The world in AD 250

Africa

Nubia, the kingdom of Kush, was in what archaeologists call its Meroitic period, named for the capital far up the Nile at Meroë. At Toshka West in Lower Nubia, a joint expedition of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and the Peabody Museum of Yale University opened an extensive cemetery in its second field season, beginning in January 1962; William Kelly Simpson, reporting the work in the Penn Museum’s Expedition Magazine, wrote that the tombs nearest the riverbank belonged mainly to the first, second and early third centuries AD, a time when Egypt to the north lay under Roman rule. The same ground was reused afterward for burials of the following X-Group period and, later still, for Coptic Christian graves.

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

West Asia

Shapur I (r. 239-70), the second Sasanian king of kings, had shared rule with his father Ardashir I from about 240 and had already beaten one Roman emperor: Gordian III died in 244 while attacking Persian Mesopotamia, and his successor Philip the Arab, in Shapur’s own account carved into the trilingual inscription at the Ka’ba-ye Zardošt, paid 500,000 dinars in ransom for his life and agreed to become tributary. The Encyclopaedia Iranica dates to about AD 250 Shapur’s renewed invasion of Mesopotamia, which he broke off when a serious disturbance in a district of Khorasan forced him east to settle it in person, following the account of the historian Tabari, before he could resume the war. Once he turned back west, his army destroyed a Roman force of 60,000 at Barbalissos on the Euphrates and went on to burn and take cities across Syria and Cappadocia. In a third campaign near Carrhae and Edessa in 260, Shapur would capture the emperor Valerian alive, an event he had carved into rock reliefs across Fars showing the captive Caesar unfettered and still in regalia.

• 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

Rome’s throne in 250 belonged to Decius, born around 195 near Sirmium, who according to the chronology kept by the historian Jona Lendering on Livius.org had proclaimed himself emperor in 249 by defeating Philip the Arab near Verona and had opened a major persecution of Christians that same year. Serving his second consulship in 250, Decius faced a Visigothic invasion of Thrace; a local Roman commander named Priscus was proclaimed a rival emperor, and Decius defeated and killed him, taking the titles Dacicus Maximus and Germanicus Maximus for his war against the Goths. Livius also lists, among that year’s events elsewhere in the Roman world, the mathematician Diophantus’s publication of the Arithmetica. Decius did not survive the next round of the Gothic war: in 251, serving a third consulship together with his son Herennius, both were killed in battle on the Danube. The army then proclaimed Trebonianus Gallus emperor, while Decius’s other son Hostilian, briefly his successor in Rome, died of the plague that was spreading through the empire.

East Asia

North China was ruled from Luoyang by the Wei court under Cao Fang (r. 239-54), still a child, with the general Sima Yi (179-251) acting as regent. Sima Yi had eliminated the rival regent Cao Shuang’s faction in 249 and, according to Ulrich Theobald’s chronology of the Cao-Wei state on Chinaknowledge.de, would put down a further revolt led by the Defender-in-chief Wang Ling in 251. Five years earlier, in 245, the Wei general Guanqiu Jian had forced the kingdom of Goguryeo into submission, and the same chronology records that the Wei court at Luoyang received tribute from Queen Himiko (c. 170-c. 248) of Yamatai in Japan. South of the Yangtze, Sun Quan (182-252), who had taken the imperial title in 229, still ruled the empire of Wu, and in the west the empire of Shu-Han, founded by Liu Bei in 221, had lost its most effective military leader when the strategist Zhuge Liang died in 234.

South Asia

In the northwest, the Sasanian governors called Kushanshah were extending their rule into Gandhara, the old Kushan heartland along the upper Indus later famous for its Buddhist sculpture. Farther into the subcontinent, a birch-bark manuscript of arithmetic rules discovered in the summer of 1881 near the village of Bakhshali, in the Peshawar district’s Yusufzai subdivision, carries an age still argued over: the MacTutor History of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews reports that the scholar F. R. Hoernle placed it in the third or fourth century AD, that M. N. Channabasappa proposed a range of AD 200 to 400, and that MacTutor’s own authors, J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, judge it more likely a later copy of a work first composed around AD 400. In its equations, a large dot stands for an unknown quantity and was sometimes used for zero as well; O’Connor and Robertson write that accepting a date as early as AD 400 for that style of numeral would force a substantial revision of the whole timeline historians have built for the development of Indian numerals.

Central Asia

Bactria and the lands between the Oxus and the Indus had for two centuries belonged to the Kushan dynasty, whose kings, among them Kanishka, the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates from the first century AD onward. By the middle of the third century, per the encyclopedia’s own entry on the Kushan dynasty, Kushan rule was giving way in part of that territory to Sasanian princes who took the title Kushanshah; a separate Iranica entry on the Kushanshahs places their rule over parts of eastern Iran, Afghanistan and Gandhara between the third-century Sasanian conquest and the Hunnic invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries.

• 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

In the woodlands of eastern North America, the culture later called Hopewell was part of a phenomenon that, in the words of the US National Park Service’s history of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ohio, flourished from AD 1 to 400 and built earthen enclosures and mounds in geometric patterns. The park’s own sites, among them the Mound City group, sat within a wider network of contacts stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains, one that brought Hopewell peoples mica, shark’s teeth, obsidian, copper and marine shells from far outside Ohio. In the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, the earliest carved stone monument yet found bearing a Long Count date, Tikal’s Stela 29, was unearthed by the University Museum’s Edwin M. Shook in 1959 and published in Expedition Magazine the following year; its inscribed date, 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Zip, is usually converted to AD 292, though the magazine’s own account of that conversion, by Linton Satterthwaite, notes that the correlation between the Maya and Christian calendars is a matter of theory and could be disputed. Whatever its precise year, the stela predates the next-oldest dated lowland Maya monuments, the Leyden Plaque and Uaxactun’s Stela 9, by several decades.

• 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

East of Samoa and Tonga, the Pacific was still empty of people. A 2011 study of 1,434 radiocarbon dates by Janet Wilmshurst, Terry Hunt, Carl Lipo and Atholl Anderson, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Polynesians had settled Samoa by about 800 BC but did not push on into the remote islands of East Polynesia, more than 500 islands across an ocean region the size of North America, until about AD 1025 to 1120, a pause the authors put at roughly 1,800 years. By AD 250 that pause had run about 1,050 of its 1,800 years, with New Zealand, Hawaii, Rapa Nui and the rest of the region still centuries from their first human footprint.

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

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. Shapur Shahbazi: "ŠĀPUR I" (2002, updated 2018)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: "Kushan Dynasty" (2014, updated 2016)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: "Kushanshahs" (2016)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Decius"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Three Empires 三國, 220-280 CE"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Empire of Cao-Wei 曹魏" (2011)
• The Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 4(4), William Kelly Simpson: "Nubia 1962: Excavations at Toshka and Arminna" (1962)
• The Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 2(2), Edwin M. Shook: "Tikal Stela 29" (1960)
• The Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 2(2), Linton Satterthwaite: "Maya 'Long Count' Numbers" (1960)
• US National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: "History & Culture"
• MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson: "The Bakhshali manuscript" (2000)
• 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)