AD 9 shook both great empires of Eurasia.
Rome lost three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, and in China Wang Mang overthrew the Han and proclaimed his own Xin dynasty.
The events
- Battle of the Teutoburg Forest9 · Kalkriese, Germany. Germanic tribes led by Arminius ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions under Varus. Rome abandoned the conquest of Germania, and the imperial frontier remained on the Rhine for centuries.
- Wang Mang founds the Xin dynasty9–23 · Chang'an. In AD 9 the regent Wang Mang deposed the Han and made himself emperor of a new Xin dynasty. He tried to nationalise land, ban the sale of slaves and bring back coinage on ancient models, but the reforms failed and he was killed in an uprising in AD 23.
More amazing facts
- 30 BC · 394 Egyptian hieroglyphs outlived Cleopatra by more than 400 years.
- 25 BC · 21 BC A one-eyed queen of Kush fought Rome and won a good peace from Augustus.
- 8 BC Augustus did not steal a day from February to make his month as long as July.
- 2 In AD 2 China held a census and counted 57,671,400 people in 12,366,470 households: the oldest surviving nationwide census of China, accurate to the individual.
- 39 Caligula never made his horse a consul.
- 50 · 1769 A steam turbine was built in Alexandria in the 1st century, about 1,700 years before Watt's engine.