As the Greeks faced Persia at Marathon, the Zapotecs in Mexico were levelling a mountaintop to build a capital on it. Monte Albán was founded around 500 BC and lasted more than a thousand years.
The events
- Founding of Monte Albánc. 500 BC · Monte Albán. The Zapotecs founded a city on a levelled mountaintop above the Valley of Oaxaca. Monte Albán remained their capital for over a thousand years and holds some of the earliest hieroglyphic and calendrical inscriptions in Mesoamerica.
- Battle of Marathon490 BC · Marathon. Athenian and Plataean hoplites under Miltiades defeated the Persian force Darius I had landed in Attica. The first major Greek victory over Persia boosted Athenian prestige and inspired the legend of the runner behind the modern marathon.
More amazing facts
- 509 BC · 508 BC Rome expelled its last king in 509 BC and Athens got democracy from Cleisthenes in 508: republic and democracy were born almost side by side.
- 500 BC · 1847 The word 'gorilla' was coined not by zoologists but by Carthaginian sailors 2,500 years ago. Hanno described hairy wild people on an African island whom his interpreters called 'gorillai'. In 1847 the name went to the ape.
- 500 BC · 767 · 1869 A canal linked the Nile to the Red Sea some 2,400 years before Suez.
- 500 BC Legend says a Pythagorean was drowned for discovering irrational numbers.
- 500 BC The Amazons may not be pure myth.
- 500 BC The tattoos of the 'Ukok Princess' are some 2,400 years old. The mummy of a 5th-century BC Pazyryk woman was found in 1993 in an ice-filled Altai kurgan, with deer still visible on her shoulder and wrist.