About 1,710 years passed between Hammurabi's laws and Caesar's assassination — nearly as long as separates us from the Edict of Milan of 313.
The events
- Code of Hammurabic. 1754 BC · Babylon. King Hammurabi of Babylon had 282 laws on trade, family, property and punishment carved on a basalt stele. It is one of the oldest and most complete written legal codes in history.
- Assassination of Julius Caesar44 BC · Rome. On the Ides of March, senators led by Brutus and Cassius stabbed the dictator Julius Caesar to death at a Senate meeting in the Curia of Pompey. Instead of saving the Republic, the murder unleashed new civil wars that brought Octavian to power.
18th century BC · 1st century BC · 4th century
More amazing facts
- 2560 BC · 2000 BC When the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island — the last of them died out only around 2000 BC.
- 2500 BC · 2334 BC Sargon of Akkad boasted that ships from Meluhha moored at his capital.
- 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.
- 1200 BC · 1936 The thylacine vanished from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, yet survived in Tasmania into the 20th century: the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
- 1050 BC · 863 Cyrillic is a distant descendant of the Phoenician alphabet: Phoenician gave rise to Greek, and Greek to the letters created almost 2,000 years later.
- 1000 BC · 210 BC The terracotta sculptures of Nigeria's Nok culture were being made centuries before China's Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang.