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Snapshot · 1400 BC

The world in 1400 BC

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TL;DR — Around 1400 BC Egypt changed kings, Mycenaean Greeks held Knossos, Elamite kings ruled from Susa, and farming villages were taking root beside Lake Titicaca.

Egypt passed from Amenhotep II to Thutmose IV at about 1400 BC, on the reign dates one American museum uses. On Crete the palace at Knossos was run by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland, where the first palaces were only beginning to appear. In southwestern Iran a line of Elamite kings styled themselves rulers of Susa and Anzan, and one of them left his seal on a tablet naming a Kassite king of Babylon. Shang bronze workers at Zhengzhou fired their clay molds at very low heat, herders in Mongolia kept two burial traditions side by side, and on the shores of Lake Titicaca the first food-producing villages were forming.

Africa

Egypt’s throne changed hands at almost exactly 1400 BC on the dates the Cleveland Museum of Art uses, which give Amenhotep II a reign of 1425 to 1400 BC and Thutmose IV (Tuthmosis, in the museum’s spelling) 1400 to 1390 BC. The museum’s own labels shift these figures by a year or two, and it dates a small gray granite head of a man, perhaps from a pair statue, only to the span of the two reigns, 1401 to 1391 BC. From the reign of Amenhotep II it also holds a boxwood paint box that belonged to the vizier Amenemope, its inscription inlaid in Egyptian blue, with five pots of color that conservators found by X-ray diffraction to be made of different minerals.

West Asia

Susa and the lowlands of southwestern Iran were in the hands of rulers known as the Kidinuids, whom François Vallat, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, dates to about 1500 to 1400 BC. He doubts that “dynasty” is the right word for them, since nothing shows that the five rulers were related and even their order is uncertain; two of them, Kidinu and Tepti-ahar, called themselves “king of Susa and of Anzan.” Tepti-ahar is the king believed to have built the temple and tomb complex at Haft Tepe, about 10 km southeast of Susa, where the Iranica’s article on the site reports a clay tablet naming the Kassite king Kadashman-Enlil I and stamped with Tepti-ahar’s seal. That makes the two kings contemporaries, and Kadashman-Enlil I reigned before Burnaburiash III, whose rule began around 1375 BC.

Europe

Knossos, on Crete, was held by Mycenaeans. Jeremy B. Rutter’s online course in Aegean prehistory at Dartmouth College dates their phase there to about 1490/1470 to 1385/1375 BC, ending when the palace burned, and notes that specialists disagree over whether the Knossos tablets in Linear B, an early form of Greek, belong to this phase or mostly to the 13th century BC. On the mainland, the same course dates the earliest excavated palatial building, at the Menelaion in Laconia, to about 1450 to 1400 BC and says the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes need be no earlier than about 1400 to 1340 BC. In Denmark, a girl of about 16 to 18 was laid in an oak coffin near Egtved roughly 3,400 years ago, a date set by tree rings, and a 2015 study led by Karin Margarita Frei found that she came from outside present-day Denmark (or from the island of Bornholm), traveled long distances in her last months and wore garments of wool made elsewhere.

East Asia

Bronze casting at Zhengzhou, a capital of the early Shang dynasty in north-central China, relied on clay molds fired at what one study calls extremely low temperatures. Bichen Yan and colleagues, in Scientific Reports in 2021, tested 10 molds and four cores from the Nanguanwai foundry, dated to the 16th to 14th centuries BC, with a new infrared method. Seven of the molds had been fired at only 200 to 300 °C and the other three at 300 to 400 °C, while three of the four cores reached 500 to 600 °C.

South Asia

Across the northwest, the Late Harappan phase that followed the Indus cities, dated in Gregory Possehl’s scheme to 1900 to 1300 BC, was nearing its end. J. Bates, C. A. Petrie and R. N. Singh, writing in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2017, studied rice spikelet bases from Indus village sites in Haryana and found the share of domesticated types rising steadily from before the urban phase, through the Late Harappan period and into the Painted Grey Ware period that came after it. The weeds found with the rice mix wetland and dryland species, with no rise in wetland plants over time. One of the villages, Bahola in Karnal district, covered 1 to 2 hectares and was occupied from Late Harappan times into the Painted Grey Ware period.

Central Asia

Herders in Mongolia buried their dead in two separate ways. A 2025 genetic study in Nature Communications by Juhyeon Lee and colleagues dates the Late Bronze Age there to about 1500 to 1000 BC, when figure-shaped graves (about 1450 to 1000 BC) were concentrated in the east and south while mounded burials and deer stones marked the west, north and center. In central Mongolia, where the two met, the 30 people whose remains the team analyzed fell into two genetically distinct groups that matched their burial types. Farther southwest, in the Bortala Valley of Xinjiang’s Tianshan mountains, a 2020 study led by Peter Jia puts the peak of Bronze Age settlement by pastoralists of the Andronovo cultural complex at about 3,900 to 3,400 years ago.

The Americas

High in the Andes, the shores of Lake Titicaca were entering what archaeologists call the Formative Period, which Melanie J. Miller and colleagues, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021, start at 1400 BC, when food-producing societies emerged in the basin. Their isotope study of human bones from Chiripa and neighboring sites on the southern shore found that people ate mostly quinoa, tubers and the meat of domestic camelids such as llamas. Fish bones are abundant at every site they studied, yet fish supplied surprisingly little of the protein people ate.

Oceania

Dingoes were already in the far south of the Australian mainland at about this time, or soon after. Jane Balme, Sue O’Connor and Stewart Fallon, in Scientific Reports in 2018, dated a dingo bone from Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain to between 3,348 and 3,081 years ago, the oldest firm date for the animal in Australia. No land bridge joined Australia to Southeast Asia, so the authors consider it unlikely that dingoes arrived without people, and since they must have entered from the north, the team suggests they spread across the mainland very rapidly.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
Song Letter. (2026, September 29). The world in 1400 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1400-bc/
Chicago
Song Letter. “The world in 1400 BC.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1400-bc/.
MLA
Song Letter. “The world in 1400 BC.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1400-bc/.

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