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Egypt’s populace abandons Thebes for a new capital at Tell el-Amarna during the brief Egyptian experiment with monotheism.

A concurrent decline in the empire is reversed with the establishment of the Nineteenth dynasty; which establishes a new royal capital at Per-Ramesse ("the house of Ramesses") in the Nile's eastern delta.

Egyptian women of the Nineteenth Dynasty period have a number of legal rights: they may own property and request divorce.

Although barred from holding government office, a woman may fill in for her husband in his absence.

A woman can earn her own living by managing a farm, weaving or dancing.

Mycenaean civilization reaches its height; Mycenae may at this time be the capital of an empire controlling the whole Aegean region.

In Canaan, Hazor reaches its peak with the construction of several temples some containing unusual cult objects and furnished with such objects as Mycenaean pottery, Egyptian scarabs, jewelry, and statuettes.

The earliest historical reference to prostitution in China dates from the Zhou dynasty, by which time it is already a well-established institution.

Callisthenes, held shortly afterward to be privy to a conspiracy against Alexander among the royal pages, is thrown into prison, where he dies in 327; resentment of this action alienates sympathy from Alexander within the Peripatetic school of philosophers, with which Callisthenes, as the nephew of Aristotle, has close connections.

His death is commemorated by his friend Theophrastus in Callisthenes, or a Treatise on Grief.

Alexander leaves Bactria in early summer with a reinforced army under a reorganized command.

If Plutarch's figure of one hundred and twenty thousand men has any reality, however, it must include all kinds of auxiliary services, together with muleteers, camel drivers, medical corps, peddlers, entertainers, women, and children; the fighting strength perhaps stands at about thirty-five thousand.

A Jewish diaspora grows, as cities like Alexandria, the Ptolemid capital, begin to acquire a substantial Jewish population.

Hellenistic Jews at Alexandria produce the Septuagint, the first version of the Hebrew Bible in Greek, the lingua franca throughout the region. (The name Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, “seventy”, is a later derivation from the legend that there were seventy-two translators, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, who worked in separate cells, translating the whole, and ultimately all their versions were identical. There are in fact large differences in style and usage between the Septuagint's translation of the Torah and its translations of the later books in the Old Testament. A tradition that translators were sent to Alexandria by Eleazar, the chief priest at Jerusalem, at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, a patron of literature, first appeared in the Letter of Aristeas, an unreliable source.)

Analysis of the language has established that the Torah, or Pentateuch, was translated near the middle of the third century BCE and that the rest of the Old Testament was translated in the second century BCE.

Ptolemy II extends Alexandria, which is rapidly becoming the literary and scientific center of the Hellenistic world, and wins renown as a great patron of the arts and sciences.

Zenon, the confidential business manager of Philadelphus' chief minister, is in 259 sent to Palestine and Syria, where his master has commercial interests.

His letters speak particularly of a trade in slaves, especially of young girls for prostitution, in whom there appears to have been a brisk trade, with export to Egypt.

Zenon's records also testify to a considerable trade in cereals, oil and wine.

Prostitutes, long licensed by the Roman Empire and duly taxed, suffer excommunication by the Christian church in 305, on moral grounds.

Despite the religious ban, the well-established institution will continue to flourish and provide an important source of tax revenue to the imperial state.

Diocletian, having saved the empire from disintegration by establishing strong central control and a bureaucracy, abolishing the last Roman republican institutions, has aged prematurely through illness.

Of his own volition, he decides to entrust the affairs of the empire to younger men and returns first to Nicomedia, where he abdicates on May 1, 305.

Perhaps he has decided that, after twenty years of reign, his abdication is also “fateful.”

Sultan Mahmud appoints Malik Ayaz to the throne of Lahore in 1021 and makes the city the capital of the Ghaznavid Empire.

As the first Muslim governor of Lahore, Ayaz begins rebuilding and repopulating the city.

Institutionalized prostitution has been extant in India since classical Hindu times—lay prostitutes are a recognized caste.

As the Koran forbids prostitution, the Muslim invasions of India result in official pronouncements against both secular and sacred prostitution.

Actual practices under Muslim rule, however, do little to discourage it; temple prostitution, in which girls are dedicated to a deity, continues.

The first royal judicial body established in New Spain in 1527 is the audiencia of Mexico City.

The audiencia consists of four judges, who also hold executive and legislative powers.

The crown, however, is aware of the need to create a post that will carry the weight of royal authority beyond local allegiances.

Control of the bureaucracy is handed over in 1535 to Antonio de Mendoza, who is named the first viceroy of New Spain (1535-50).

His duties are extensive but exclude judicial matters entrusted to the audiencia.

The conquest of the Aztec empire had required an enormous effort and a tremendous sacrifice by Cortes's army, and after their victory, the soldiers had demanded what they have come for: prestige and wealth.

The spoils from the city largely had been lost; Cortes has to resort to some other strategy to provide for his men.

The conquistador has already surveyed all Aztec records related to tributes and tributary towns, and on the basis of this information, he decides to distribute grants of people and land among his men.

This practice has already been tried in the Caribbean, and Cortes himself had received encomiendas, grants of land and people, in Hispaniola in 1509 and in Cuba in 1511.

Granting encomiendas become an institutions throughout New Spain to ensure subordination of the conquered pop-ulations and the use of their labor by the Spanish colonizers, as well as a means to reward Spanish subjects for services rendered to the crown.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain reaches from New Mexico to Panama by the end of the seventeenth century and includes the Caribbean islands and the Philippines.

Local audiencias enjoy greater autonomy in the most distant areas, and viceregal authority is merely nominal.

After the sixteenth-century expansion of power, the seventeenth century has been marked by a decline in central authority, even though the administrative structure transplanted to the New World remains intact.