The world in 600 BC

Africa

Necho II, son of Psammetichus I, ruled Egypt from 610 to 595 BC, and in 601 BC his forces turned back a Babylonian attack on the country, according to the Livius.org chronology by Jona Lendering. Herodotus says Necho sent Phoenician crews from the Red Sea to sail around Libya, his name for Africa, and that they came home through the Pillars of Heracles in the third year, stopping each autumn to sow a crop and wait for the harvest. Herodotus doubted their report that the sun had been on their right as they sailed west; A. D. Godley, in a note to his 1920 translation, argued that this detail supports the story, since it matches the sun’s position south of the equator. Lendering lists the voyage among Necho’s deeds without a date.

West Asia

After Assyria’s fall, the Encyclopaedia Iranica article by Inna Medvedskaya and Muhammad Dandamayev notes, only four powerful states remained in the Near East, and the Babylonian and Median allies soon grew wary of each other. A Babylonian letter of 591 BC records citizens of Uruk who fled to Media and ignored King Nebuchadnezzar’s order to return, while Babylonian ration lists of 595 to 570 BC include a “refugee from Media.” Cyaxares, king of the Medes, is dated from Herodotus to about 625 to 585 BC, though Edvin Grantovskiĭ proposed 620 to 584. In 590 BC his army reached the Halys river in Anatolia and met Alyattes of Lydia; the war lasted five years, until a solar eclipse during a battle on May 29, 585 BC, led both sides to make peace with the Halys as their border.

• A cylinder from Babylon, 1879: a building text called a rights charter539 BC
• How did Persia run the largest empire the world had seen?500 BC

Europe

Solon, the Athenian poet and statesman, was appointed lawgiver in 594/593 BC, the date given by Lendering. Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution says the many were then “enslaved to the few,” and that Solon, chosen as arbitrator and archon, banned loans secured on the person and canceled debts, measures known as “the Shaking-off of Burdens”; the translator, H. Rackham, adds that their actual provisions are uncertain. On the northwest coast of Greece, Corinth had founded Amvrakia, today’s Arta, on the Arachthos River in the second half of the seventh century BC. Genomes published in 2026 by Nikolaos Psonis and colleagues point to a single founding population from Corinthian territory, with no ancestry traced to the local Late Bronze Age people nearby.

• How Did Rome's Common People Win Their Rights — by Walking Out of the City?494 BC
• Why Did Athens Vote to Exile Its Most Powerful Men — on Broken Pottery?487 BC
• Why Did Athens Choose Its Leaders by Lottery, Not Election?487 BC
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East Asia

A bronze food container of the gui type in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated 600 to 500 BC in the Spring and Autumn period, has openwork and sculpted designs that, in the museum’s words, transform the silhouette of a stately vessel form. Lotus-petal openwork rings its cover, wave patterns run around the body, and two open-mouthed dragons joined by two felines form the arched handles of the vessel, which measures 34.3 by 44.5 centimeters overall. Farther east, a 2025 study led by Oliver Craig of the University of York tested food residues in 260 pots from Bronze Age (Mumun) Korea and from Jomon and Yayoi sites in northern Kyushu. A chemical marker of broomcorn millet turned up only in the Korean pots, and early farming households in Kyushu kept cooking aquatic foods in their pots as their Jomon predecessors had, though rice, by a radiocarbon synthesis the study cites, had reached the region as early as the late second millennium BC.

South Asia

Anuradhapura, later the capital of Sri Lanka for most of about 1,900 years, was around 600 BC an Iron Age village, one founded in the eighth century BC, according to Robin Coningham and colleagues. Its growth into a planned city laid out around a 100-hectare enclosed core came later. The island’s Pali chronicles, the Mahavamsa, Dipavamsa and Culavamsa, give a narrative from the middle of the first millennium BC onward, but Buddhist monks compiled them in the Early Historic and Medieval periods, so the village of this date is known from excavation rather than writing.

Central Asia

At Jirzankal, an early Iron Age cemetery on the eastern Pamir Plateau, Wang Xueye, Tang Zihua and colleagues measured strontium isotopes in 34 people buried about 2,500 years ago. Ten had grown up somewhere else, a share the authors set against a 1909 census of Kashgar Prefecture, where the cemetery lies, that counted 3% non-locals. Grave goods point the same way: silk fabrics from eastern China, and an angular harp of a type that originated in the Near East, made of ash wood and radiocarbon dated to 2710 to 2360 years before present.

• Arzhan 2 in Tuva: a man, a woman, 14 horses and 40 pounds of gold650 BC

The Americas

Holtun, a Maya civic and ceremonial center about 35 kilometers southwest of Tikal in Guatemala, was first occupied in the Late Middle Preclassic period, which Michael Callaghan, Daniel Pierce and Brigitte Kovacevich date to 600 to 300 BC. Four radiocarbon dates from early layers of construction fill fall between 788 and 473 BC. In Ohio the National Park Service dates the Early Woodland period from about 800 BC; its people, called Adena, lived in semipermanent settlements near waterways, planted goosefoot, sunflower, squash and other native plants, and in the course of the period raised cone-shaped mounds up to 63 feet high, mostly for burials.

Oceania

Palau, in western Micronesia, had been settled for some six centuries by 600 BC, since people first reached its limestone Rock Islands and volcanic Babeldaob about 3,200 years ago. In a 2026 study, Yue-Chen Liu and colleagues report genomes from 21 individuals at four Palauan sites dated from 2,900 to 500 years ago. All carry roughly 60% East Asian and 40% Papuan ancestry, close to the mix of present-day Palauans and the longest stretch of population continuity found anywhere in Remote Oceania. In the Lapita settlements of the southwest Pacific, by contrast, the earliest people sampled had almost entirely East Asian ancestry, and Papuan ancestry arrived in quantity only after about 2,500 years ago.

• 1,800 years in Tonga and Samoa: the long pause before East Polynesia500 BC

Sources

• Livius.org: Necho II (Jona Lendering)
• Herodotus, The Histories 4.42, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA, 1920), Perseus Digital Library
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Media (Inna N. Medvedskaya and Muhammad A. Dandamayev)
• Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 5, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1952), Perseus Digital Library
• Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 6, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1952), Perseus Digital Library
• Livius.org: Solon (Jona Lendering)
• Psonis et al., "Genetic affinities between the ancient Greek colony of Amvrakia and its metropolis," Genome Biology 27 (2026)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access API: Food Container (Gui), 600–500 BCE (1974.73)
• Craig et al., "Lipid residue analysis reveals divergent culinary practices in Japan and Korea at the dawn of intensive agriculture," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (2025)
• Coningham et al., "From village to state, and back again: cycles of de-urbanization and adaptation in Early Historic and Medieval Sri Lanka," World Archaeology (2026)
• Wang et al., "Strontium isotope evidence for a highly mobile population on the Pamir Plateau 2500 years ago," Scientific Reports 6 (2016)
• Callaghan, Pierce and Kovacevich, "An atlas of paste fabrics and supplemental paste compositional data from late middle preclassic-period ceramics at the Maya site of Holtun, Guatemala," Data in Brief 11 (2017)
• National Park Service: Ohio's Prehistoric Past
• Liu et al., "Papuan admixture predated the settlement of Palau," Cell 189 (2026)