The world in 900 BC

Africa

Dynasty 22 held the throne of Egypt; its founder, Shoshenq I, reigned from 943 to 922 BC in the dates used by the Cleveland Museum of Art. A limestone stela in that museum, 86.8 by 78.5 centimeters and made in his reign, belonged to Shedsunefertem, High Priest of Ptah; it was originally painted and gilded, and its bottom register shows his colleagues as dependents under the high priest’s protection. At Thebes the dead were still laid in “yellow” coffins, anthropoid wooden cases whose painted background imitated gold. Stefania Mainieri of the Museo Egizio in Turin, whose Faces Revealed project has recorded more than 100 coffin lids in 10 museums, writes that the type appeared at the end of the New Kingdom and was used most under Dynasty 21, about 1069 to 945 BC.

West Asia

Assyria had entered what historians call the Neo-Assyrian period, dated from 911 BC. Two people of that period were among the three Iron Age individuals whose DNA Matthew Williams and colleagues sequenced in 2026 at Bakr Awa, the largest mound in the southern Shahrizor Plain of northeastern Iraq, and the first indications are that their ancestry largely continued that of the site’s Bronze Age community rather than replacing it. Southwest of Lake Urmia, the citadel of Hasanlu was crowned by monumental buildings, among them a temple with a columned hall 18 by 24 meters, four rows of six columns, which Robert Dyson wrote in the Encyclopaedia Iranica was a forerunner of later columned halls in Media and Achaemenid Anshan. The citadel burned in a sudden attack by an unknown enemy at the end of the ninth or early in the eighth century BC, leaving more than 7,000 artifacts in place; no tablets were found, but stone maceheads and vessel fragments preserve names connected to Assyria and Elam.

Europe

Near Seddin, in the Prignitz region of northern Germany, a monumental mound of the ninth century BC covered a polygonal stone chamber holding more than 40 ceramic and metal objects, among them a full-hilted bronze sword. Its bronze amphora was made in a style foreign to the region, with parallels at the Etruscan town of Veii in Italy, and a bronze disk that covered the urn belongs to a type found almost only in the urnfield culture of southern Europe. The human remains from this King’s Grave went missing after excavation, so Anja Frank and colleagues measured strontium in 29 cremated petrous bones from five neighboring burial grounds of the period. Twenty of the people sampled had values higher than the local baseline and probably grew up elsewhere, though the authors caution that the regional baseline data are still thin.

• Must Farm: Bronze Age stilt houses that burned into a river850 BC

East Asia

Wet rice farming had come to the northern coast of Kyushu from the Korean peninsula, and a 2022 model of direct radiocarbon dates on charred rice grains by Enrico Crema, Chris Stevens and Shinya Shoda puts its arrival there between 1176 and 845 BC. On the peninsula, where rice had appeared around 1677 to 1161 BC, bone chemistry shows that millet supplied up to 40 percent of dietary protein in the Mumun period; when Oliver Craig and colleagues tested residues in 260 pots in 2025, a biomarker for broomcorn millet turned up only in the Korean vessels, not in the early farming pottery of Kyushu. In the Western Zhou foundries of the Xi’an region, bronze casters were breaking the old Shang animal mask into abstract curving bands, as on a hollow-legged tripod in the Cleveland Museum of Art that the museum dates to about 900 BC.

South Asia

Ancient remains from the Swat and Chitral districts of northern Pakistan supplied 117 of the individuals, dated from 1400 BC to AD 1700, that Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues analyzed in a 2019 study of ancient DNA. For the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age people of Swat, they dated the mixing-in of ancestry from steppe herders to about 1900 to 1500 BC, and they estimated that this steppe ancestry makes up as much as 30 percent of the ancestry of modern South Asian groups. They considered the movements behind it likely conduits for the spread of Indo-European languages into the subcontinent.

