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Snapshot · 1100 BC

The world in 1100 BC

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TL;DR — Around 1100 BC Assyria’s Tiglath-pileser I was fighting Aramaeans, Theban tomb robbers faced inquests, and scholars still argue whether the Shang yet ruled China.

Tiglath-pileser I of Assyria claimed to have crossed the Euphrates 28 times in pursuit of the Aramaeans, and around 1100 BC he was also at war with Babylon. Egypt, in the last decades of the Ramesside kings, was holding court inquests into the plundering of royal tombs at Thebes and struggling to pay its necropolis workmen. In Greece the old citadels had become burial grounds, and in north China the Shang kings at Anyang were entering their final generations, though no one can fix the year the Zhou replaced them. Elsewhere the evidence is archaeological: a ballcourt closing in the highlands of Oaxaca, irrigated fields at an oasis near Kashgar, and a land tortoise in the southwest Pacific that the first island settlers would hunt out of existence.

Africa

Thebes was the scene of a long run of thefts from the royal dead. The Cleveland Museum of Art dates the 20th Dynasty to 1186–1069 BC, and the court records known as the tomb robbery papyri, most of them found in the temple of Medinet Habu, deal with thefts from Theban temples and tombs under Ramesses IX and Ramesses XI; in a 2021 study the radiologist Sahar Saleem and the archaeologist Zahi Hawass note that the thieves were often “members of the burial group” and were after the jewels and amulets inside the wrappings. The Turin Taxation Papyrus, from year 12 of Ramesses XI, records the necropolis scribe Dhutmose collecting grain owed to the state to cover the overdue wages of the necropolis workmen at Deir el-Medina, as the Egyptologist Sally Katary describes it. On the forecourt he added to the temple of Khonsu at Karnak, the high priest Herihor appears as king and is called “valiant fighter in the midst of his enemy, who has conquered myriads,” but K. A. Kitchen judged that, unless he had beaten off Libyan intruders, his only real fighting was probably against civil strife in Egypt or the dissident viceroy Panehsy.

West Asia

Assyria under Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 BC) faced enemies on two fronts. In the introduction to his inscriptions in the Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online project at the University of Pennsylvania, Nathan Morello notes that the Aramaeans are first named in this reign and that the king boasted of 28 crossings of the Euphrates against them, while a fragmentary chronicle suggests that on at least one occasion, during a famine, the Aramaeans overran the Assyrian heartland and its people fled into the mountains. From the south, the Babylonian king Marduk-nadin-ahhe (c. 1099–1082 BC) raided the Assyrian city of Ekallate and carried off the statues of the gods Adad and Shala, and Tiglath-pileser’s answering campaigns brought Babylon itself under his control. His scribes also gathered and copied lexical lists, omen texts and literary works, among them the collection known as the Middle Assyrian Laws.

Europe

Mycenae and the Acropolis of Athens had become burial grounds. Jeremy Rutter of Dartmouth College describes the late 12th and early 11th centuries BC in Greece as “a general decline from which Mycenaean culture did not recover,” with cist graves dug inside the citadel at Mycenae and on the Athenian Acropolis, and he dates the destruction of the twin shrines at Phylakopi on Melos and of the temple at Ayia Irini to about 1120 BC, possibly in an earthquake. Cremation now appeared in chamber tombs at Perati in eastern Attica and in the Submycenaean cist-grave cemetery of the Kerameikos in Athens. Painted pottery had just passed its last peak, which Rutter puts at about 1160/1140 to 1120/1100 BC; the Warrior Vase from Mycenae belongs to it, and its foot soldiers carry small shields and horned or crested helmets in place of the body shields and boar’s-tusk helmets of the palace age.

East Asia

Whether the Shang still ruled north China in 1100 BC depends on which date for their fall is accepted. The Western Han scholar Liu Xin, who died in AD 23, put the Zhou conquest in 1122 BC, and at least 44 dates between 1130 and 1018 BC have been proposed since. In a 2021 paper in the journal Radiocarbon, Kexin Liu and colleagues at Peking University dated oracle bones from each phase of Shang divination and found that the last phase ended around 1041 BC, which agrees with the 1046 BC date reached by Li Xueqin and his colleagues. On that count the kings at Yinxu, near Anyang, had about six decades left.

South Asia

Farmers in South India still grew the crops of the Neolithic. Eleanor Kingwell-Banham of University College London, writing in 2019, describes crop production there from about 2800 to 1000 BC as based on drought-tolerant millets and pulses along with wheat and barley; rice, a domestic crop in India since about 2500 BC, did not spread into the drier south until around 500 BC. In the north, Michael Witzel of Harvard places Vedic culture in the greater Punjab between about 1200 and 400 BC. In his reading of the texts composed after the Rigveda, the Indo-Aryan herders kept on the move with their cattle, while the villages and small market towns of the Painted Gray Ware culture belonged to the local post-Indus population.

Central Asia

The Kashgar Oasis today gets 71.4 millimeters of rain a year against close to 3,000 of evaporation, and its farms live on rivers fed from the mountains. At Wupaer, 50 kilometers southwest of Kashgar in the western Tarim Basin, Qingjiang Yang and colleagues found in a 2020 study that the first farmers, between 1500 and 1300 BC, grew only naked barley and compact wheat. After 1200 BC, following an apparent gap in occupation, farming was intensified through more elaborate irrigation, water-hungry legumes such as peas, and possibly more free-threshing wheat, and naked barley seems to drop out of the record. The team argues that these crops and the knowledge of irrigation reached the Tarim Basin through the mountains from southern Central Asia, and that better harvests may have fed the exchange later called the Silk Road.

The Americas

Etlatongo, in the highlands of Oaxaca, had the earliest known ballcourt in highland Mexico, built around 1374 BC, and in the decades before 1100 BC its use came to an end. Jeffrey Blomster and Víctor Salazar Chávez of George Washington University date the termination to between 1174 and 1102 BC, or 1261 to 1016 BC at a wider margin, marked by burned deposits up to a meter deep. On the Gulf Coast the published dates for San Lorenzo differ: Ivan Šprajc, Takeshi Inomata and Anthony Aveni put its heyday at 1400 to 1100 BC and describe its builders as relying heavily on the wild foods of the rivers and wetlands, while Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) says its population grew dramatically between 1200 and 850 BC alongside a growing interest in maize. At Aguada Fénix, further east, people were using pottery by about 1200 BC, but the Main Plateau, 1,400 meters long and 400 wide, was not begun until around 1050 BC.

Oceania

A hornless land tortoise, tentatively identified as Meiolania damelipi, lived on the islands from Vanuatu to Viti Levu in Fiji. Stuart Hawkins and colleagues, writing in 2016, found its bones, some with cut marks and butchery fractures, at seven early archaeological sites and date the remains to the first settlement of Vanuatu, between 3000 and 2700 BP, that is, about 1050 to 750 BC; the species then died out. A sediment core taken near the Teouma cemetery on Efate and analyzed by Giorgia Camperio and colleagues in 2024 puts the first unequivocal trace of people and taro growing at 2,800 years ago. A 2012 statistical study of Lapita dates by Tim Denham, Christopher Bronk Ramsey and Jim Specht has pottery-making settlers in Vanuatu and Fiji earlier, before 1100 BC, so whether anyone lived on Efate that year is not settled.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
Song Letter. (2026, September 29). The world in 1100 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1100-bc/
Chicago
Song Letter. “The world in 1100 BC.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1100-bc/.
MLA
Song Letter. “The world in 1100 BC.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1100-bc/.

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