The world in 500 BC

Africa

Egypt had been a Persian province since Cambyses took Memphis in 525 BC, and in 500 BC a satrap governed it for Darius I. South of Egypt, the kingdom of Kush was in its Napatan period, which the UNESCO listing dates from 900 to 270 BC, with the temple of Amun below the sacred hill of Gebel Barkal and royal pyramids at Nuri and Kurru. Carthage, founded by Phoenician settlers on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the ninth century BC, had by c. 500 BC become a trading city whose ships carried metals, oil, wine and grain around the western Mediterranean, with posts in Sicily and Sardinia. Around the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, people of the Nok culture were making the hollow terracotta heads and figures that the Metropolitan Museum dates to 500 BC to AD 200, the oldest known figurative sculpture south of the Sahara, and were among the earliest ironworkers in Africa; most Nok finds were dug up without record of where they lay.

West Asia

Darius I (r. 522–486 BC) had stabilized the empire after the succession crisis of 522 BC, with satraps in each province, roads for royal messages and new palaces at Susa and Persepolis, whose reliefs showed tributaries filing toward the enthroned king. On the Aegean coast, Persian rule over the Greek cities ran through local tyrants answerable to Artaphernes, the satrap at Sardis and a brother of Darius; Miletus, the southernmost of those cities, was at the height of its prosperity around 500 BC under Aristagoras. In that year Aristagoras asked Artaphernes for a fleet to restore exiled aristocrats to Naxos, and Darius approved an expedition of 200 triremes. Its failure set off the Ionian Revolt in 499 BC, which the Persians needed until 493 BC to put down.

• How did Persia run the largest empire the world had seen?500 BC

Europe

Athens had lived under the constitution of Cleisthenes since 508/507 BC: ten new tribes, 139 demes and a Council of Five Hundred, set up after the Spartan king Cleomenes I expelled the tyrant Hippias in 511/510 BC. Fearing a Spartan return, the Athenians had offered “earth and water,” the token of submission, to Artaphernes at Sardis, an offer they later failed to honor. Rome, by its own tradition, had expelled its last king, Tarquinius Superbus, in 510 or 509 BC; its early history is known only from Roman writers of much later date. North of the Black Sea, the Scythians had beaten off an invasion led by Darius himself, which the Encyclopaedia Iranica places most probably in 513 BC among proposed dates from 520 to 507 BC; the failure gave the Scythians a reputation among the Greeks as unconquerable.

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East Asia

China in 500 BC was in the last decades of the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC), which had begun when the Zhou court moved east to Luoyang; the Warring States period, when China was divided among smaller polities at war with one another, is dated in the Metropolitan Museum’s chronology from 475 BC. Confucius, whose traditional dates are 551 to 479 BC, was alive in the state of Lu in what is now Shandong, and the teaching later called Confucianism took shape in this period. Bronze casting and lacquerwork were the leading crafts, and inlay of silver and gold into bronze vessels became the mark of Warring States workshops.

South Asia

North India was divided among the sixteen mahajanapadas, fortified “great states” that had grown on the Ganges plain from the eighth century BC; by 500 BC Magadha in the northeast was gaining on its rivals under Bimbisara (540–493 BC), whose territory later became the core of the Mauryan empire. To the west, Darius I had added northwestern India to the Persian empire. The Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakya clan, and Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, both taught in this world of Gangetic kingdoms; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that the older reckoning put the Buddha’s life at about 560 to 480 BC and that much recent scholarship places his death around 405 BC.

Central Asia

Since about 545 BC the oasis city-states and small kingdoms of western Central Asia had been satrapies of the Achaemenid empire, paying taxes and tribute to the Persian king. On the steppe to their north, groups the Persians called Saka lived by horse-riding pastoralism, a way of life built on the compound bow fired from horseback. In the Altai Mountains the Pazyryk people would, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, bury their dead in log chambers under stone mounds, where groundwater froze and preserved Chinese silk and pile carpets. What was written about the steppe in this period came from outside it: Persian royal inscriptions and, later, Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 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 was founded on a defensible hill around 500 BC and grew fast into the main center of the region, while valley-floor villages such as San José Mogote, where the earliest known Zapotec calendrical glyph had been carved around 600 BC, lost population. On the Gulf Coast the Olmec center of La Venta still stood, with its earthen pyramid and greenstone offerings; by 400 BC its monuments were damaged and the site was being deserted. In the Andes, Chavín de Huántar, the pilgrimage center whose images had spread from the north coast to the Nazca drainage, began to lose its power around 500 BC as monumental building in the north ceased. On the south coast, Chavín-style motifs reached Karwa near the Paracas Peninsula by c. 400 BC, and by c. 300 BC the Paracas people were wrapping their dead in embroidered funerary bundles.

Oceania

Lapita settlers had reached Fiji, Tonga and Samoa between 1300 and 1000 BC, and by c. 500 BC the decoration of their pottery ceased as their descendants developed the earliest recognizably Polynesian cultures on those islands. The remote archipelagos of the eastern Pacific had not yet been reached; the Marquesas and the northern Cook Islands were settled between 200 BC and AD 1. In Vanuatu, Manga’asi-period pottery with incised geometric motifs was made from c. 600 BC, and in Arnhem Land in northern Australia the “estuarine” period of rock art, dated from c. 6000 BC, continued. No writing existed in the region; the dates come from pottery and excavated sites.

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 B.C.)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ionian Revolt (Ernst Badian)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Scythians
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Nok Terracottas (500 B.C.–200 A.D.)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Western North Africa, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Livius.org: Cleisthenes (Jona Lendering)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: China, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: South Asia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Buddha (Mark Siderits)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Central and North Asia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Mesoamerica, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Central and Southern Andes, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Oceania, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.