A boat of cedar planks, some 44 metres long, is buried at Giza

Phoenicians sail round the Cape of Good Hope and bring back the surprising news that the sun was seen to the north of them

The great network of roads built by Darius I has at its centre the 2000-mile royal road from Susa to Sardis

Pheidippides, given the task of running from Athens to Sparta to request help at Marathon against the Persians, completes the journey in two days

The first Roman road, the Via Appia, links Rome with Capua

Pytheas, a Greek explorer, sails up the west coast of Britain and finds beyond it a more northerly land which he calls Thule

Zhang Qian, a Chinese diplomat, begins a spell of twelve years as a captive of the nomadic horde, the Xiongnu

Zhang Qian reaches Bactria and is the first to bring news of western Asia back to China

Roman legions build the Fosse Way, a raised road with a ditch on each side stretching from Lincoln to Devon

Seafarers colonize New Zealand, the last great island region in the Pacific to be reached by human beings

Eric Thorvaldsson, or Eric the Red, sails to Greenland when he is exiled from Iceland

Leif Ericsson claims to have made landfall at three places in north America, one of which he names Vinland - the land of wine

Thorfinn Karlsefni leads an expedition to north America, traces of which may survive in a longhouse at L'Anse aux Meadows

Marco Polo, aged seventeen, sets off from Venice on his journey to the east

Marco Polo is presented to Kublai Khan in Xanadu, and according to his own account makes a very good impression

Marco Polo is back in Venice after an absence of 25 years in the east

Marco Polo, in prison in Genoa, is persuaded by a fellow prisoner to narrate his adventures

Portolan charts, showing the coastlines of the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Atlantic coast, are the start of accurate mapmaking

Ibn Batutah leaves his home in Morocco to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and continues travelling for 24 years

Construction begins on a canal from Lübeck south to the Elbe, linking the Baltic and the North Sea

A Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, becomes fascinated by exploration down the coast of Africa and commissions successive voyages

Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, makes voyages of trade and exploration with a fleet of Chinese junks

The caravel, a sailing ship developed in the Mediterranean and used down the west coast of Africa, is adapted by the Portuguese for Atlantic use

Bartolomeu Dias, sailing for the king of Portugal, becomes the first European navigator to round the Cape of Good Hope

Christopher Columbus, together with the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzón, sails west from Palos in Spain