumapura. The 23-year-old Indian astronomer Aryabhata composed a treatise on mathematics and astronomy. It uses place-value notation, gives π ≈ 3.1416 and states that the Earth rotates on its axis.
- Fall of the Western Roman Empire476 · Ravenna. The Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The year is traditionally taken as the end of the Western Roman Empire and the line between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
More amazing facts
- 165 · 166 In 166, men claiming to be envoys of the ruler of Rome — probably Marcus Aurelius — reached China.
- 232 · 1280 The colossal Taupō eruption of around 232 struck a New Zealand with no people at all: Polynesians would arrive more than a thousand years later.
- 301 · 313 · 330 Among the first Christian states were Armenia (traditionally 301) and Aksum in Ethiopia (around 330).
- 378 In January 378, a party from Teotihuacan arrived at the Maya city of Tikal, about 1,000 km away.
- 476 · 1453 The Eastern Roman Empire outlived the Western one by almost 1,000 years: Rome fell in 476, Constantinople only in 1453.
- 536 · 541 536 is called one of the worst years to be alive: volcanic haze dimmed the sun across the Northern Hemisphere, and five years later the Plague of Justinian began.