The earliest known Long Count calendar date in Mesoamerica is 36 BC — just five years before the Battle of Actium.

36 BC · 31 BC · apart: 5 years

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The events

• Earliest Long Count date36 BC · Chiapa de Corzo. Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo bears the date 7.16.3.2.13 — December 36 BC, the oldest known Mesoamerican Long Count inscription. The calendar, later used by the Maya, counted days from a mythical starting point in 3114 BC.
• Battle of Actium31 BC · Actium. Octavian's fleet under Agrippa defeated the navy of Mark Antony and Cleopatra of Egypt. Within a year both had taken their own lives, Egypt became a Roman province and Octavian the sole ruler of the Roman world.

1st century BC

More amazing facts

• 261 BC · 260 BC Almost simultaneously, Ashoka conquered Kalinga (261 BC) and repented the bloodshed, while China saw the Battle of Changping (260 BC), one of antiquity's bloodiest.
• 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.
• 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.
• 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
• 105 · 751 China had paper by the early 2nd century, but according to tradition it reached the Islamic world only after the Battle of Talas in 751, via Chinese captives.
• 165 · 166 In 166, men claiming to be envoys of the ruler of Rome — probably Marcus Aurelius — reached China.

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