The world in 100 BC

Africa

Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy X Alexander, who had become co-ruler with his mother, Cleopatra III, in October 107 BC, when Ptolemy IX, the partner the people of Alexandria had forced on her in 116 BC, was driven out to Cyprus. Jona Lendering’s chronology on Livius.org has Ptolemy X invading Judaea in 103 BC and reaching Damascus, Cleopatra defeating Ptolemy IX near Pelusium on February 20, 102 BC, and Ptolemy X ordering her death on October 26, 101 BC, after which he ruled alone. In 100 BC his wife, Cleopatra Berenice III, accepted his young son as her own, and the boy, who was living on the island of Kos, was recognized as king. Up the Nile, Kush was in its Meroitic period, which Anne Austin, Brenda Baker and Tatjana Jovanović date to about 350 BC to AD 350; at Semna South, in the second cataract region, their multispectral survey found a woman of that period, aged 17 to 21, with bands of dots and lozenge-shaped dot tattoos on her right wrist and forearm.

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• Was Egypt's Last Pharaoh Really Egyptian?30 BC
• How Did a Royal Decree Revive a Script Dead for 1,400 Years?196 BC
• What Single Day's Battle Is Still Taught in Military Academies?216 BC

West Asia

Mithridates II of Parthia, whose reign Klaus Schippmann dates to about 124/3 to 88/7 BC in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, had beaten Hyspaosines of Characene, made Adiabene, Gordyene and Osrhoene his vassals and taken Dura-Europos in 113 BC; from about 109/8 BC he used the title “King of Kings.” Schippmann writes that an embassy from the Han emperor Wu reached him around 115 BC and that the two rulers agreed on opening the route later known as the Silk Road, and that in 96 BC a Parthian envoy named Orobazos met Sulla on the Euphrates and offered him the “friendship” and “alliance” of his master. In Anatolia, Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus had added the Crimea in 115/114 BC and Colchis in 104/103 BC while Rome was fighting Jugurtha in Numidia and then the Cimbri and Teutones, and in 101 BC he moved into Cappadocia and Galatia. Sulla, then a praetor, answered by placing Ariobarzanes I on the Cappadocian throne, which Lendering says Ariobarzanes would lose and regain at least six times.

Europe

Marius was 50 when he was elected consul for 107 BC, by the dating in the notes to the 1920 Loeb translation of Plutarch, who wrote that “contrary to law and custom he enlisted many a poor and insignificant man” in the legions. Voters returned him to office for 104 BC and each year after; in his fourth consulship, in 102 BC, he met the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae, a short march from the Alps, and in his fifth he and Catulus defeated the Cimbri in a battle fought in the summer heat. Of the sixth, in 100 BC, Plutarch wrote that “in this last consulship particularly did Marius make himself hated,” because he backed the tribune Saturninus, whose land law made senators swear to obey it; Metellus refused and was banished, and when the Senate and the knights turned on Saturninus, Marius drove his followers onto the Capitol and forced their surrender by cutting the water conduits. Suetonius has Julius Caesar dying “in the fifty-sixth year of his age,” which puts his birth in 100 BC, but the editor of the 1913 Loeb edition noted that “the arguments in favour of 102 are however very strong.”

East Asia

Emperor Wu of the Han, who reigned from 141 to 87 BC, sent Li Guangli west in 104 BC to take the horses of Ferghana, known in Chinese as Dayuan. In the account of Zhang Qian’s mission that Friedrich Hirth translated in 1917, the first army turned back after two years with only one or two in ten of its soldiers left, and a second force of 60,000 men left Dunhuang with 100,000 oxen and more than 30,000 horses; after a siege of more than 40 days, Ferghana gave up several dozen superior horses and more than 3,000 of lesser quality. The court’s Grand Historian, Sima Qian (145?–86? BC), was still writing the history his father, Sima Tan, had begun, and in a letter to his friend Ren An he described its 130 chapters as an attempt “to penetrate the changes of the past and present.” On the Korean peninsula, Columbia University’s timeline dates the Chinese commanderies in the north from about 108 BC to AD 313, and a southern federation called the Samhan from about 100 BC.

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South Asia

The Cleveland Museum of Art dates the Shunga period of northern India to 185–78 BC. Its molded terracotta figure of a man from the Chandraketugarh area of Bengal, made about 100 BC, wears a bulbous turban with finely incised textile patterns, a style the museum calls characteristic of the period. In Sri Lanka, Robin Coningham and his coauthors write, Anuradhapura had been laid out as a citadel of 100 hectares inside a rampart and moat by the fourth century BC; a ring of reservoirs was built around it from the fifth century BC to the first century AD, and very large stupas rose in its monasteries from the second century BC. News of India reached the Han court secondhand: Zhang Qian reported seeing bamboo and cloth from Sichuan in Bactria, which the Bactrians said they bought in Shon-tu, India, a low, hot and damp country whose people, he was told, rode elephants into battle.

