The world in AD 100

Africa

Thamugadi, now Timgad in Algeria, was founded around AD 100 by Trajan and settled with veteran legionaries, under the full name Colonia Marciana Ulpia Traiana Thamugadi. Its streets ran on a grid, and its western gate was dedicated to the emperor. Africa also came before a Roman court: in 99 or 100 Pliny the Younger and the historian Tacitus prosecuted Marius Priscus, a former governor of Africa, who was forced to plead guilty; Pliny spoke for nearly five hours and wrote that Trajan more than once sent word through a freedman that he should “spare my voice and lungs.”

• Was Cleopatra a seductress, and was she Egyptian? What the ancient sources say30 BC

West Asia

Pacorus II ruled Parthia from 78 to 105 in the chronology of the numismatist G. R. F. Assar; he enlarged Ctesiphon, built its city walls and exchanged letters and presents with Decebalus, king of the Dacians. Revolts broke out in the east of his empire, the last under a rival named Vologases III around 105. At Tiaozhi, which the translator John Hill identifies as Characene and Susiana at the head of the Gulf, the Han envoy Gan Ying was told in 97 by sailors of the Parthian frontier that a round trip could take three months with good winds and two years with bad, “that is why all the men who go by sea take stores for three years,” and he gave up the crossing. A limestone relief from the caravan city of Palmyra, dated 100 to 150 by the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows riders in Parthian dress on Arabian horses ahead of men on camels, which the museum reads as a possible reference to the caravans that made the city rich.

• A goat for Aaron's tomb: Burckhardt at Petra, August 22, 1812AD 100
• A synagogue to Damascus, a church to Yale: Dura-Europos, 1920–1937AD 245

Europe

Trajan had been born at Italica in 53 and adopted by Nerva in 97. In September and October of AD 100 the consuls were Pliny the Younger, then 38, and his friend Gaius Julius Cornutus Tertullus; Pliny presided over the Senate, judged cases and put on gladiatorial games, one of them on September 18, the emperor’s birthday. Jona Lendering’s chronology on Livius.org dates Pliny’s Panegyricus to the same year and Tacitus’s Germania to 98. The Dacian War began in 101, and Trajan celebrated his first Dacian triumph in 102.

• A birthday invitation on a wooden leaf from Roman VindolandaAD 100
• Pompeii in AD 79, from Pliny's letters to the plaster castsAD 79
• How the Herculaneum scrolls are being read without being openedAD 79

East Asia

Xu Shen (c. 58 to c. 147), a scholar of the Later Han, finished the Shuowen jiezi in 100, but his son Xu Chong did not submit it to the court until 121. Its 9,353 head characters and 1,163 variants are arranged under 540 radicals, each head written in small-seal script with the explanation in the chancery script of the day; Xu compiled it to help readers of the Confucian classics that had surfaced in older scripts. The sinologist Ulrich Theobald notes that it later made the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, found only in the early 20th century, easier to read. The throne belonged to Emperor He, whose general Dou Xian had won a great victory over the Xiongnu in 89.

South Asia

In the Encyclopaedia Iranica the Iranist A. D. H. Bivar writes that the accession of the Kushan king Vima Kadphises “is not precisely fixed” but probably fell around AD 100. His reign brought a standardized copper currency and an important gold coinage, which Bivar ties to Silk Road trade and to the Roman silver and gold that paid for eastern goods. Stupa complexes at Manikiyala near Rawalpindi and at Guldarra near Kabul have primary deposits dated by his gold pieces. The Hou Hanshu, drawing on a Han general’s report of 125, says the Kushans had killed the kings of Tianzhu, in Hill’s reading northwestern India, and installed their own generals to govern it.

• 'A veritable Roman town': Arikamedu and the Arretine sherds of 1945AD 50
• 'Carving done by the ivory-workers of Vedisa': who paid for Sanchi50 BC

Central Asia

Ban Chao had been in the Western Regions since 73, when the Han sent him to Kashgar, and in 91 he was named Protector General and stationed at Kucha. After he defeated Karashahr in 94, according to the Hou Hanshu, more than 50 kingdoms sent hostages. The same history puts the center of the Kushan kingdom at Lanshi, Bactra or Balkh, with 100,000 households, 400,000 people and more than 100,000 men able to bear arms. The Han hold did not last: after Emperor He died in 105 the Western Regions rebelled, and in 107 the court abolished the post of Protector General because these regions were “remote, difficult, and dangerous to reach.”

• Two walled-up rooms at Begram, 1937 and 1939: glass, ivory and lacquerAD 100
• He put it into Aryan: the Rabatak inscription of Kanishka, found 1993AD 127
• A Tiberius aureus in tomb 3: the six graves of Tillya Tepe, 1978AD 25

The Americas

Across the woodlands of eastern North America, communities of the Hopewell culture, which the National Park Service dates from AD 1 to 400, raised enclosures of earthen walls and ditches in geometric patterns, along with mounds. Their contacts ran from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains and brought mica, shark’s teeth, obsidian, copper and marine shells to sites such as the five now protected in Ross County, Ohio. On Peru’s North Coast, Moche metalsmiths joined sheets of gold and silver by heating and hammering; the Cleveland Museum of Art dates a nose ornament of serpents and long-necked water birds made this way to about 100 to 300 and places the Moche culture between 50 and 800.

• Mound City, twenty-four mounds in 1848 and an army camp in 1917AD 200
• How did the Nazca draw figures they could never see whole?AD 200
• How big was Teotihuacan, and who ran it?AD 200
• The Maya shell zero, and the Long Count it served36 BC

Oceania

Ten radiocarbon dates on human bone from Burial Ground 1 at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes, on the southwest coast of Viti Levu in Fiji, spread over about 600 years, from 1,888 to 1,272 calibrated years before present, a range that opens in the first century AD. Simon Best excavated the graves in 1987 and 1988, and a 2024 study led by Estelle Herrscher of Aix-Marseille University measured isotopes in bone and teeth from 38 adults. The diets leaned toward marine food, with differences between men and women that the authors trace to daily work rather than to burial customs. Farther west in Vanuatu, the same paper notes, people of 2,500 to 2,000 years ago had shifted to a more terrestrial and vegetarian diet than the first Lapita settlers.

• Sand, reef and stick charts: settling the Marshall IslandsAD 1
• One fifth of Babeldaob: the terraced hills of Palau, 500 BC to AD 650AD 200

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Trajan"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Pliny the Younger (4): Trajan"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Thamugadi (Timgad)"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Pacorus II"
• Silk Road Seattle, University of Washington: "The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu" (Hou Hanshu 88, translated by John E. Hill, 2nd ed., 2003)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. D. H. Bivar: "KUSHAN DYNASTY i. Dynastic History" (2009, updated 2014)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Shuowen jiezi 說文解字" (2018)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Procession of Nobles" (1970.15)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Nose Ornament with Serpents and Long-necked Birds" (2005.177)
• National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: "History & Culture"
• PLoS One 19(5) via PubMed Central, Herrscher et al.: "Life histories in Fiji as reconstructed from first millennium CE Sigatoka Sand Dune burials using isotopes" (2024)