The world in AD 150

Africa

Ptolemy of Alexandria, the astronomer, had written the Almagest around 140, according to the historian Jona Lendering’s chronology on Livius.org, which also has Rome fighting a war against the Moors from 144 to 152 and putting down risings in Africa in 160. In Roman Egypt, portraits in encaustic on linen were bound to the wrapped dead. The Cleveland Museum of Art dates one such portrait of a woman to between 138 and 192 and explains that these were apparently painted during the owner’s life and hung at home; at death the portrait was cut from its frame, trimmed and bound to the mummy, and the gilding was added then.

West Asia

Vologases IV took the Parthian throne in 147 in succession to his father, Mithradates V. That was also the last year of coins struck by Vologases III, a rival who had held the eastern provinces, and Lendering reads this as a sign that the new king removed him at once, though how is unknown. Vologases also seems to have won back Characene, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. Farther west, the Livius chronology records an earthquake in 151 that destroyed Smyrna and Mytilene, and lists the temple of Bacchus and the Great Court of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek among the buildings of Antoninus Pius.

• 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
• Did Persia really capture a Roman emperor alive in AD 260?AD 260
• How did a desert oasis get rich enough to challenge Rome?AD 270

Europe

Born at Lanuvium in 86, Antoninus had been proconsul of Asia in 135 or 136, and on succeeding Hadrian in 138 he accepted the title Pius. In 148 Rome marked its ninth centennial together with his first ten years of rule, and that same year the denarius was debased. Marcus Aurelius, already his caesar, had married his daughter, Faustina II, in 145, the year the two men held the consulship together and the Temple of Hadrian was dedicated in Rome. In Britain, the governor Lollius Urbicus had beaten the Brigantes in 139.

• 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

Liang Ji had inherited his father’s post of General-in-chief in 141, and in 146 he put Emperor Huan on the throne while his sister was Empress Dowager. She died in 150. In the account of the sinologist Ulrich Theobald, tribute from the whole empire went to Liang Ji before it reached the emperor, he decided which memorials the throne would see, and many of his worst abuses came after his sister’s death. Huan finally moved against him with the help of palace eunuchs, and the sale of the Liang family’s property brought the treasury enough money to lower taxes for a while.

South Asia

On a rock at Junagadh, the ancient Girinagara below the mountain now called Girnar, the Mahakshatrapa Rudradaman had an inscription cut that is dated in the year 72; F. Kielhorn of Göttingen, re-editing it for Epigraphia Indica, called it “our earliest Sanskrit inscription of importance.” It tells how a storm burst the dam of the lake Sudarsana, first built under the Maurya king Chandragupta, through a breach 420 cubits long and 75 cubits deep. Rudradaman paid for the repair from his own treasury rather than from taxes or forced labor and made the dam “three times as strong in breadth and length,” with the work carried out by his governor Suvisakha, a Pahlava. To the north, the Kushan king Kanishka I had founded a monastery at or near Peshawar that carried his name, known, Harry Falk writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, from a perfume casket and a rock painting.

• 'A veritable Roman town': Arikamedu and the Arretine sherds of 1945AD 50

Central Asia

Khotan, one of the two great kingdoms on the Southern Route east of the Pamirs, had 32,000 households and 83,000 people by the count in the Hou Hanshu. In 151 the Han Chief Scribe Zhao Ping died there of a carbuncle, and Cheng Guo, king of neighboring Jumi and long at odds with Jian, king of Khotan, told Zhao’s son that Jian had a doctor poison the wound. Sent to investigate in 152, Zhao’s successor Wang Jing took Cheng Guo’s advice, had Jian killed, and was himself killed when the Khotanese rose; the Khotanese then made Jian’s son An Guo king, and Emperor Huan refused to let the Dunhuang governor Ma Da march on them. West of the Pamirs, the Bactrian inscription of Rabatak says that Kanishka “inaugurated the year one,” and Falk places that year in 127/8, which puts AD 150 in about the 23rd year of the Kushan era.

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

The Americas

Teotihuacan’s largest palace stood near a small temple decorated with green-feathered serpents, which the Cleveland Museum of Art calls symbols of the earth’s fertility. Beneath that temple lie the remains of at least 120 sacrificial victims, most of them men and many of them warriors, some buried with greenstone ornaments. The museum dates a jadeite necklace with a gold nose ornament, and a pair of ear ornaments, of this kind to 150 to 200, and suggests the burials may have consecrated the temple, a ruler’s tomb, or both.

• 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
• Gold seized by police in February 1987 led archaeologists to SipánAD 250

Oceania

Potters in Tonga had given up their craft centuries before AD 150. A 2018 study led by David Burley of Simon Fraser University used 44 radiocarbon dates from 13 settlements to place the end of Polynesian Plainware, the undecorated pottery that followed Lapita, no later than 2350 calibrated years before present. That cut the length of the plainware phase, which began around 2700 years before present, to about 350 years. Most of the 13 sites were coastal settlements first occupied during or near the end of the Lapita phase that stayed inhabited through the later periods without pottery, and several remain villages today.

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

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Antoninus Pius"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Vologases IV"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Liang Ji 梁冀" (2012)
• 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, Nicholas Sims-Williams and Harry Falk: "KUSHAN DYNASTY ii. Inscriptions of the Kushans" (2014)
• Epigraphia Indica, Vol. 8 (1905-06), F. Kielhorn: "No. 6, Junagadh Rock Inscription of Rudradaman; the Year 72", via Internet Archive
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Funerary Portrait of a Woman" (1971.136)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Necklace and Nose Ornament" (1990.263)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Pair of Ear Ornaments" (1990.264)
• PLoS One 13(2) via PubMed Central, Burley, Connaughton and Clark: "Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga" (2018)