The world in 300 BC

Africa

Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s officers, had governed Egypt since 323 BC, took the royal title in the late summer of 306 BC and was crowned in the Egyptian manner in January 304 BC, with the same throne name Alexander had used. In 300 BC he confirmed an alliance with Lysimachus, ruler of Thrace, by giving him his daughter Arsinoe in marriage, partly out of fear of Demetrius Poliorcetes and his fleet. The Museum and Library of Alexandria were in full operation under his son Ptolemy II, and Lendering judges it likely that the father began organizing them in the 280s BC. South of Egypt, the archaeologist Michael Brass writes that the Kushite elite moved its capital to Meroe in the mid-fourth century BC and dates the Meroitic state from the late fourth century BC to the mid-fourth century AD, with ebony, elephants, gold, iron, ivory and ostrich feathers leaving Meroe as trade goods.

• Meroë's royal pyramids and the gold Ferlini took in 1834300 BC
• Which Dynasty's Harbor Held One of the Seven Wonders of the World?280 BC
• Why Did Nine-Year-Old Hannibal Swear an Oath Against Rome?237 BC
• Why Did One Man Lead War Elephants Over the Alps?218 BC

West Asia

Seleucus I Nicator, made satrap of Babylonia around 320 BC, arrived at Ipsus with some 400 war elephants to join Lysimachus and Cassander, and the defeat of Antigonus the One-Eyed gave him Syria, although Ptolemy had already taken its southern part, Coele Syria. He then founded four cities in northwestern Syria: Seleucia in Pieria, named for himself; Antioch on the Orontes, for his father Antiochus; Apamea, for his wife Apame; and Laodicea, for his mother. Lendering dates the founding of the empire’s two capitals, Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris, to about 300 BC, but his own entry on the Tigris city argues that it must be older than 301 BC, the year of Seleucus’s last visit to Babylonia. Cuneiform texts called that city the “city of kingship,” and Babylon, 60 kilometers to the south, lost some of its citizens to it.

Europe

Under the settlement that followed Ipsus, Cassander held Macedonia and Greece and Lysimachus the eastern Aegean, while Antigonus’s son Demetrius kept a fleet and began, in Lendering’s phrase, “a career as a pirate king.” In Rome, the Ogulnian law, which Leonhard Schmitz dated to 300 BC in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities of 1875, raised the number of pontiffs to eight, four of them plebeians, and Livy recorded that five plebeian augurs were added to make that college nine. Livy described the Samnites that year as “so far quite satisfied with their recent treaty with Rome.” Rome and Carthage were bound by a treaty that Livy said had been renewed for the third time during the Samnite campaigns, with “munificent presents” for the Carthaginian envoys; the First Punic War, fought over Sicily from 264 to 241 BC, was more than three decades away.

• The Empire Split — So Why Did They Speak Greek All the Way to India?323 BC
• Can Half an Army Beat Hundreds of Thousands?331 BC
• How Did a 20-Year-Old Conquer the World?336 BC

East Asia

China was in the Warring States period, which Columbia University’s Asia for Educators timeline dates from about 475 BC and the historian Yuri Pines from 453 BC, both ending with the Qin unification of 221 BC. Pines describes an age in which iron tools raised farm yields and mass infantry armies of peasant conscripts, armed with new weapons such as the crossbow, replaced chariot-led aristocratic armies; Qin had become a leading power through the reforms of Shang Yang, who died in 338 BC. Qin’s ruler in 300 BC was King Zhaoxiang, whose reign ran from 306 to 251 BC, and a 2025 study of its watchtowers by Xingyi Li and colleagues reports that after 272 BC he built a wall of about 800 kilometers along the northern edge of the Guanzhong Plain. In Japan, the Columbia timeline starts the Yayoi culture about 300 BC, but a 2025 study led by Oliver Craig dates the first paddy fields of northern Kyushu, which mark the start of the Yayoi period, tentatively to the early first millennium BC and cites radiocarbon dates on rice grains that place its arrival there as early as 1251–872 BC.

• A Dagger Sprang From the Map — How Did the King of Qin, the Future First Emperor of China, Survive?227 BC
• Some 38,000 slips from a well in Liye: Qin rule in Qianling county222 BC
• How Did One Boy Become China's First Emperor?221 BC
• How Did the Mighty Han Empire Begin? It Paid Silk Tribute to Nomads200 BC

South Asia

Chandragupta Maurya, whom Greek writers called Sandrocottus, ruled from the Ganges plain to the Indus. Strabo recorded that Seleucus gave him the lands along the Indus that Alexander had taken from the Persians “in consequence of a marriage contract, and received in return five hundred elephants”; Lendering places the agreement in Seleucus’s eastern campaigns of 308 to 304 BC. Megasthenes went as an ambassador to Sandrocottus at Palibothra, which Strabo described as a city 80 stadia long and 15 wide at the meeting of the Ganges and the Erannoboas, with a wooden wall pierced by openings for archers. Strabo himself distrusted the ambassador’s reports: “No faith whatever can be placed in Deimachus and Megasthenes,” he wrote, citing their tales of men with ears large enough to sleep in.

