The world in 1500 BC

Africa

Egypt had been reunified only a few generations earlier. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the Theban king Ahmose I, who drove the Hyksos rulers out of the Nile Delta and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty, to about 1550 to 1525 BC. By 1500 BC his successors governed a single kingdom from the Delta to the First Cataract, with Thebes as the religious center and the temple of Amun at Karnak enlarged by each new king. Within a generation, Thutmose III would take the throne; Livius.org gives his reign as 1479 to 1425 BC and describes the campaigns he later led into Syria, where Egyptian chariots fought the kingdom of Mitanni for control of towns on the Euphrates.

West Asia

Mesopotamia had no single ruler. Babylonia itself was still divided: the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates the incorporation of the rival Sealand dynasty, based at Ur, Uruk and Larsa, into the Kassite kingdom of the north to about 1465 BC, meaning that at 1500 BC the two still stood apart. To the west, in Syria, the kingdom of Mitanni had grown strong under a king named Parrattarna, who according to Livius.org controlled the city of Aleppo around 1500 BC; the location of Mitanni’s own capital, Waššukanni, has never been identified, and most of what is known about the kingdom comes from the records of its neighbors rather than its own. A century earlier, in 1595 BC, a Hittite army under Mursili I had sacked Babylon and withdrawn, and Livius.org treats that raid as the opening that let both Mitanni and the Kassites expand into the vacuum it left behind.

Europe

On Crete, the palaces of the Neopalatial period were still standing at 1500 BC. Livius.org marks the eruption of the Thera volcano as the traditional boundary between Crete’s Old and New Palace periods, though the date of that eruption is disputed. A lesson from Dartmouth College’s Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology course sets out the competing chronologies: the town of Akrotiri on Thera, which the eruption buried in ash, may have been struck by an earlier earthquake around 1650 or 1560 BC and then buried by the eruption itself around 1625 or 1550 to 1540 BC, while the wave of destructions that actually ended the Neopalatial period on Crete cannot be dated earlier than about 1480 to 1470 BC. The Dartmouth lesson argues the two events are separate rather than cause and effect, since ash from the eruption has turned up in Cretan and island layers that predate those later destructions. By either chronology, the palace at Knossos was occupied in 1500 BC and would not be destroyed for several more decades.

• Akrotiri: a town under the ash of Thera, and a date no one agrees on1600 BC
• Dug up July 4, 1999, seized in Basel in 2002: the Nebra Sky Disc1600 BC

East Asia

In China, the Shang dynasty controlled a stretch of the north and north-central plain. The Metropolitan Museum’s chronology dates the Shang dynasty to about 1600 to 1046 BC and names Zhengzhou, not yet Anyang, as a major Shang center in this earlier period; Anyang would not become the Shang capital until about 1300 BC. At sites like Zhengzhou, Shang workshops cast ritual bronze vessels using multiple ceramic piece-molds, a casting method the Met’s chronology credits to this dynasty and links to vessels used in ancestor rites that tied the living king to his forebears. A few hundred kilometers to the west, the walled site of Erlitou in Henan, which some archaeologists identify with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty and others treat only as an unnamed early state, had been occupied since about 1900 BC and was, on the dates given for the site, approaching the end of its roughly four-century life around 1500 BC, as Shang power consolidated on the plain around it.

South Asia

In north India, the cities of the Indus Valley civilization had already been empty for centuries; the Metropolitan Museum’s chronology places the breakdown of that urban culture into smaller, localized groups from about 1900 BC, in what is termed the Late Harappan period. Into this landscape, by the Met’s own dating, came migrants from the northwest speaking an Indo-European language; Livius.org’s article on the Aryan migrations describes this same broader movement splitting, somewhere in what is now Uzbekistan, into one group that went on to the Punjab and another that turned toward Iran. The Met’s chronology gives 1500 BC as the point when the hymns later collected as the Vedas, composed in Sanskrit and passed down orally by Brahmin priests, began to be composed, the earliest evidence for the language and religious tradition later associated with Hinduism. In central India and the Deccan farther south, the Met’s chronology also records villages using stone and copper tools dated to about the middle of the second millennium BC.

