Hannibal took elephants over the Alps at almost the same time China began its Great Wall.
Carthage crossed the mountains in 218 BC; China, unified in 221 BC, started linking old walls into one a few years later.
The events
- Hannibal crosses the Alps218 BC · Western Alps. At the start of the Second Punic War the Carthaginian general Hannibal led an army with war elephants from Spain across the Alps into Italy. He lost nearly half his men but went on to crush the Romans at the Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae.
- Great Wall of Chinac. 214 BC · Northern China. Qin Shi Huang ordered the border walls of the former states joined into one line against the Xiongnu nomads, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Later dynasties, above all the Ming, rebuilt it, and with all its branches it exceeds 20,000 km.
More amazing facts
- 240 BC Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference in Egypt, while Chinese chroniclers made the first sure record of Halley's Comet.
- 240 BC An Egyptian king kept the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and simply forfeited a huge deposit.
- 240 BC The word 'geography' was coined by the first man to measure the Earth.
- 214 BC · 1368 · 1644 The Great Wall of postcards is younger than it looks: most of its brick sections were built under the Ming, after 1368.
- 210 BC China's First Emperor sought immortality and may have been poisoned by it: one theory blames a mercury elixir from his alchemists.
- 202 BC In 202 BC, empires were decided at both ends of Eurasia: Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty.