Stolen credit.

The Cyrus Cylinder (c. 539 BCE) is often called the first known declaration of human rights — religious tolerance, an end to forced labour, the right of displaced peoples to return home. It predates the Magna Carta by 1,754 years. The British Museum holds it. British schoolchildren rarely hear of it.

The qanat — the underground aqueduct that turned Iranian deserts into farmland — was running for two and a half millennia before European hydraulic engineers 'rediscovered' the principle. The Achaemenid postal system, with its relay riders, was the operational model for every subsequent imperial communications network including Rome's.

Algebra in its medieval form is unthinkable without al-Khwarizmi (Persian, 9th c.), whose name became the word 'algorithm'. Modern medicine inherited the encyclopaedic compendiums of Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Persian, 11th c.); his Canon was the standard medical textbook in European universities for six centuries. Algebra, algorithm, alcohol, almanac, average, alkali, alchemy: the words trace the debt.

Persian poetry — Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Khayyam, Ferdowsi — has been read continuously, in dozens of languages, for a thousand years. Goethe credited Hafez as the source of his West–East Divan. Emerson took Saadi as a model. None of this is on the standard Western humanities syllabus.

Paper. Printing. Gunpowder. The magnetic compass. The four technologies that, more than any others, made the European Renaissance and the European voyages of conquest physically possible. All four were Chinese, the earliest by more than a thousand years.

Movable type printing was developed by Bi Sheng around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg. Cast iron was being produced in industrial quantities in China by the 5th century BCE — roughly seventeen hundred years before Europe managed it. The compass was being used for marine navigation off the Chinese coast by the 11th century, two hundred years before it appeared in the Mediterranean.

When a Chinese tech firm dominates a sector today and a Western press release calls it 'surprising', the surprise is the part that should be examined.

The decimal place-value system, the symbol for zero as a number, and the basic algorithms of arithmetic that the entire global economy runs on were developed in India between the 5th and 7th centuries by mathematicians including Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. They reached Europe through Arabic translations of Indian texts; 'Arabic numerals' is therefore a misnomer the Arabs themselves were happy to correct.

Indian metallurgists were producing wootz crucible steel — the basis of the Damascus blade — by the 6th century BCE. The Iron Pillar of Delhi has stood, essentially un-rusted, for sixteen hundred years; metallurgists still publish papers on it.

Cataract surgery, rhinoplasty, the suturing of wounds: the Sushruta Samhita (c. 6th century BCE) describes hundreds of surgical procedures. European surgeons reinvented several of them in the 18th and 19th centuries and named them after themselves.

Between roughly 750 and 1250 CE, the libraries of Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Damascus, Bukhara and Samarkand preserved, translated and extended the entire surviving corpus of Greek, Persian and Indian science. Without that labour, the European Renaissance has nothing to renaissance from. The Latin word 'cipher' comes from the Arabic ṣifr, meaning zero; the word 'chemistry' from al-kīmiyāʾ; the word 'admiral' from amīr al-baḥr.

Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 10th–11th c., Basra and Cairo) wrote the Book of Optics, in which he experimentally established that vision is light entering the eye, not rays emitted by it. He is the father of the scientific method as the West later codified it.

Al-Razi (Rhazes), al-Biruni, al-Tusi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Khaldun: the names that built the bridge from antiquity to modernity. Their absence from Western 'history of science' syllabi is not an accident of citation. It is a curatorial choice.

Pharaonic Egypt ran a complex literate state with surveying, advanced medicine, geometry, and continental trade routes while northern Europe was a forest. Kemetic medicine, including detailed papyri on diagnosis and pharmacology (Edwin Smith, Ebers, c. 1600 BCE), was studied by Greek physicians who acknowledged their teachers.

The Kingdom of Kush in present-day Sudan ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty in the 8th century BCE. The Meroitic script remains only partly deciphered. European Egyptology spent two centuries arguing that Egypt could not have been African; the argument continues, in softer language, on cable television.

The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez was founded in 859 CE by a Tunisian woman, Fatima al-Fihri. It still operates. Oxford traces its first teaching to 1096, Bologna to 1088. The University of Sankoré in Timbuktu, in the 14th–16th centuries, held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, jurisprudence and medicine.

Great Zimbabwe — the dry-stone capital of a southern African kingdom from the 11th to 15th centuries — was so impressive when European colonists encountered its ruins that they spent decades insisting Africans could not possibly have built it. Subsequent archaeology has been unambiguous.

The Mali empire of Mansa Musa was, by several measures, the wealthiest political entity in the world in the 14th century. His pilgrimage to Mecca destabilised the gold markets of the entire Mediterranean for a decade. He is rarely a name in Western general education.

Tenochtitlán, the Mexica capital at Spanish contact, had a population in the hundreds of thousands — larger than any European city of the period except possibly Paris and Constantinople. It was a planned city of causeways, aqueducts, public sanitation and floating agriculture. Cortés' own officers described it as more beautiful than anything in Spain. They destroyed it.

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy operated a federated representative system of government with checks on executive power, formal procedures for impeachment, and women's councils, centuries before the U.S. Constitution. Several of the U.S. founders — including Benjamin Franklin — explicitly studied it. It is rarely credited.

Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, vanilla, peanuts, chillies, beans, squash, sunflowers, manioc, quinoa, sweet potatoes, peppers, tobacco, rubber, pineapple, avocado: roughly 60% of the crops grown in the world today were domesticated by Native American agronomists over millennia. The Italian, Indian, Thai and Sichuanese cuisines that exist today are post-Columbian.

Andean civilisations performed successful skull surgery (trepanation) with survival rates that European surgeons would not match until the 20th century. They engineered terraced agriculture at altitudes Europeans considered uninhabitable. The Inca road network at its height ran 40,000 kilometres.

Polynesian navigators colonised an oceanic triangle the size of a continent, using stars, swells, bird flight and oral charts called rapa, while Europeans were still hugging the Mediterranean coast. Captain Cook's Tahitian navigator Tupaia drew a map of the South Pacific from memory that included islands Cook had not yet visited.

Indigenous Australians maintained the longest continuous civilisation on earth — at least 65,000 years — with complex land management practices, including controlled burning, that European settlers misread as 'wilderness' and proceeded to break. Settler Australia is, on multiple measures, currently relearning what it spent two centuries destroying.