Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1900 BC

The world in 1900 BC

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

Published

TL;DR — In 1900 BC Amenemhat II ruled Egypt, silkworm cocoons were left at a Bronze Age site in Uzbekistan, and Georgia’s last shell ring village was near its end.

Some of the oldest silkworm cocoons ever found come from a Bronze Age site north of the Amu Darya, and one of them has been radiocarbon dated to a span that takes in 1900 BC. Egypt was in its Twelfth Dynasty, rival dynasties at Isin and Larsa shared southern Mesopotamia, and Hammurabi’s reign at Babylon lay about a century ahead on the most widely used chronology. In southeastern Spain the El Argar culture built hilltop towns and placed its tombs beneath them. A grain domesticated in West Africa was growing in South Asia, fishers on a Japanese peninsula were eating more from the sea, and on an island off Georgia only one shell ring village remained in use.

Africa

Amenemhat II held Egypt’s throne in 1900 BC, in a reign that the Cleveland Museum of Art dates to 1929-1895 BC. From Meir comes the museum’s coffin of a man named Senbi, dated to about 1918-1859 BC, between the reigns of Amenemhat II and Senusret III: a rectangular box of gessoed and painted cedar, the most common coffin shape of the Middle Kingdom. Senbi was laid on his left side facing east, behind a pair of painted eyes given a falcon’s markings so that, in the museum’s words, he could “behold the rising sun, reborn daily,” and the long bands of inscription ask for food, drink and other things needed in the afterlife.

West Asia

Two dynasties, based at Isin and at Larsa, divided the power of southern Mesopotamia. Jona Lendering’s survey of Mesopotamian chronology on Livius.org describes them as contemporaries, both strong before Hammurabi united the region, and notes that king lists survive for each. Babylon had grown in importance after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, when Amorites moved into the area, but the remains of its oldest city lie below the groundwater of the Euphrates and cannot be recovered. Lendering’s comparative table places the first year of Sumuabum, the earliest Babylonian reign it lists, in 1894 BC on the Middle Chronology, 1950 BC on the High, 1830 BC on the Low and 1798 BC on the ultra-low.

Europe

Hilltop towns of up to 5 hectares were spreading across southeastern Iberia. The El Argar culture, dated from about 2200 to 1550 BC by Vanessa Villalba-Mouco of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues writing in Scientific Reports, grew from the coastal lowlands into the inland highlands until it covered about 35,000 square kilometers, with public buildings, water supply structures and large-scale cereal storage. At La Almoloya in Murcia, where the local phase running from 2000 to 1750 BC was under way, the dead were buried in single and double tombs placed under the settled areas. Ancient DNA from 68 people buried there led the team to conclude that Argaric society was patrilineal, with women moving between groups at marriage and paternal family trees reaching five generations.

East Asia

Along the Atsumi Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Late Jomon period were adding to shell mounds. Soichiro Kusaka and Yasuhiro Yamada, writing in Anthropological Science, date that period to 4490-3220 calibrated years before the present, and describe the Kawaji shell mound at the tip of the peninsula, where excavators found eight Late Jomon dwelling sites, stone weights for net fishing and a shell layer up to 45 centimeters thick, rich in littleneck clams, hard clams and oysters. Isotopes in human bone from the site showed that people there relied more on marine food during the Late Jomon, a dependence that fell again in the following Yayoi period.

South Asia

Pearl millet, a grain that genetic studies trace to the western Sahel of Africa by 2800 BC, had reached South Asia. Carolina Jiménez-Arteaga, Marco Madella and colleagues, writing in Scientific Reports in 2025, note that securely dated finds of the crop there appear around 1900 BC and that it is documented in Gujarat by at least 1700 BC and possibly 2000 BC, perhaps after arriving by sea through intermediaries in Arabia. Their own direct radiocarbon dates on two grains from Bhando Qubo, in Sindh in the lower Indus Valley, came out at 2578-2358 and 2576-2356 BC, as early as the oldest evidence for domesticated pearl millet in Africa.

Central Asia

Three silkworm cocoons turned up in flotation samples from Sapalli Tepe, a site of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex about 8 kilometers from the northern bank of the Amu Darya in southern Uzbekistan. Writing in Science Advances in 2026, Xinying Zhou, Hui Shen and colleagues identified them as the domestic silkworm Bombyx mori and directly dated one to 1940-1765 BC, within an occupation of the site they place between 2140 and 1800 BC; the same work produced the earliest mulberry charcoal yet reported from Central Asia. The authors argue that silk production in the Oxus region began nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously documented, and suggest the silkworms and mulberry trees may have come along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, while allowing that other routes could explain the pattern.

The Americas

On Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, only one of three circular shell rings was still lived in. Carey J. Garland of the University of Georgia and colleagues, writing in PLoS One in 2022, describe such rings as the remains of some of the earliest villages on the South Atlantic coast of North America, built during the Late Archaic (5000-3000 BP); the largest at Sapelo, Ring I, holds some 5,660 cubic meters of shell over 6,000 square meters. Their Bayesian models put the abandonment of Ring III, the last occupied, at about 3845 BP, close to 1900 BC, after local oyster fisheries collapsed, and they argue that people then dispersed and turned to a less marine way of life.

Oceania

No dingo bone found in Australia has been dated as early as 1900 BC, though when the animal arrived is still disputed. Jane Balme, Sue O’Connor and Stewart Fallon, reporting in Scientific Reports in 2018, directly dated dingo bones from Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain to between 3348 and 3081 years ago, the oldest firm evidence of the species on the continent; earlier estimates ranged from 5,000-4,000 years ago, based on the deposits where remains were found, to as much as 18,000 years from DNA. Since no land bridge joined Australia to Southeast Asia, the authors think dingoes are unlikely to have arrived without people, which makes them the only hard evidence of outside visits to the mainland between first Indigenous settlement and about 400 years ago.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
Song Letter. (2026, September 30). The world in 1900 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1900-bc/
Chicago
Song Letter. “The world in 1900 BC.” Our Earth's History, September 30, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1900-bc/.
MLA
Song Letter. “The world in 1900 BC.” Our Earth's History, 30 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/1900-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.