Central Asia

In the first millennium BC, confederations of nomadic tribes took shape across the steppe of Central Eurasia. Ayshin Ghalichi and colleagues date the Scytho-Siberian archaeological horizon, known for animal-style imagery, horse gear and distinctive weapons, from about 900 BC to about 200 BC; it came to cover more than 3,500 kilometers between the Altai Mountains and the Black Sea. In central Xinjiang, on the north bank of the Kaidu River, the oldest graves of the Hejing Huoergu Hydropower Station cemetery are stone chambers inside stone fences dated to around 2,800 years ago. Each held a single person with few objects, copper knives or sheep vertebrae, Li Haijun and colleagues reported in 2025.

The Americas

Aguada Fénix, in the Maya lowlands of southeastern Mexico, was built without prominent social hierarchies or permanent houses, as far as its excavators can tell, yet its Main Plateau measures 1,400 by 400 meters and stands 10 to 15 meters high. Takeshi Inomata and colleagues, reporting in 2025, used lidar and excavation to show that the plateau, raised between 1050 and 700 BC, was the center of a cross-shaped plan whose two main lines, 9 and 7.5 kilometers long, were marked by canals and corridors. In its central plaza a cruciform pit 5.9 by 5.6 meters held azurite to the north, malachite to the east, ochre to the south and marine shells to the west; radiocarbon dates place that cache between 900 and 845 BC, and the authors describe it as the earliest known set of directional color symbols in Mesoamerica.

• What was the Cascajal Block, the 62-sign stone from Veracruz?900 BC
• Twenty shell trumpets in a gallery: Chavín de Huántar, 2001 to 2025800 BC
• Seventeen heads, five to fifty tons: the Olmec portraits in basalt1000 BC

Oceania

Three people buried at Teouma, on Efate in Vanuatu, radiocarbon dated between 3,110 and 2,740 years before present and so within the Lapita period, gave Pontus Skoglund and colleagues genome-wide DNA in 2016. Their Papuan ancestry was estimated at 0 to 11 percent, against more than 25 percent in all present-day Oceanians, and a Tongan individual analyzed with them showed 0 to 17 percent. The authors concluded that the first people to reach the uninhabited islands of Remote Oceania came with little or possibly no mixture with Papuans, which leaves the Papuan share found there now to later contact.

• The Ferry Berth site: Samoa's one Lapita deposit, under a lagoon floor930 BC
• Who reached the remote Pacific first, and how did they get there?1000 BC
• 'Small scattered fragments do not a dwarf make': Palau, 20081000 BC
• A skull in Pot 2: the Teouma Lapita cemetery, Vanuatu, 2004 to 20201000 BC

Sources

• The Cleveland Museum of Art: Stele of the High Priest of Ptah, Shedsunefertem, 945–924 BCE, 1914.669
• Stefania Mainieri et al., "Faces Revealed Project and ancient Egyptian yellow coffins: A new methodology step-by-step," Open Research Europe 4 (2024)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ḥasanlu Teppe i. The Site (Robert H. Dyson Jr.)
• Williams et al., "Mesopotamian ancient DNA reveals Iron Age integration of heterogeneous Bronze Age genetic ancestries following resettlement," Genome Biology 27 (2026)
• Frank et al., "A Late Bronze Age foreign elite? Investigating mobility patterns at Seddin, Germany," PLoS ONE (2025)
• Crema, Stevens and Shoda, "Bayesian analyses of direct radiocarbon dates reveal geographic variations in the rate of rice farming dispersal in prehistoric Japan," Science Advances 8 (2022)
• 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)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: Hollow-Legged Tripod (Li Ding), Western Zhou dynasty, 1961.203
• Narasimhan et al., "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia," Science 365 (2019), author manuscript at PubMed Central
• Ghalichi et al., "Ancient DNA reveals elite dynastic rule among Iron Age Eurasian Steppe nomads," Science Advances 12 (2026)
• Li et al., "Ancient genomes shed light on the genetic history of the Iron Age to historical central Xinjiang, northwest China," BMC Biology 23 (2025)
• Inomata et al., "Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerica," Science Advances 11 (2025)
• Skoglund et al., "Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific," Nature 538 (2016), author manuscript at PubMed Central