• 'Carving done by the ivory-workers of Vedisa': who paid for Sanchi50 BC
• Bhir Mound, Sirkap, Sirsukh: John Marshall's three cities of Taxila170 BC
• 'A veritable Roman town': Arikamedu and the Arretine sherds of 1945AD 50

Central Asia

The Xiongnu controlled the eastern steppe from present-day Mongolia; Juhyeon Lee and colleagues date their empire from about 209 BC to its breakup in the late first century AD and note that it imported Roman glass and Greek silver. Zhang Qian’s account says that a Xiongnu envoy carrying a letter from the Shanyu received safe-conduct and provisions in every country from the Wusun to Parthia, while Han envoys had to pay, because the people there “were more afraid of the Hsiung-nu than of the Chinese ambassadors.” The Yuezhi, driven by the Xiongnu from their lands between Dunhuang and the Qilian hills, had gone west past Ferghana, conquered Bactria and set up their king’s court north of the Oxus; Schippmann places their appearance near the river between about 133 and 129 BC. South of the Oxus, Zhang Qian found that the Bactrians had no great king, only petty chiefs in each town, and a capital, Lan-shi, with markets for every kind of merchandise.

• Mithradatkert: the Parthian fortress at Old Nisa and its ivory rhyta200 BC
• A Tiberius aureus in tomb 3: the six graves of Tillya Tepe, 1978AD 25
• A Corinthian capital on the Oxus: the Greek city of Ai Khanoum250 BC

The Americas

In the Valley of Oaxaca, 100 BC is the line archaeologists draw between the Late Monte Albán I phase and Monte Albán II, which runs to AD 200; Sofía Pacheco-Forés and her coauthors write that the Zapotec capital kept extending its influence through both. On the south coast of Peru, a team led by Masato Sakai, which used AI to find 303 new figurative geoglyphs on the Nazca Pampa in six months, dates the start of geoglyph use to the first century BC at the latest, in an Initial Nasca period of 100 BC to AD 50. Other scholars place the change later: Charles Stanish, Henry Tantaleán and Kelly Knudson describe the Paracas culture as flourishing from the eighth to the third century BC and date the Nasca culture that followed it to about AD 100–700.

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Oceania

On the south coast of Papua New Guinea, intensive settlement with shell-impressed pottery began about 2,200 years ago, and its pottery and tools moved through an exchange sphere of about 700 kilometers, according to a 2025 study by Kathrin Nägele and colleagues of the ancient genomes of 42 people. The oldest individuals they sampled carry only Papuan-related ancestry, while those dated from 2,100 years ago on carry varying amounts of East Asian-related ancestry, centuries after the Lapita cultural complex reached the Bismarck Archipelago around 3,300 to 3,200 years ago. Nobody in Australia, New Guinea or the Pacific islands kept written records in this period, so its history rests on excavated pottery, dated burials and genomes.

• Three dark bands in a dune: Sigatoka's Levels 1, 2 and 3, dug in 1965200 BC
• Sand, reef and stick charts: settling the Marshall IslandsAD 1

Sources

• LacusCurtius, University of Chicago: Plutarch, "The Life of Marius" (Loeb Classical Library, 1920)
• LacusCurtius, University of Chicago: Suetonius, "The Life of Julius Caesar" (Loeb Classical Library, 1913)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Mithridates VI Eupator"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Ptolemy X Alexander"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Klaus Schippmann: "Arsacids ii. The Arsacid dynasty" (1986)
• Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington: "Selections from the Han Narrative Histories" (Zhang Qian's mission translated by Friedrich Hirth, 1917)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Excerpt from Sima Qian's Letter to Ren An" (from Sources of Chinese Tradition, 1999)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Korea: Timeline of Historical Periods"
• Cleveland Museum of Art: "Male Figure" (1992.116), India, Chandraketugarh area, about 100 BC
• World Archaeology via PubMed Central, Robin Coningham, Christopher Davis, Prishanta Gunawardhana and Mark Manuel: "From village to state, and back again: cycles of de-urbanization and adaptation in Early Historic and Medieval Sri Lanka" (2026)
• Science Advances 9(15) via PubMed Central, Juhyeon Lee et al.: "Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales" (2023)
• PNAS 122(51) via PubMed Central, Anne Austin, Brenda J. Baker and Tatjana M. Jovanović: "Revealing tattoo traditions in ancient Nubia through multispectral imaging" (2025)
• PLOS One via PubMed Central, Sofía I. Pacheco-Forés et al.: "Radiogenic strontium isotope variability in the Valley of Oaxaca" (2025)
• PNAS 121(40) via PubMed Central, Masato Sakai et al.: "AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose" (2024)
• PNAS 115(29) via PubMed Central, Charles Stanish, Henry Tantaleán and Kelly Knudson: "Feasting and the evolution of cooperative social organizations circa 2300 B.P. in Paracas culture, southern Peru" (2018)
• Nature Ecology & Evolution 9(6) via PubMed Central, Kathrin Nägele et al.: "The impact of human dispersals and local interactions on the genetic diversity of coastal Papua New Guinea over the past 2,500 years" (2025)