The world in 1700 BC

Africa

Avaris, the harbor town at Tell el-Dab’a in the eastern Nile Delta, was filling with newcomers. Chris Stantis and six colleagues, writing in PLoS ONE in 2020, measured strontium isotopes in the tooth enamel of 75 people buried at the site and found that 40 of them, or 53%, had spent their childhood outside the Delta. The influx was already visible before the Hyksos kings, whose 15th Dynasty the authors date to about 1640-1530 BC, came to power, in the 12th and 13th Dynasties of about 1991-1649 BC. The team reads the results as evidence that the Hyksos rose by taking over from within, not by the invasion that the Ptolemaic priest Manetho described some twelve centuries later.

West Asia

Susa, in the lowlands of southwestern Iran, was in what Elizabeth Carter’s entry on Elamite archaeology in the Encyclopaedia Iranica calls the sukkalmah period, about 1900-1600 BC and named for its ruling dynasty. Early in the second millennium BC the city grew to an estimated 85 hectares, new towns and villages appeared all over the Susiana plain, and Anshan, in the highlands of Fars, grew as well. Anshan had a scribal school, but every document found there is written in the language and format usual in Mesopotamia, and no Elamite tablets of this period have yet come to light there. Hammurabi’s law stele, carved during a reign the Louvre dates to 1792-1750 BC, would later turn up at Susa: Carter lists it among finds from a building at Susa that also held the stele of Naram-Sin and trophies brought back from Mesopotamia by Middle Elamite kings, whose period she dates from about 1600 BC, and French excavators recovered the 225 cm basalt stone there in 1901-1902.

Europe

Knossos and Phaistos had come through a disaster a few decades earlier. Jeremy B. Rutter’s Aegean prehistory course at Dartmouth College marks the end of the Middle Minoan IIB phase at both palaces with a major destruction horizon, probably caused by an earthquake, and places the rebuilding of the palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and possibly Mallia, along with a new palace at Zakro, in the next phase, about 1750/1720 to 1700/1675 BC. At Mallia, the complex known as Quartier Mu, where clay tablets, medallions and sealings in Crete’s “Hieroglyphic” script were found, had been built and destroyed by fire during the preceding phase. From a fill of the new period in the east wing at Knossos come some two dozen faience plaques showing house fronts, known as the “Town Mosaic,” which probably decorated a wooden chest.

• A real godsend, and controversial: Evans's concrete at Knossos1700 BC
• 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
• A telegram to King George: Schliemann's gold at Mycenae, 18761550 BC

East Asia

A bronze wine-warming vessel of the type called jia, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dates from about 1700-1500 BC and probably comes from Henan province. The museum calls it the earliest Chinese bronze vessel in its collection and dates the Erlitou culture as a whole to about 1900-1500 BC. The type site at Yanshi was found in 1959 by archaeologists looking for remains of the Xia in the area where ancient texts placed them, and a 2021 review in Radiocarbon by Xuelian Zhang and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences notes that several hundred articles on whether it belonged to the Xia or the Shang had appeared by the mid-1990s without settling the question. The same review describes how radiocarbon wiggle-matching, used since the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project began in the mid-1990s, has gradually made the site’s dates clearer.

• Is Erlitou China's first dynasty, or a city no one can name?1700 BC

South Asia

Rice in northern India was still partway between a gathered plant and a crop. J. Bates, C. A. Petrie and R. N. Singh, in a 2017 study of three Indus settlements in the northwest of the country, found that domesticated-type rice spikelet bases became steadily more common, and wild types rarer, from before the urban phase through the Late Harappan period, which their table dates to 1900-1300 BC. The earliest firm evidence of fully domesticated rice in the region, from the site of Mahagara in the Ganges region, dates to about 1800-1600 BC, and the authors see it as the end of a long process. They also note that the fully domesticated japonica rice introduced around 2000 BC arrived in an area already familiar with the plant.

Central Asia

Horses on the steppe belonged to a new lineage. From 475 ancient horse genomes, Pablo Librado and colleagues, writing in Nature in 2024, found that breeders had taken control of the reproduction of the modern domestic line around 2200 BC, and that it then spread suddenly over Eurasia and replaced almost every local horse lineage. The same team found shortened generation times at Botai, a settlement in Central Asia, around 3500 BC, which they read as local horse husbandry well before the modern bloodlines existed.

The Americas

On the coast of the Atacama Desert, the Chinchorro culture was near the end of a tradition that had lasted about 4,000 years. Gonzalo M. Rojas-Costa and colleagues, writing in Scientific Reports in 2025, place the Chinchorro between 7,500 and 3,500 calibrated years before the present, from Ilo in southern Peru to Antofagasta in northern Chile, as hunters, gatherers and fishers who developed the earliest known techniques of artificial mummification. From about 4,000 years ago, they write, these coastal groups changed gradually through sustained contact with farmers in the inland valleys.

Oceania

Pottery had not yet reached the highlands of New Guinea, where four sites just north of the Lamari River valley had been lived in from about 4,000 years ago. Dylan Gaffney and colleagues, writing in PLoS ONE in 2015, traced the oldest securely dated pottery on the island to Wañelek, a ridge-top site 1,710 m above sea level in the Kaironk Valley, where the main occupation dates to about 3,000 years ago and one of the sherds they analyzed had been made on the northeast coast. Offshore in the Bismarck Archipelago, the decorated pottery known as Lapita appears by about 3,300 years ago, still centuries after 1700 BC.

Sources

• Chris Stantis, Arwa Kharobi, Nina Maaranen, Geoff M. Nowell, Manfred Bietak, Silvia Prell and Holger Schutkowski, "Who were the Hyksos? Challenging traditional narratives using strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) analysis of human remains from ancient Egypt," PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235414 (2020), full text at PubMed Central
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Elam ii. The archaeology of Elam (Elizabeth Carter)
• Musée du Louvre, collections database: Code de Hammurabi (SB 8)
• Dartmouth College, Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology: Lesson 10, Narrative (Jeremy B. Rutter)
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Wine Vessel (Jia), Erlitou culture (1989.150), open-access collection record
• Xuelian Zhang, Shihua Qiu, Lianzhen Cai, Hong Xu, Haitao Zhao and Guoliang Chen, "14C dating of the Erlitou site," Radiocarbon 64(4): 819-832 (2022), abstract at Cambridge Core
• J. Bates, C. A. Petrie and R. N. Singh, "Approaching rice domestication in South Asia: New evidence from Indus settlements in northern India," Journal of Archaeological Science 78: 193-201 (2017), full text at PubMed Central
• Pablo Librado et al., "Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2200 BCE in Eurasia," Nature 631: 819-825 (2024), full text at PubMed Central
• Gonzalo M. Rojas-Costa et al., "Intracranial volume variation in Chinchorro mummies: a comparative study with pre-hispanic farmers and contemporary Chilean populations," Scientific Reports 15: 41301 (2025), full text at PubMed Central
• Dylan Gaffney, Glenn R. Summerhayes, Anne Ford, James M. Scott, Tim Denham, Judith Field and William R. Dickinson, "Earliest pottery on New Guinea mainland reveals Austronesian influences in highland environments 3000 years ago," PLoS ONE 10(9): e0134497 (2015), full text at PubMed Central