Central Asia

In Bactria, in what is now northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan, the walled towns of the Bronze Age culture archaeologists call the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex had already gone. Livius.org dates that culture to about 2200 to 1700 BC and gives an environmental cause for its end: as farmers dug canals to irrigate land at the foot of the mountains, the water table dropped and desert spread into the zone they had settled, breaking the region into separate strips of mountain, irrigated foothill, desert and river. By 1500 BC, this part of Central Asia was past its Bronze Age high point. This was also the era in which Livius.org’s article on the Aryan migrations places groups moving south out of Central Asia, splitting near what is now Uzbekistan into a branch that continued into the Punjab and one that turned toward the Iranian plateau.

The Americas

On the Gulf Coast of Mexico, San Lorenzo was an established center. The Metropolitan Museum’s essay on Olmec art places the construction of monumental earthen platforms and mounds at San Lorenzo within the Early Formative period, which it dates to about 1800 to 1200 BC, and credits the carved basalt colossal heads found there as the earliest evidence of dynastic rulers anywhere in Mesoamerica, a span that includes 1500 BC. Far to the north, in what is now Louisiana, hunter-gatherers who grew no crops were partway through building the concentric earthworks at Poverty Point: a Louisiana Division of Archaeology booklet dates the site’s Late Archaic mound-building to between 1700 and 1100 BC, with its largest earthwork, Mound A, still a century or two away, around 1300 to 1350 BC.

• Nearly 2 million cubic yards by the basketful: Poverty Point, 1700 BC1500 BC

Oceania

In the western Pacific, a small group of voyagers had just made one of the longest ocean crossings attempted anywhere up to that time. A 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drawing on ancient DNA from two skeletons found at Ritidian Beach Cave on Guam, states that reaching the Mariana Islands required crossing more than 2,000 km of open ocean, and that the genetic evidence points to ancestors from the Philippines rather than from New Guinea or the islands of eastern Indonesia, the routes favored by earlier sailing simulations. The archaeologist Mike T. Carson has dated the earliest settlement layers at Ritidian and at the Bapot-1 site on Saipan to about 1500 BC. A 2025 study in Science Advances, examining the same Ritidian pottery, found rice phytoliths dated to 3,500 to 3,100 years ago, evidence the researchers read as ritual rather than everyday food use. Farther southwest, in the Bismarck Archipelago and the islands beyond it, the culture archaeologists call Lapita was just beginning its spread; the Metropolitan Museum’s chronology dates the start of this eastward expansion to about 1500 BC as well, a movement that would not reach Tonga and Samoa for another five hundred years. On the Mussau Islands north of New Guinea, Lapita communities would later build the stilt village at Talepakemalai over a lagoon, though that settlement itself dates from centuries after 1500 BC.

• More than 2,000 km of open sea: the Mariana Islands, about 1500 BC1500 BC

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Egypt in the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 B.C.), by Catharine H. Roehrig
• Livius.org: Mitanni (Jona Lendering)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Kassites
• Livius.org: Thera
• Dartmouth College, Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology: Lesson 17, Narrative (Jeremy B. Rutter)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: China, 2000–1000 B.C.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: South Asia, 2000–1000 B.C.
• Livius.org: Aryans (Jona Lendering)
• Livius.org: Bactria
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Olmec Art
• Louisiana Division of Archaeology, "Poverty Point," Discover Archaeology education series (content adviser Diana Greenlee, 2014). Read via Wayback Machine snapshot; live site blocks automated access.
• Pugach, Hubner, Hung, Meyer, Carson and Stoneking, "Ancient DNA from Guam and the peopling of the Pacific," PNAS 118(1): e2022112118 (2021), full text at PubMed Central
• Mike T. Carson, "Peopling of Oceania: Clarifying an initial settlement horizon in the Mariana Islands at 1500 BC," Radiocarbon 62(6): 1733-1754 (2020), abstract at Cambridge Core
• Carson, Wang, Huan, Dong, Hung and Deng, "Earliest evidence of rice cultivation in Remote Oceania: Ritual use by the first islanders in the Marianas 3500 years ago," Science Advances 11(26): eadw3591 (2025), full text at PubMed Central
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Lapita Pottery (ca. 1500-500 B.C.), by Jennifer Wagelie