Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1300 BC

The world in 1300 BC

Edited by Song Letter · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

Published

TL;DR — Around 1300 BC Egypt was ruled by kings from outside the royal line, a ship full of tin had sunk off Anatolia, and Belize’s fishers worked dug channels.

A merchant ship carrying copper from Cyprus and tin from as far away as Central Asia went down off the southern coast of Anatolia some two decades before 1300 BC, and its cargo shows how far Bronze Age metal could travel. Egypt was governed by one of a run of kings who had not been born royal, and the family of Ramesses I was about to take the throne. At Mycenae, a potters’ workshop had been brought down by an earthquake a few decades earlier, while in Denmark some families were already burning their dead rather than burying them. In Japan, rice farming had most likely not yet arrived, and in the wetlands of Belize, people who made no pottery were fishing from a network of dug channels.

Africa

The kings who held Egypt in these years were not born to the throne. Colleen Manassa Darnell, writing in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, groups Aye, Horemheb and Ramesses I as rulers from non-royal families, credits Horemheb with about 15 years of rule (a reign closer to three decades has also been proposed) and gives Ramesses I less than two full years. The Cleveland Museum of Art dates the reign of his son Sety I to about 1294 to 1279 BC, which on that reckoning places 1300 BC late in the reign of Horemheb. Sety I went on to fight the land of Irem, most likely southwest of Lower Nubia, and paid for his building program with gold from stepped-up mining in the Eastern Desert.

West Asia

Off Uluburun, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, a merchant ship sank around 1320 BC, with a radiocarbon margin of 15 years either way. Wayne Powell and colleagues, writing in Science Advances in 2022, describe a hold carrying 10 metric tons of Cypriot copper ingots and about one metric ton of tin, the largest and most securely dated collection of ancient tin known, and they trace two-thirds of that tin to the Taurus Mountains of Turkey. On land, the Hittites had replaced Mitanni as Egypt’s chief rival in Syria-Palestine; Manassa Darnell’s article records that Sety I would later take Amurru and Kadesh and fight a Hittite force at a place his Karnak reliefs leave unnamed.

Europe

Petsas House, a craft-producing household at Mycenae that worked outside the palace economy, where stacked vessels point to pottery making and storage, had been wrecked by an earthquake in the later part of the Late Helladic IIIA2 phase. Jacqueline Meier and colleagues, in PLoS ONE in 2023, date that phase to 1390/70 to 1330/15 BC and describe walls shifted off their foundations, with debris and household rubbish later cleared into a well that excavators dug to more than 12 meters below the surface. Far to the north, the Danish chronology set out in a 2021 strontium isotope study draws the line between Periods II and III of the Nordic Bronze Age at 1300 BC. The study reports that cremation already accounts for about 10% of the Period II burials recorded in Thisted County in northwest Jutland, and it finds no one-to-one link between the new rite and people moving in from elsewhere.

East Asia

Shang rule in north China had not yet, on one reckoning, moved to Anyang. A 2020 study of Anyang bronzes led by Ruiliang Liu of Oxford dates the Shang dynasty as a whole to about 1600 to 1045 BC and the city’s time as its last capital to about 1250 to 1045 BC. The Japanese islands belonged to Jomon hunter-gatherers, who by the time farming arrived were taking a broad range of land and water animals and managing plants such as soybean, adzuki bean and chestnut. A synthesis of radiocarbon dates on carbonized rice grains, cited by Oliver Craig and colleagues in PNAS in 2025, puts the arrival of rice in northern Kyushu at 1251 to 872 BC at the earliest, on a 90% probability range, so the crop had most likely not yet reached Japan.

South Asia

Inamgaon, a Chalcolithic settlement near Pune in Maharashtra, was in what archaeologists call its Early Jorwe phase, dated to 1400 to 1000 BC. The site was excavated from 1968 to 1983 by Deccan College in Pune, and a 2022 dataset led by researchers there sets out tooth isotope readings from people buried there across that phase and the ones before and after it. Farther south, charred horsegram seeds from Sanganakallu dated to 1400 to 1250 BC have seed coats of what Charlene Murphy and Dorian Fuller of University College London call a “semi-thin” grade, a step between the wild and fully domesticated forms of this pulse in their 2017 synchrotron scans.

Central Asia

Tin from the mountains of Central Asia was already reaching the Mediterranean. Powell’s team matched one-third of the Uluburun tin ingots to ores in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the ancient workings at Mušiston in Tajikistan and Karnab in Uzbekistan have yielded only small settlements with coarse, incised pottery like that of the herders and farmers of the steppe and its mountain fringe. Northeast of those mines, at Tasbas in the Zhetysu region of southeastern Kazakhstan, a 2025 pottery study by Paula Doumani Dupuy and colleagues dates the Late Semirech’ye layers to 1436 to 806 BC. The same study reports that by the Late Bronze Age, people at Tasbas were growing several crops locally, and that mudbrick was coming into use in the region for cooking installations, house floors and ritual buildings.

The Americas

Crooked Tree, the largest inland wetland in Belize, is crossed by 167 mapped linear features, 107.7 km in total, spread over about 41.8 square kilometers. Eleanor Harrison-Buck and colleagues, writing in Science Advances in 2024, identify them as fish traps begun by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers perhaps as early as 2000 BC, and one canal wall yielded sediment dated to 1290 to 1050 BC. The earliest settled villages found elsewhere in Belize date to about 1200 to 1100 BC, so in 1300 BC the channels belonged, as far as the dated evidence shows, to people who did not yet live in pottery-using villages.

Oceania

Efate, in what is now Vanuatu, may not yet have had any human settlers. A sediment core taken near Teouma, the oldest cemetery in Remote Oceania, and dated with 40 radiocarbon samples, shows the first unequivocal traces of people and of taro growing only at 2800 years ago, according to G. Camperio and colleagues in Communications Earth & Environment in 2024. The same core records the island’s climate turning wetter in steps from about 3600 years ago, and the authors note that the timing of the first settlement of Remote Oceania remains debated.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
Song Letter. (2026, September 29). The world in 1300 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1300-bc/
Chicago
Song Letter. “The world in 1300 BC.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1300-bc/.
MLA
Song Letter. “The world in 1300 BC.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1300-bc/.

Get the week in history

One email a week: the new articles, and what was happening elsewhere at the same moment. Free, no ads, unsubscribe any time. How we handle your email.

Text licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Found an error? Tell us.