Slavery arrives as part of the package of civlization, along with armies, public works and social hierarchies

The Code of Hammurabi is the first surviving document to record the law relating to slaves

The biblical account suggests that around this period the Hebrews are a captive tribe in Egypt

The Assyrians overwhelm the north of Israel and the ten northern tribes vanish from history - the majority of them probably dispersed or sold into slavery

The Athenians, capturing Melos, kill all the males of the island and sell the women and children into slavery

The African slave trade through the Sahara is so extensive that a new town, Zawila, is established as a trading station

The caliphs in Baghdad begin to employ Turkish slaves, or Mamelukes, in their armies

Portugal claims ownership of the region of Guinea, subsequently the centre of their slave trade on the west African coast

The Portuguese settlers on the Cape Verde islands are granted a monopoly on the new slave trade

Africans, bought in the Portuguese trading posts of west Africa, are shipped across the Atlantic as slaves

The British, settling in Jamaica, soon turn the island into the major slave market of the West Indies

The Dutch in South Africa purchase slaves to do domestic and agricultural work

Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade

Boston merchant Samuel Sewall publishes The Selling of Joseph, a very early anti-slavery tract

John Peter Zenger, editor of the Weekly Journal, is acquitted of libelling the governor of New York on the grounds that what he published was true

Quaker minister John Woolman publishes the first part of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, an essay denouncing slavery

The triangular trade, controlled from Liverpool, ships millions of Africans across the Atlantic as slaves

The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is founded in London, with a strong Quaker influence

A British ship lands a party of freed slaves as the first modern settlers in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a slave captured as a child in Africa, becomes a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic

The US Congress passes Fugitive Slave Laws, enabling southern slave owners to reclaim escaped slaves in northern states

Legislation abolishing the slave trade is passed in both Britain and America

The British government uses Freetown, in Sierra Leone, as a base in the fight against the slave trade

The Turks recapture Belgrade and sell thousands of Serb women and children into slavery

Robert Finley, a US anti-slavery campaigner, founds the American Colonization Society to settle freed slaves in Africa