Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, spreads in oral form

Sacrificial hymns of the Aryans, gathered in the Rigveda, become the earliest Sanskrit literature

The Homeric texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are written down - probably in Ionia

The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is known in its complete form from texts in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

The poems of the Shi Jing, China's earliest work of literature, are gathered together

K'ung-fu-tzu, or Confucius, teaches a practical philosophy which will profoundly influence Chinese history

Parmenides is the first pure philosopher, using logic as a philosophical tool in his poem Nature

The Chinese philosophy of alternating opposites is expressed as yin and yang

Aeschylus wins the prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia in Athens

Sophocles wins the prize for tragedy in Athens, defeating Aeschylus in the competition

Herodotus, the 'father of history', writes his account of the Greco-Persian Wars from a vantage point in Asia Minor

Euripides enters the drama contest at the City Dionysia in Athens for the first time

The Sophists, professional philosophers, travel round Greece educating the sons of the rich

The renewal of the Peloponnesian War prompts Thucydides to begin a great work of contemporary history

Aristophanes wins first prize in Athens for his comedy The Acharnians

Socrates is now sufficiently prominent to be satirized in Clouds, a comedy by Aristophanes

Greek mercenaries, on the losing side at Cunaxa, begin a long journey home - described by Xenophon in the Anabasis

Daodejing ('The Way and the Power') is the book of Daoism

Socrates, convicted in Athens of impiety, is sentenced to death and drinks the hemlock

Plato establishes a school in Akademeia, a suburb of Athens

Central to Plato's philosophy is the theory that there are higher Forms of reality, of which our senses perceive only a transient shadow

Aristotle, at the age of seventeen, comes to Athens to join Plato's academy

The Mahabharata, India's great national epic, begins to take shape

Aristotle tackles wide-ranging subjects on a systematic basis, leaving to his successors an encyclopedia of contemporary thought

The Indian epic of romance and adventure, the Ramayana, is probably the work of a single author at about this time