Emperor Xiaowen builds the Shaolin Monastery for…

The Northern Wei Dynasty moves its capital from Datong to Luoyang in 494.

Emperor Xiaowen makes Chinese the official language of his court and orders his nobles to adopt Chinese names.

After this move, …

…work on the bas-reliefs and statues at Yungang’s Buddhist caves becomes intermittent.

Stone sculptures at Longmen, a complex of Buddhist cave temples ten miles (sixteen kilometers) south of Luoyang, in China’s Henan province, begin in 494.

An earthquake devastates the Syrian port town of Latakia in 494.

The Ostrogoths take Taranto and other southern Italian cities in 494.

Pope Gelasius I, after a long contest, changes the pagan Lupercalia festival into a Christian feast day.

Significantly, this festival of purification, which had given its name—dies februatus, from februare, "to purify"—to the month of February, is replaced with a Christian festival celebrating the purification of the Virgin Mary instead: Candlemas, observed forty days after Christmas, on February 2.

The Decretum Gelasianum (list of forbidden books) is attributed to Gelasius.

In 494, Gelasius writes a very influential letter, known as Duo sunt, to Emperor Anastasius on the topic of Church-State relations; its political impact will be felt for almost a millennium.

He also canonizes Saint George Pope Gelasius I gains support from Italian bishops in his assertion that the spiritual power of the papacy is superior to the emperor's temporal authority.

Like his predecessors, the pope opposes the efforts of Anastasius I to establish Miaphysite doctrine.

King Kavadh I denies Jews the right to organize their own militia, but Mar-Zutra II, who at the age of fifteen had become Exilarch of the Jewish community in Babylon, takes advantage of the confusion into which Mazdak's communistic attempts have plunged Persia and leads a successful military revolt that achieves political independence for the Jews of Mahoza in about 495.

Cerdic of Wessex and his son, Cynric, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle land somewhere on the south coast, probably near the Hampshire-Dorset border, with five ships.

He is said to have fought a Brythonic king named Natanleod at Netley Marsh in Hampshire.

Their followers will establish the beginnings of the Kingdom of Wessex.

The so-called Old Bering Sea tradition in coastal Alaska and Siberia, focused on seal and walrus hunting, gradually begins to give way to a tradition based on whale hunting.

The Uralic-speaking peoples living in the central and southern regions of the Urals had split up during the fourth millennium BCE.

Some had dispersed towards the west and northwest and came into contact with Iranian speakers who were spreading northwards.

The Ugrian speakers became distinguished from the rest of the Uralic community from at least 2000 BCE onward.

Judging by evidence from burial mounds and settlement sites, they interacted with the Andronovo Culture.

Furthermore, the type of Hungarians of the Conquest period shows related features to that of the Andronovo people.

In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, the Magyars moved to the west of the Ural Mountains to the area between the southern Ural Mountains and the Volga River known as Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) and Perm Krai.

The Magyars of northeastern Europe, have, by 500, mixed with various Turkish tribes and accepted their equestrian culture.