The world in AD 1

Africa

Egypt had been a Roman province since 30 BC, and its Red Sea ports opened onto the Indian Ocean. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s handbook written in the first century AD, opened its route at “the Egyptian port of Mussel Harbor” and Berenice. South of Egypt the kingdom of Kush ruled the Middle Nile from Meroë, its main royal residence and burial ground since the third century BC, a city of pyramids, temples and iron-working quarters. Farther southeast, the Periplus named the port of Adulis, an inland ivory market at Coloe, and, five days beyond, “the city of the people called Auxumites,” the future Aksum, whose ruler Zoscales was said to read Greek.

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West Asia

The Parthian king Phraates IV was killed in 2 BC, and his son Phraataces took the throne. In AD 1 the Roman prince Gaius Caesar, grandson of Augustus, met Phraataces on an island in the Euphrates to settle the quarrel over Armenia, and the officer Velleius Paterculus, who was there, wrote that the Parthian dined with Gaius on the Roman bank and Gaius then supped with the king “on the soil of the enemy.” Trade crossed that frontier anyway. Caravans went from Antioch through Palmyra to Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, then over the Zagros to Ecbatana and Merv, while the Gulf port of Spasinu Charax fed goods up the Tigris and Euphrates and Nabataean Petra fed the road to Gaza.

Europe

Augustus had ruled Rome since 27 BC. By AD 1, in the words of the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman department, the city “was transformed from a city of modest brick and local stone into a metropolis of marble,” with the Ara Pacis finished between 13 and 9 BC and Virgil writing that the gods had ordained Rome mistress of the world. Drusus, the emperor’s stepson, had marched to the Elbe in 9 BC and died on the way back, and his brother Tiberius had deported thousands of Sugambri to the west bank in 9 and 8 BC. Three legions held camps along the Rhine and the Lippe. In September AD 9 the Cheruscan leader Arminius destroyed all three in the Teutoburg Forest, and Germania was never made a province.

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East Asia

The Western Han had ruled China from Chang’an since 206 BC. Under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BC) the Han had taken the Ferghana valley in 101 BC, seized its horses and gained control of the caravan routes north and south of the Taklamakan; silk and gold went west, and wine, grapes and alfalfa came back along the same roads. The Han Shu, the dynasty’s official history, records that in 1 BC the Xiongnu ruler, the Shanyu, came to court with 500 attendants and left with 370 coats, 30,000 pieces of silk and 30,000 pounds of raw silk, and that “for several generations, the country had not been startled by beacon fires on the northern borders.” The Western Han ended in AD 9, when Wang Mang took the throne.

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South Asia

Northwest India was changing hands. The Yuezhi, driven west by the Xiongnu, had reached Bactria around 135 BC; in the first century BC Kujula Kadphises united their tribes, the Kushans, and led them south into Gandhara, where they set up a capital near Kabul. His son was the first ruler in India to strike gold coins in imitation of the Roman aureus. In central India the great stupa at Sanchi, enlarged under the Sunga kings (184–72 BC), received carved gateways under the Satavahana dynasty in the first century AD. On the far south coast, the Periplus listed Muziris and Nelcynda in the kingdom of “Cerobothra,” the Chera, as the two leading markets, crowded with ships from Arabia and with Greeks, and credited a pilot named Hippalus with the first straight run across the ocean.

Central Asia

The steppe north of China belonged to the Xiongnu. Their ruler’s visit to Chang’an in 1 BC, recorded in the Han Shu, came with a request to bring 500 men “that they might witness the glory of the Son of Heaven.” A Han memorial preserved in the same history counted 36 kingdoms under the protector-general of the Western Regions and complained that Sogdiana and the Wusun had still crossed the White Dragon Mound to raid the border. South of the Oxus, the former nomads of Bactria were becoming the Kushan state. Between these powers the caravan road ran from Merv through Bukhara and Ferghana on one branch and into Bactria on the other, on the backs of Bactrian camels.

The Americas

Around AD 1 Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico “grows rapidly as rural populations move in, possibly coerced,” in the words of the Metropolitan Museum’s regional timeline; the grid plan and the first stage of the Pyramid of the Sun followed around AD 50. In the Petén lowlands of Guatemala the Maya city of El Mirador was in its Late Preclassic peak (300 BC to AD 150). Its La Danta complex stood on a platform 980 feet wide and 2,000 feet long, which the archaeologist Richard Hansen estimated took 15 million man-days to build; the city was abandoned, in Hansen’s words, “nearly 2,000 years ago” as of 2011. On the south coast of Peru, people of the Rio Grande de Nasca basin were scraping animal figures and lines into the desert, a practice UNESCO dates from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD.

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Oceania

Australia had been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, and the western Pacific was settled. Samoa had been occupied since about 800 BC, but a 2011 study of 1,434 radiocarbon dates by Janet Wilmshurst, Terry Hunt, Carl Lipo and Atholl Anderson found that no one sailed farther east for roughly 1,800 years: the Society Islands were first settled about AD 1025 to 1120, and the rest of East Polynesia, including Hawaii, New Zealand and Rapa Nui, between about AD 1190 and 1290. In AD 1 those 15 archipelagos were the last habitable places on Earth with no people. No written record exists for any part of the region at this date; what is known comes from pottery, radiocarbon dates and ancient DNA.

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Augustan Rule (27 B.C.–14 A.D.)" (2000)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Teutoburg Forest (9 CE)"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Phraataces"
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Trade between the Romans and the Empires of Asia" (2000)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.)" (2000)
• Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington: "Selections from the Han Narrative Histories" (Han Shu, translated by A. Wylie, 1874–1882)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Kushan Empire (ca. Second Century B.C.–Third Century A.D.)" (2000)
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: "Buddhist Monuments at Sanchi"
• Fordham University, Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: "The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea" (translated by W. H. Schoff, 1912)
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: "Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe"
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Central America, 1–500 A.D." (2000)
• Smithsonian Magazine, Chip Brown: "El Mirador, the Lost City of the Maya" (May 2011)
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: "Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa"
• PNAS 108(5) via PubMed Central, Wilmshurst, Hunt, Lipo and Anderson: "High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia" (2011)