page_title: Timeline of historic inventions
section_title: 3rd century BC
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of historic inventions / Agricultural and Proto-Agricultural Eras / Classical antiquity and medieval era / 3rd century BC
caption_attribution_description: An image of a Ming dynasty woodcut describing five major steps in ancient Chinese papermaking process as outlined by Cai Lun in 105 AD
context_page_description: The timeline of historic inventions is a chronological list of particularly important or significant technological inventions and the people who created the inventions.
  Note: Dates for inventions are often controversial. Sometimes inventions are invented by several inventors around the same time, or may be invented in an impractical form many years before another inventor improves the invention into a more practical form. Where there is ambiguity, the date of the first known working version of the invention is used here.
  A proportion of all discoveries within the United States made during the 20ᵗʰ and 21ˢᵗ centuries were made within skunk work enterprises.
context_section_description: By 3rd century BC: Automatons in either the Hellenistic world or India. Kautilya's Arthashastra describes the use of calayantras (dynamic devices) such as automatic doors in Indian warfare. Later commentaries and texts describe a theoretic foundation for the engineering of basic automatons, describing them as compositions of simple machines operating through pressure, rotation and weight. However robots remained foreign to India at the time, with a Hindu-Buddhist tale attributing their invention to the Hellenistic world.
  3rd century BC: Analog computers in the Hellenistic world (see e.g. the Antikythera mechanism), possibly in Rhodes.
  By at least the 3rd century BC: Archimedes screw in Ancient Greece
  Early 3rd century BC: Canal lock in Ancient Suez Canal under Ptolemy II (283–246 BC) in Hellenistic Egypt
  3rd century BC: Cam during the Hellenistic period, used in water-driven automata.
  By the 3rd century BC: Water wheel. The origin is unclear: Indian Pali texts dating to the 4th century BCE refer to the cakkavattaka, which later commentaries describe as arahatta-ghati-yanta (machine with wheel-pots attached). Helaine Selin suggests that the device existed in Persia before 350 BC. The clearest description of the water wheel and Liquid-driven escapement is provided by Philo of Byzantium (c. 280 – 220 BC) in the Hellenistic kingdoms.
  3rd century BC: Gimbal described Philo of Byzantium
  Late 3rd century BC: Dry dock under Ptolemy IV (221–205 BC) in Hellenistic Egypt
  3rd–2nd century BC: Blast furnace in Ancient China: The earliest discovered blast furnaces in China date to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, although most sites are from the later Han Dynasty.
caption: An illustration depicting the papermaking process in Han Dynasty China.
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