The world in 2000 BC

Africa

Egypt in 2000 BC had not yet entered what the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures dates as the Middle Kingdom, which the Institute places at about 1938 to 1725 BC; the years around 2000 BC fell in the tail end of the political division that the Middle Kingdom’s founders would end. Immediately south of the First Cataract, Lower Nubia was home to C-Group pastoralist communities, whom the same institute dates from 2500 to 1500 BC and who would later be dominated, at times, by the fortress-building Middle Kingdom state. Farther upriver, near the Third Cataract, the city of Kerma had entered what the Swiss-Sudanese Archaeological Mission excavating the site calls its Middle Kerma period, dated there to about 2050-1750 BC: a fortified town with palaces and cemeteries for its elite, whose wealth came from cattle and goat herding, farming and a trade in gold, ivory and ebony carried along routes linking Egypt, the Red Sea coast and the interior of Africa. No written record from this period survives south of Egypt itself.

West Asia

In Mesopotamia, the Third Dynasty of Ur was already gone. Livius.org’s chronology of the dynasty runs from its founder Ur-Nammu (r. 2112-2095 BC), who built the great ziggurat of the moon god Nanna at Ur a century and a half after Sargon of Akkad had built the world’s first empire, through his son Shulgi (r. 2094-2047 BC) and the shorter reigns of Amar-Sin (2046-2038 BC) and Shu-Sin (2037-2029 BC), down to Ibbi-Sin (r. 2028-2004 BC), who could not hold the empire together. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, in 2004 BC the Elamites, allied with the people of Susiana under Kindattu, the sixth king of the Simashki dynasty, conquered Ur and led Ibbi-Sin away as a prisoner to Elam; the victors then installed the Epartid, or sukkalmah, dynasty at Susa, founded by the ninth king of Simashki. By 2000 BC that collapse was four years in the past, and Mesopotamia had no single ruler over it.

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Europe

The ditch and bank enclosing Stonehenge had been dug around 3000 BC, and the sarsen stones raised around 2500 BC; two to three centuries later, in English Heritage’s account, the bluestones were rearranged into a circle and inner oval, and an earthwork Avenue was built to connect the monument to the River Avon. The last known change to the stones, two rings of pits called the Y and Z holes, still lay in the future and would not be dug until between 1800 and 1500 BC. In central Germany a different kind of monument marked status: at Leubingen, in Thuringia, a man was buried in a timber mortuary chamber under a burial mound with 256 grams of gold and bronze weapons, in a grave that Max Planck Institute researchers writing in Scientific Reports have dendrochronologically dated, from its timbers, to 1942 BC plus or minus ten years, the oldest known “princely” burial of the Unetice culture (2200-1550 BC), whose bronze-working chiefdoms held the region between the Harz Mountains and Bohemia.

East Asia

The late Neolithic Longshan culture, dated about 2600 to 1900 BC by the Peking University archaeologists Lin Meicun and Xiang Liu writing in the journal Antiquity, was already in contact with steppe metalworking: a Longshan-period layer at the Xiawanggang site in Henan has produced a socketed spearhead of the hooked, triple-lined type made by the Seima-Turbino culture, which had begun spreading bronze technology out of the Altai Mountains across the Eurasian steppe from around 2200 BC. To the west, in Gansu and Qinghai, the Qijia and Siba cultures were working copper and copper-arsenic alloys; few mines or metal workshops of this date have been found among their sites, but Lin and Liu still count them among the earliest bronze-using cultures in China because of how many metal artifacts survive from them, in styles the two archaeologists judge earlier than the bronzes that would later appear at Erlitou.

South Asia

On the Indus, the mature cities were roughly a century from their end. Excavations at Harappa itself, published online by the site’s directors Richard Meadow and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, date the Harappan Phase there to about 2600-1900 BC and place a small pot found on Mound E within what they call Period 3C of that phase, roughly 2200-2000 BC. Finely woven cloth, steatite and carnelian beads, and seals carved with the still-undeciphered Indus script were all in daily use in that period. Within a century or so, Meadow and Kenoyer’s excavation record shows Cemetery H pottery, associated with the Late Harappan period, beginning to appear at the same site.

Central Asia

In the Kopet Dagh foothills of what is now Turkmenistan, farmers of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, known through Viktor Sarianidi’s excavations, had occupied the fertile Margiana delta since about 2200 BC, according to the historian Jona Lendering; at Gonur Depe, the complex’s largest known site, this was the era of its walled palace. On the steppe well to the north, in the southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, a cluster of settlements of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, some of them heavily fortified with earth ramparts and ditches, emerged around 2000 BC, according to a Bayesian radiocarbon study by Stephan Lindner of the Freie Universitat Berlin published in Antiquity. Arkaim is one such settlement; burials of the same culture soon afterward held the earliest known spoke-wheeled chariots, one of which Lindner’s radiocarbon modeling dates to between about 1950 and 1880 BC.

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The Americas

In the Supe valley on the coast, Caral was in its last two centuries: UNESCO’s listing for the site dates its development, by radiocarbon, to between 3000 and 1800 BC, and counts it as one of eighteen urban settlements built in the same area, with six large pyramidal mounds and sunken circular courts at Caral itself. Once abandoned, the site would not be resettled until about 1000 BC. In the northern highlands near Huanuco, at Kotosh, a University of Tokyo mission led by Seiichi Izumi found two clay reliefs of crossed hands set into a temple wall in 1960; Peru’s National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History dates them to about 2200-1500 BC.

• Two crossed-hands reliefs at Kotosh: University of Tokyo digs, 19602000 BC

Oceania

In the highlands of New Guinea, at Kuk Swamp, people were digging drainage ditches with wooden tools through wetlands to grow bananas, taro and yam. UNESCO’s listing for the Kuk Early Agricultural Site dates that ditch-digging phase to about 4,000 years before the present, close to 2000 BC, a stage in a sequence of land use that the listing traces back 7,000 to 6,400 years to the first mounded gardens there; UNESCO calls Kuk one of the few places in the world where farming arose as an independent invention rather than spreading from elsewhere. No other part of the Pacific has left a comparably dated record for this period.

• Bananas at 1,550 meters: the drained gardens of Kuk Swamp, New Guinea2000 BC

Sources

• Livius.org: Ur (Jona Lendering)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Elam i. The history of Elam
• Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago: Ancient Nubia: C-Group, Pan Grave, Kerma, 2400-1550 BC
• Swiss-Sudanese Archaeological Mission at Kerma: History
• English Heritage: History of Stonehenge
• Sandra Penske et al., "Kinship practices at the early bronze age site of Leubingen in Central Germany," Scientific Reports 14 (2024), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
• Lin Meicun and Xiang Liu, "The origins of metallurgy in China," Antiquity 91.359 (2017), School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University
• Harappa.com: "Around the Indus in 90 Slides 2," Richard H. Meadow and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Harappa Archaeological Research Project
• Livius.org: Margiana (Jona Lendering)
• Stephan Lindner, "Chariots in the Eurasian Steppe: a Bayesian approach to the emergence of horse-drawn transport in the early second millennium BC," Antiquity 94.374 (2020), Freie Universitat Berlin
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Sacred City of Caral-Supe
• Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú: Galería Orígenes
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Kuk Early Agricultural Site