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Snapshot · 700 BC

The world in 700 BC

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TL;DR — In 700 BC Sennacherib ruled Assyria, Kushite kings held Egypt, Greek colonists had founded Syracuse in Sicily and Zhou China was splitting into rival states.

Sennacherib, the son of Sargon II, had lately come to the Assyrian throne, and within two years of 700 BC his armies marched into western Iran and then into the Levant. Egypt was in the hands of kings from Kush, in Nubia, whose order of succession Egyptologists are still arguing over. Greek settlers had founded towns in Sicily, Etruscan Italy was changing fast, and in China the old Zhou order was giving way to competition among rival states. Elsewhere the evidence is archaeological: a raised plaza in the Maya lowlands, Chavín pottery in the Andes, royal mounds in southern Siberia and the first settlements of Samoa.

Africa

Kings from Kush, in Nubia, ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty, but which of them held the throne in 700 BC depends on a debate over their order. Until the end of the 20th century scholars generally placed Shabaka’s 15 attested years in Egypt before Shebitku’s three, following the Greek king list of Manetho, compiled nearly 400 years after Kushite rule in Egypt ended. In 1999 the publication of an inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Tang-i Var, naming Shabataka (Shebitku) as ruler of Kush no later than 705 BC, unsettled that scheme, and since the 2010s several scholars, reading temples, royal tombs, genealogies and donation stelae, have put Shebitku before Shabaka. Jeremy Pope, who sets out the case in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2019), notes that radiocarbon cannot decide it, since the whole dynasty falls on the Hallstatt plateau, and that the revised sequence still needs testing.

West Asia

The Encyclopaedia Iranica, in an article by Muhammad Dandamayev and Edvin Grantovskiĭ, dates Sennacherib’s reign to 704 to 681 BC. In 702 BC he led an expedition into Ellipi in western Iran against its ruler Aspabara, and at the end of the campaign received tribute from “the distant Medes,” a people his inscription claims his ancestors had never known. In 701 BC his army besieged Lachish in the Levant, a siege shown in a relief from his palace at Nineveh and still marked on the site by an Assyrian siege ramp. Archaeomagnetic tests published in 2024 by Yoav Vaknin and colleagues show that a mudbrick tower in the town’s outer wall was fired, most probably during that siege.

Europe

Thucydides names Chalcidians from Euboea, led by Thucles, as the first Greeks to settle in Sicily, at Naxos; Archias of Corinth founded Syracuse the year after, and five years after that the Chalcidians of Naxos founded Leontini and then Catana, and Jona Lendering of Livius.org dates the first two foundations to 734 and 733 BC. In Etruria, Charlotte Potts and Christopher Smith describe “the major shift that occurred around 700 BC,” in the age of the first tumulus tombs of the late eighth or early seventh century; that age is still called Orientalizing by convention, a label they call controversial, and among its exchanges was the spread of an alphabet that the Etruscans adapted to their own use. North of the Alps, the salt mines of Hallstatt in Austria, worked underground since at least the 14th century BC, gave their name to Europe’s early Iron Age of 800 to 400 BC. Frank Maixner and colleagues found in 2021 that an Iron Age sample of human feces from the mine held DNA and proteins of the fungi used to make blue cheese and beer, the first molecular evidence of either in Iron Age Europe.

East Asia

Some 70 years into the Spring and Autumn period, which Columbia University’s Asia for Educators dates from about 770 to 475 BC, the Zhou system of aristocratic families holding domains under the royal house was breaking down into competition among rival semi-autonomous states. What had held that system together, the same timeline notes, was less anything like European feudalism than a hierarchy of ancestral cults. At Guanzhuang, near Xingyang in Henan, a site that belonged to the state of Eastern Guo in the late Western Zhou and later to the state of Zheng, 11 ancient genomes published in 2024 by Wu Xiyan and colleagues show continuity with the Neolithic people of the Yellow River basin. They also show inbreeding, which the authors say casts doubt on how strictly rules against marriage within the same surname or clan were enforced.

South Asia

The subcontinent was in its Iron Age, dated by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham of University College London to about 1000 to 500 BC, and by around 500 BC domestic rice was grown across the whole mainland. Rice farming in the dry south has usually been tied to irrigation and to ritual water features of the Iron Age. Her 2019 study of rice phytoliths and plant remains from four sites found instead that Iron Age and Early Historic rice in South India may have depended on seasonal rainfall. The Sangam texts of South India, which treat irrigation works as a noble undertaking for kings, are dated in their earliest layer to about 300 BC to AD 300, so for 700 BC the evidence is plant remains and excavated sites.

Central Asia

Tuva’s Turan-Uyuk basin, called the “Valley of the Kings,” holds a chain of great mounds built for nomad leaders of the highest rank. Artem Nedoluzhko and colleagues date Arzhan 2 and the nearby complex of Chinge-Tey I to the seventh and sixth centuries BC, a period that opens with 700 BC, and assign both to the Aldy-Bel culture, one of the earliest groups with Scythian-type objects. In 2025 they compared the genome of a high-ranking man from Chinge-Tey I with two published genomes from graves that accompanied the central “royal” burial at Arzhan 2, and found all three genetically close to the Tasmola culture of Kazakhstan and to Early Iron Age pastoralists buried in Xinjiang.

The Americas

At the Maya site of Ceibal in Guatemala, the Real phase of about 1000 to 700 BC was giving way to the Escoba phase, dated 700 to 350 BC. Takeshi Inomata and colleagues showed in 2019 that the first form of the town’s artificial plateau, an area of roughly 400 by 200 meters, was built in the Real phase, and they estimate that builders added 98,827 cubic meters of fill in that phase and 203,040 in the Escoba phase. In Peru, Christian Mesía-Montenegro and Ángel Sánchez-Borjas, drawing on a Bayesian reassessment of 190 radiocarbon dates from 13 central-coast sites, treat Chavín de Huántar as active from about 1100 to 550 BC and the spread of Chavín ceramics across the central Andes at 800 to 550 BC. On the central coast, they note, the tradition of U-shaped ceremonial buildings was declining between about 1000 and 500 BC.

Oceania

Samoa’s founders were Lapita potters. Archaeological estimates summarized by Daniel Harris and colleagues in a 2020 genetic study place its founding between 2,750 and 2,880 years ago, by people who made intricately decorated pottery. Their model of Samoan population history shows growth starting about 3,000 years ago followed by a small effective population that lasted some 2,100 years, in keeping with a modest early settlement. Whether modern Samoans descend mainly from those founders or from a later migration 1,500 to 2,000 years ago remains an open question in their study.

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APA
LETTER. (2026, September 29). The world in 700 BC. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/700-bc/
Chicago
LETTER. “The world in 700 BC.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/700-bc/.
MLA
LETTER. “The world in 700 BC.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/700-bc/.

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