The world in 3000 BC

Africa

Egypt had one king. The Hierakonpolis Expedition attributes the Palette of Narmer, found at that city, to the first king of the First Dynasty at about 3100 BC, and the Metropolitan Museum dates the Early Dynastic Period from c. 3100 to 2649 BC. Hierakonpolis itself, ancient Nekhen, ran for more than 3 km along the edge of the Nile floodplain and had been divided into neighborhoods and quarters since 3600 BC; in the Naqada III period (c. 3300–3100 BC) its slate palettes and ivory tags carried the first stages of hieroglyphic writing, and Abydos was the burial ground of the late Predynastic leaders. South of the first cataract, the A-Group people of Lower Nubia (c. 3700–2800 BC) made eggshell-thin pottery, sent raw materials north into Egypt, and by the Met’s account were ruled from about 3100 BC by a series of prosperous kings until the Egyptians drove them out.

West Asia

Uruk covered about 250 hectares and was ruled by a man whom Ira Spar of the Metropolitan Museum describes as a priest-king, shown in art with religious duties. Its temple estates kept accounts on clay: about 6,000 proto-cuneiform tablets survive from the Uruk culture, drawn with a reed on damp clay, and signs that stood for a sound as well as a thing appear in only a few cases between 3200 and 3000 BC. At Susa, below the Zagros Mountains, scribes wrote numerals and word signs on tablets of their own about 100 years after the first Uruk tablets. Uruk-style buildings stood in settlements in Syria and southern Turkey, and Uruk pottery has been found in northern and central Iran.

Europe

Stone furniture survives in the houses of Skara Brae on Orkney: a dresser, two box beds and a central hearth in each single room of about 40 square meters, in a village that Historic Environment Scotland dates to 5,000 years ago and that was lived in until about 2500 BC. Its people farmed, fished and hunted, played with dice, and left no weapons. On Salisbury Plain the first Stonehenge was a circular ditch and bank about 100 meters across with two entrances, dug about 3000 BC according to English Heritage, and people buried cremations in the ditch and in the Aubrey Holes; about 64 have been found. The sarsen circle came about 500 years later, and no one in Europe wrote.

East Asia

Jade was the prestige material in China. The Metropolitan Museum’s chronology counts more than thirty Late Neolithic cultures and places two jade-carving cultures at this date: the Hongshan in the northeast (c. 3500–2000 BC), whose sites in Liaoning held clay figures of women with protruding stomachs, and the Liangzhu in the southeast (c. 3200–2000 BC). Yangshao potters in north central China painted masks, dancing figures and frogs on their vessels, and Dawenkou potters on the east coast fired fine black and white wares. In northern Japan the Jomon settlement at Sannai Maruyama, in Aomori, entered the stage its managers date c. 3000–2200 BC, with pit dwellings set out in plan, pillar-supported buildings, graves in rows, and jade, obsidian and asphalt brought from far away.

South Asia

Harappa was a village of huts. Excavations by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project in Trench 39 South, reported by Richard Meadow and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, found levels from about 3300 to 2800 BC, the Ravi Phase, in which people lived in huts of wooden posts covered with reeds and clay and stored grain in small bell-shaped pits. A house floor dated c. 3100 BC held complete vessels and broken necklaces; all the early pottery was hand built, and a pot of about 3100 BC carries one of the earliest intersecting-circle motifs in the Indus region. Agate, lapis lazuli, steatite, marine shell and copper reached the village from distant sources. The baked-brick city with its drains lay some 400 years ahead.

Central Asia

Horses were being milked in northern Kazakhstan. Alan Outram’s team at the University of Exeter, publishing in Science in 2009, traced horse herding in the Botai culture to about 3500 BC: horse bones shaped by selective breeding, bit damage from bridling, and fat from mare’s milk in the pottery. Whether the Botai rode their horses remained, in the team’s words, possible. Farther south, at Sarazm on the Zeravshan River in what is now Tajikistan, a settlement occupied from the fourth millennium BC to the end of the third stood between mountain pastoralists and valley farmers; UNESCO’s listing counts it among the oldest centers of settlement in Central Asia. No script existed in either place.

The Americas

On a desert terrace above the Supe River in Peru, Caral was being built. The Zona Arqueológica Caral, the Peruvian state body that runs the site, dates it to 3000–1800 BC and counts 32 public buildings and residential areas over 68 hectares, and it calls Caral the capital of the oldest civilization in the Americas. The site lies four hours north of Lima and was placed on the World Heritage List in 2009. Its builders left no writing, and the sources cited below name no other monumental center in the hemisphere at this date.

Oceania

Banana, taro and yam grew on cultivation mounds at Kuk, 1,500 meters up in the western highlands of New Guinea. UNESCO’s listing dates that mound farming to 7,000–6,400 years ago and the later ditches, dug with wooden tools to drain the swamp, from 4,000 years ago, so in 3000 BC the mounds were still in use. In Australia the Arnhem Land painters of the Estuarine period (c. 6000 BC–AD 500), in the Metropolitan Museum’s sequence, depicted saltwater fish and crocodiles, animals that came with the rising sea that formed the Torres Strait. The same timeline has Austronesian speakers spreading through island Southeast Asia c. 4000–2500 BC; the islands east of the Solomons had no people, and no one in the region wrote.

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Egypt, 8000–2000 B.C.," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (October 2000).
• Hierakonpolis Expedition, "Explore the City of the Hawk" (About Hierakonpolis), hierakonpolis-online.org.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Sudan, 8000–2000 B.C.," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ira Spar, "The Origins of Writing," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (October 2004).
• Historic Environment Scotland, "Skara Brae: History and stories."
• English Heritage, "History of Stonehenge."
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "China, 8000–2000 B.C.," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
• Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan (official site), "Sannai Maruyama Site."
• Richard H. Meadow and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, "Around the Indus in 90 Slides 2" (Harappa Archaeological Research Project), harappa.com.
• University of Exeter, Department of Archaeology, "Horse domestication in the Botai Culture, Eneolithic Kazakhstan" (on Outram et al., Science, 2009).
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Proto-urban Site of Sarazm" (World Heritage List No. 1141).
• Zona Arqueológica Caral, Ministry of Culture of Peru, "Ciudad Sagrada de Caral."
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Oceania, 8000–2000 B.C.," Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Kuk Early Agricultural Site" (World Heritage List No. 887).