• Why did an emperor carve his regret for a war into rock across India?260 BC
• Bhir Mound, Sirkap, Sirsukh: John Marshall's three cities of Taxila170 BC

Central Asia

Bactria, north of the Hindu Kush, had been part of the Seleucid empire since 308 BC, when an army from the west returned there after Seleucus won the Babylonian War. Pierre Leriche writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that its chief city, Bactra, became for a time the headquarters of Seleucus’s son Antiochus, sent to defend the eastern satrapies against the growing might of the Mauryan empire; Antiochus was named heir and satrap of Bactria in 292 BC. At Ai Khanum, at the meeting of the Oxus and the Kokcha, a city that Lendering says Alexander’s friend Hephaestion may have founded, excavations from 1964 to 1978 uncovered the Hellenistic capital of eastern Bactria, with a gymnasium and theater beside a large central palace built on Iranian lines.

• A Corinthian capital on the Oxus: the Greek city of Ai Khanoum250 BC
• Mithradatkert: the Parthian fortress at Old Nisa and its ivory rhyta200 BC
• What did the frozen tombs of the Altai preserve for 2,400 years?400 BC

The Americas

In the Valley of Oaxaca, Monte Albán entered the Late Monte Albán I phase, which Sofía Pacheco-Forés and her coauthors date to 300–100 BC, when the multi-ethnic Zapotec state centered there became one of the earliest state-level societies in the Americas. In the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, painters at San Bartolo wrote the day “7 Deer” of the 260-day calendar on walls that David Stuart and his colleagues date to between 300 and 200 BC, the earliest securely dated example of the Maya calendar; within the third century BC the Maya broke up those paintings and razed the buildings. In the Andes, Chavín de Huántar, a monumental center of the period that John Rick’s team calls the Middle-Late Formative (about 1200–400 BC), had passed its peak: the layers from one of its excavated galleries run to about 350 BC, spanning the end of Chavín’s apogee and what the team calls the immediately post-Chavín period.

Oceania

In Tonga, the plain pottery made by the descendants of the first settlers had gone out of use: David Burley, Sean Connaughton and Geoffrey Clark, working from 44 radiocarbon dates at 13 sites, place the end of Polynesian Plainware no later than 2350 calibrated years before present, around 400 BC, while Samoa kept making pottery much longer. The islands were in the “long pause,” a period in which, in the authors’ words, “Polynesians literally became Polynesian,” forming the cultural template and the proto-Polynesian language stage. Their growth model projects no more than 1,337 people in Tonga at that date. No written record exists for any part of the region, and what is known comes from pottery and radiocarbon dates.

• Three dark bands in a dune: Sigatoka's Levels 1, 2 and 3, dug in 1965200 BC

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Seleucus I Nicator"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "The battle of Ipsus"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Antioch (Antakya)"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Seleucia on the Tigris"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Seleucids"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Diadochi"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Ptolemy I Soter" (part 3, King of Egypt)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Carthage"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Bactria"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Pierre Leriche: "Bactria i. Pre-Islamic period" (1988)
• Perseus Digital Library, Strabo, Geography 15.2.9 (translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, 1903)
• Perseus Digital Library, Strabo, Geography 15.1.36 (translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, 1903)
• Perseus Digital Library, Strabo, Geography 2.1.9 (translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, 1903)
• Perseus Digital Library, Livy, History of Rome 10.6 (translated by Canon Roberts, 1912)
• Perseus Digital Library, Livy, History of Rome 9.43 (translated by Canon Roberts, 1912)
• LacusCurtius, University of Chicago, Leonhard Schmitz: "Pontifex", in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1875)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Yuri Pines: "Legalism in Chinese Philosophy" (revised 2023)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Timeline of Chinese History and Dynasties"
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Timeline of Japanese History"
• PLOS One 20(8) via PubMed Central, Xingyi Li et al.: "The building concept of border defence facilities of Qin: Watchtowers along the King of Zhaoxiang great wall in Shaanxi province" (2025)
• PNAS 122(30) via PubMed Central, Oliver E. Craig et al.: "Lipid residue analysis reveals divergent culinary practices in Japan and Korea at the dawn of intensive agriculture" (2025)
• Journal of World Prehistory 28 via PubMed Central, Michael Brass: "Interactions and Pastoralism Along the Southern and Southeastern Frontiers of the Meroitic State, Sudan" (2015)
• PLOS One via PubMed Central, Sofía I. Pacheco-Forés et al.: "Radiogenic strontium isotope variability in the Valley of Oaxaca" (2025)
• Science Advances 8(15) via PubMed Central, David Stuart, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltrán and William Saturno: "An early Maya calendar record from San Bartolo, Guatemala" (2022)
• PNAS 122(19) via PubMed Central, John W. Rick et al.: "Pre-Hispanic ritual use of psychoactive plants at Chavín de Huántar, Peru" (2025)
• PLoS ONE 13(2) via PubMed Central, David V. Burley, Sean P. Connaughton and Geoffrey Clark: "Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga" (2018)