The world in AD 300

Africa

Upstream of Elephantine, Rome gave up a stretch of the Nile valley that had once reached a further seven days’ journey south. Procopius, writing under Justinian, tells how Diocletian judged the tribute from those districts too small to pay for the garrison stationed there, persuaded the Nobatae to move from the country around Oasis to the river, handed them the Roman cities beyond Elephantine, and fixed a yearly payment in gold to them and to the Blemyes on condition that they stop raiding Roman land. Procopius adds that the gold was still being paid in his own day, though the raids had not stopped. He gives no year for the arrangement; Diocletian was in Egypt in 297 and 298, putting down a revolt that ended with the sack of Alexandria.

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

West Asia

Narseh, a son of Shapur I, had taken the Sasanian throne in 293 at an age of roughly 60 to 65, after the nobility turned against his grandnephew Bahram III, whose four-month reign is known only from Narseh’s own inscription on the tower at Paikuli in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ursula Weber, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, quotes that inscription’s claim that “Caesar and the Romans were in gratitude (?) and peace and friendship with us,” yet war broke out three years later: Galerius suffered a heavy defeat between Callinicum and Carrhae in the spring of 297, then surprised Narseh’s camp in Armenia, took members of his family and many nobles captive, and dictated the peace of 298. Weber writes that Narseh must have seen the treaty as a grave loss of prestige; she ends his reign in 302 (Livius.org dates his death to 303), and only his grandson Shapur II won back much of the lost ground, in a treaty with the emperor Jovian in 363.

• How did a desert oasis get rich enough to challenge Rome?AD 270
• Did Persia really capture a Roman emperor alive in AD 260?AD 260
• A synagogue to Damascus, a church to Yale: Dura-Europos, 1920–1937AD 245

Europe

Diocletian, emperor since 284, had shared the rank of Augustus with Maximian since 286, and in 293 the two named Galerius and Constantius, nicknamed Chlorus, “the pale one,” as their Caesars, the arrangement known as the First Tetrarchy. The chronologies Jona Lendering keeps on Livius.org place the start of a protracted war in the Rhineland in 300, while Galerius was fighting a long campaign along the Danube against the Sarmatians and Carpi that had begun the year before. A monetary reform and an edict on maximum prices followed in 301, and an edict against the Christians in 303. On May 1, 305, Diocletian and Maximian resigned, and Diocletian retired to Spalatum, modern Split, where he died in 313.

• Fragment 8 of Priscus: wooden cups at Attila's court, 448 or 449AD 449

East Asia

Luoyang, capital of the Western Jin, saw the faction of Empress Jia (257-300) fall in 300. Ulrich Theobald’s political history of the Jin on Chinaknowledge.de records that after the empress had the heir apparent, Sima Yu, put to death that year, the princes Sima Lun and Sima Tong entered the capital and killed her and her followers; Sima Lun took over the government and in 301 tried to make himself emperor, one round in the fifteen-year struggle historians call the Rebellion of the Eight Princes (291-306). In Goguryeo, according to the National Institute of Korean History, the chief minister Chang Jo-ri deposed King Bongsang in 300 while the king was out hunting and enthroned his nephew Eulbul, who became King Micheon; the Samguk sagi relates that Eulbul had fled after his father was ordered to take his own life and had lived as a hired laborer and a salt peddler. Micheon reigned until 331, led 30,000 troops against the Chinese commandery of Xuantu in 302, and brought the commandery of Lelang to an end in 313.

South Asia

Buddhist monasteries at Hadda, in present-day Afghanistan on the northwestern edge of the subcontinent, were producing figures in stucco. The Cleveland Museum of Art dates to about AD 300 a figure of a layman bearing offerings, 25.3 centimeters tall and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, probably from the Hadda site of Tape Shotor. The museum’s note on the piece says the monasteries were famous internationally until fire destroyed them in the 800s, that the British explorer Charles Masson documented the ruins a thousand years later, and that French archaeologists excavated them systematically between 1926 and 1929.

Central Asia

Sogdian traders from Samarkand kept agents in the cities along the road into China, and one of their letters mentions “100 freemen from Samarkand” in such a colony. Aurel Stein found five nearly complete letters and fragments of others in 1907 in a ruined watchtower on the Chinese frontier wall between Dunhuang and Loulan; one was addressed to Samarkand, 2,000 miles to the west, and a writer in another complains, “it is three years since I have received an answer from them.” Nicholas Sims-Williams, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, reports that W. B. Henning dated the letters to 312-13 from one letter’s mention of the Huns’ destruction of Luoyang, a date generally accepted, although A. Fujieda held that the paper could be no earlier than the sixth century and J. Harmatta linked the letters to an earlier sack of Luoyang in 190.

The Americas

Potters at Teotihuacan in central Mexico made earthenware figurines in great abundance, and the Cleveland Museum of Art dates to between 150 and 350 an unusually large figurine head from the city, pressed in a mold and then retouched by hand; the museum notes that the earliest Teotihuacan figurines were modeled entirely by hand and that such figures may have been used in household rituals. The same collection holds a greenstone mask from Teotihuacan, dated only to between AD 1 and 550, whose eyes and mouth once held inlays and which, the museum suggests, was perhaps tied through holes in its back to a body-shaped form dressed in garments and a headdress.

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

Rat-gnawed seed cases buried in New Zealand sediments set a limit on when people could have landed there. In a 2008 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Janet Wilmshurst and three colleagues noted that proposed settlement dates for East Polynesia ranged from about 200 BC to AD 1000 or later, and that a series of old Pacific rat bone dates processed in 1995 and 1996 was the only direct evidence for an early human presence in New Zealand. Redating bones from the same sites and dating the gnawed seeds, they found that the rat, carried through the Pacific by prehistoric voyagers, reached both main islands about 1280, a millennium later than previously assumed.

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

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Diocletian"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Galerius"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Constantius I Chlorus"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ursula Weber: "Narseh" (2016, updated 2018)
• LacusCurtius, Procopius: "History of the Wars" I.19-20 (Loeb Classical Library, 1914)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Political History of the Jin Period" (2011)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 우리역사넷, 한국사연대기: "미천왕 미상~331"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Nicholas Sims-Williams: "Ancient Letters" (1985, updated 2018)
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Layman bearing offerings" (1967.40)
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Figurine Head Fragment" (1921.1709)
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Mask" (1942.1094)
• PNAS 105(22) via PubMed Central, Wilmshurst, Anderson, Higham and Worthy: "Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat" (2008)