The Olympic Games are older than Rome: the first were held in 776 BC, and by tradition the city was founded only 23 years later.
The events
- First Olympic Games776 BC · Olympia. The first recorded Olympic Games were held at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia; Coroebus of Elis won the stadion footrace. Held every four years, the Games gave the Greeks a common system for counting years.
- Founding of Romec. 753 BC · Palatine Hill. Roman tradition holds that Romulus founded the city on the Palatine Hill on 21 April 753 BC. Romans counted years 'from the founding of the City', and the small settlement grew into the centre of a vast empire.
More amazing facts
- 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.
- 880 BC · 814 BC Around 880 BC, Lapita seafarers landed on Tonga — at nearly the same time the Phoenicians founded Carthage.
- 650 BC · 612 BC The fire that destroyed Nineveh in 612 BC baked the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal's library — helping them survive to the present day.
- 563 BC · 551 BC · 530 BC By traditional dating, the Buddha, Confucius and Pythagoras were contemporaries: all three lived in the 6th century BC.
- 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.