The world in AD 200

Africa

Lepcis Magna, where Severus was born in 145, was filling with his monuments. The historian Jona Lendering’s chronology on Livius.org lists the emperor’s buildings there, among them an arch, a new forum, a basilica, a temple of his family and the harbor, and puts his visit to the city in 203, the year of a campaign against the Garamantes. In 201, preparing that trip, Severus founded Gholaia, now Bu Njem, one of a line of desert forts built by soldiers of the Third Legion Augusta about 100 km from the coast. By holding the wells, the forts kept large groups of nomads out of Tripolitania, and farmers who settled behind them fed the coastal towns of Sabratha, Oea and Lepcis.

• Which African kingdom minted gold coins and raised 23-meter stelae?AD 350

West Asia

Vologases V, king of Parthia from 191 to 208 in the chronology of the numismatist G. R. F. Assar, had backed the wrong claimant in Rome’s civil war of 193, recognizing the Syrian governor Pescennius Niger. Severus won, relieved the besieged city of Nisibis in the summer of 195, and accepted the surrender of King Abgar VIII of Edessa, whose towns went into a new Roman province, Mesopotamia. A second war broke out in 197, and Severus took the twin cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, a capital that covered 30 square kilometers against 13.7 for imperial Rome; the desert city of Hatra, besieged on his way home, held out. One modern estimate cited by Lendering holds that the gold and silver carried off from Ctesiphon postponed a European economic crisis by three or four decades, and the weakened Parthian state faced the revolt of the Persian vassal Ardashir in 224, who took Ctesiphon two years later.

• 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
• A goat for Aaron's tomb: Burckhardt at Petra, August 22, 1812AD 100

Europe

The emperor spent the year 200 in Rome, after a tour of Syria and Egypt. His rival in the west, Clodius Albinus, had been defeated near Lugdunum, modern Lyon, in 197, the same year the Christian writer Tertullian published his Apologeticum. Severus raised three new legions, numbered I, II and III Parthica, celebrated ten years of rule in 202 as consul with his son Caracalla, and staged the Secular Games in 204; an arch he built in Rome carried reliefs of the fall of Ctesiphon. He left for Britain in 208, took the title Britannicus in 210 and died at York on February 4, 211.

• A birthday invitation on a wooden leaf from Roman VindolandaAD 100
• Why Was This Bread Trapped in the Oven for 2,000 Years? PompeiiAD 79
• How Do You Read a 2,000-Year-Old Book Too Fragile to Open?AD 79

East Asia

Cao Cao (155-220) had held the young Emperor Xian of Han since 196, when his advisers Mao Jie and Xun Yu proposed moving the court to Xuxian, modern Xuchang in Henan. Because the central government no longer collected its taxes, the land around the new capital was turned into agrarian colonies, the tuntian, whose granaries fed his armies. In 200, in the account of the sinologist Ulrich Theobald, Cao Cao defeated “the vastly superior army of Yuan Shao” at Guandu, near modern Zhongmou in Henan, and secured the whole of northern China for the dynasty, then forced the Wuhuan federation of the northeast into submission. He became Counsellor-in-chief in 208 and turned to the south, held by Liu Biao, Sun Quan and Liu Bei.

South Asia

Mathura, in northern India, was a Kushan city. A gold coin of Vasudeva I in the Cleveland Museum of Art carries the king’s portrait and inscriptions in Kharosthi, and an inscription at Mathura dated to year 77 of the Kanishka era, equivalent to AD 204, credits Vasudeva’s predecessor Huvishka, already dead, with founding a Buddhist monastery on the Jamalpur mound near the city. The Cleveland museum dates the Satavahana period, named for the dynasty whose realm included what is now Andhra Pradesh, from the 100s BC to the AD 200s, which puts AD 200 in its last century. A limestone relief panel of a Jataka tale in the same collection, from Andhra Pradesh and possibly from Amaravati, is dated about 175 to 225.

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

Central Asia

Huvishka had reigned from at least 154 to 186, in the reckoning of the Iranist A. D. H. Bivar in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and a Kharosthi inscription on a vase from Wardak in Afghanistan, dated 177, shows his authority reached that far northwest. The temple at Surkh Kotal in Bactria appears to have been restored in his time. His successor Vasudeva is recorded in an inscription of 190 or 193, depending on the reading of the year. Bivar notes that apart from passing mentions in the Kashmir chronicle Rajatarangini, coins and inscriptions are the only evidence, and nothing is known of the political history of Huvishka’s reign; he reads the lavish gold coinage as a sign of wealth from the Silk Road trade.

• 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

The Americas

Teotihuacan, 48 km northeast of modern Mexico City, had begun to grow around 200 BC; according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), in the two centuries before the start of the era the Street of the Dead was laid out and the city reached 50,000 inhabitants. The Pyramid of the Sun, 225 m on a side and about 65 m high, was built in a single stage during the Tzacualli phase, AD 1 to 150, so by 200 it was complete. The city would peak at about 100,000 people between 350 and 450. On Peru’s North Coast, a 2025 study led by the archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter places the flourishing of the Moche culture between the fourth and tenth centuries AD, which by their dating puts AD 200 before it.

• 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

Oceania

Lake Te Roto, a crater lake on Atiu in the southern Cook Islands, has collected sediment almost without a break for more than 6,500 years, and a team led by David Sear of the University of Southampton read it for traces of the first people. The lake records no sign of humans in AD 200: fecal markers from pigs or people appear only between about 828 and 1004, and the team dates the dispersal into East Polynesia from about then, nearly 2,000 years after Tonga and Samoa were colonized. A gap of 800 to 1,200 km of open water separated Samoa and Tonga from the southern Cooks. On Atiu itself no early settlement site has been found, though the authors note that little archaeology has been done there.

• One fifth of Babeldaob: the terraced hills of Palau, 500 BC to AD 650AD 200

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Lucius Septimius Severus"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Gholaia (Bu Njem)"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Vologases V"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Ctesiphon"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Wei Wudi 魏武帝 Cao Cao 曹操" (2011)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. D. H. Bivar: "HUVIŠKA" (2004, updated 2013)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Buddha's Previous Life as a Woodpecker: Javasakunda Jataka" (1970.350)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Coin of Kushan King Vasudeva I" (1999.226)
• INAH, Dirección de Patrimonio Mundial: "Ciudad Prehispánica de Teotihuacán"
• PNAS 122 via PubMed Central, Quilter et al.: "Family relations of Moche elite burials on the North Coast of Peru (~500 CE)" (2025)
• PNAS 117(16) via PubMed Central, Sear et al.: "Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought" (2020)