The world in AD 350

Africa

Rome’s African provinces passed to Magnentius in 350; the historian Eutropius, writing under the emperor Valens, lists Africa with Italy and Gaul as the lands he governed after Constans died. By the middle of the decade the kingdom of Aksum, far to the southeast, had a Christian bishop, Frumentius, whom Athanasius of Alexandria had raised to that rank. After Athanasius had been driven from Alexandria in 356, Constantius wrote to “Æzanes and Sazanes,” the princes of Aksum, ordering them to send Frumentius to Egypt to be examined by Athanasius’s replacement. Athanasius copied the letter into his defense addressed to the emperor, and in it Constantius warns of the danger that the deposed bishop might “pass over into Auxumis and corrupt your people.”

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

West Asia

Nisibis, a Roman frontier city, came under Persian siege in 350, according to the chronology Jona Lendering keeps on Livius.org. Touraj Daryaee, writing for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, counts three sieges of the city by Shapur II during his war with Constantius, a war that went in favor of neither side and had settled into stalemate by 350, partly because nomads pressing on Persia’s eastern borders drew the king away. In Armenia the reign of King Tiran, who had tried to play Rome and Persia against each other, ended in 350, and his son Arshak II took the throne for the next 17 years.

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Europe

Within a single year the Latin West changed hands and the Balkans acquired an emperor who, in Eutropius’s words, “did not even acquire the first rudiments of literature until he was old and had become emperor.” That was Vetranio, an elderly and popular general whom the soldiers of Illyricum raised to the throne after Constans died at a fortress called Helena near the Spanish border. In Rome, Nepotianus, a son of Constantine’s sister, tried to take power with a band of gladiators and lasted 28 days before the officers of Magnentius overthrew him. By the end of 350 Vetranio had laid down the purple in favor of Constantius, and the following year Constantius defeated Magnentius near Mursa; Magnentius took his own life at Lyon in 353.

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

East Asia

Ran Min, an adoptive grandson of the Later Zhao ruler Shi Hu, seized power in 350, removed the Shi princes Shi Jian and Shi Zhi and proclaimed a Wei dynasty of his own, known to historians as Ran-Wei. Ulrich Theobald, on Chinaknowledge.de, dates that state to 350-352 in one table and 350-353 in another; either way it was conquered by Murong Jun of the Former Yan, a Xianbei ruler who had moved his capital to Ji, near modern Beijing. The same upheaval set the Di chieftain Fu Hong, whose people Shi Hu had resettled in Henan, to declare himself King of the Three Qin; when he died before the march began, his son Fu Jian led the Di west, secured the region around Chang’an and in 351 proclaimed himself emperor of the Former Qin.

South Asia

Gold coins struck for the Gupta king Samudragupta show the earlier king Chandragupta I with his queen, Kumaradevi. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco dates its example, 2.2 centimeters across and from northwest India, to between approximately 330 and 376. Daryaee writes that around this time Hunnic groups, probably the Kidarites, were threatening both Persia and the Gupta realm, and that Middle Persian inscriptions place Sind within Shapur II’s eastern boundary.

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Central Asia

Ammianus Marcellinus, the fourth-century Roman historian, is the first writer to name the Chionites, a people Wolfgang Felix of the Encyclopaedia Iranica describes as probably Iranian in origin and prominent in Bactria and Transoxania. Shapur II wintered in their territory and that of the Kushans in 356-57, and by 358 Chionite troops were serving in his army under their king Grumbates. Scholars differ on when they arrived: Franz Altheim placed their conquest of Sogdia not long after 350, while Károly Czeglédy first dated their union with another people to between about 350 and 450 and later moved it before 350, locating it in the Altai.

The Americas

Earthen enclosures in geometric patterns, along with mounds of various shapes, mark the culture the National Park Service calls Hopewell, a network of shared beliefs and practices among different Native American groups that flourished in the woodlands of eastern North America from 1 to 400. Its contacts reached from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains and brought mica, shark’s teeth, obsidian, copper and marine shells to Ohio. Far to the south in Oaxaca, Zapotec potters were shaping funerary urns such as the terracotta example in the Cleveland Museum of Art, 38.3 centimeters high and dated 350 to 500.

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Oceania

Nobody in Tonga had made pottery for centuries by AD 350. A 2018 study in PLoS One by David Burley, Sean Connaughton and Geoffrey Clark, using 44 radiocarbon dates from 13 sites across Tonga, set the end of the Polynesian Plainware ceramic phase no later than 2,350 calibrated years before present, roughly 400 BC, and shortened that phase to 350 years or less after the decorated Lapita wares disappeared. “It seems aberrant, then, that a society could or would abandon a robust potting industry without apparent reason,” the authors write. Several of the coastal sites they dated were occupied without a break into the villages of the present day.

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

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Constantius II"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Magnentius"
• Eutropius: "Abridgment of Roman History" Book X (translated by John Selby Watson, George Bell and Sons, 1886), Tertullian Project
• Athanasius: "Apologia ad Constantium" (translated by M. Atkinson and Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4, 1892), New Advent
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Touraj Daryaee: "Šāpur II" (2009, updated 2018)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Wolfgang Felix: "Chionites" (1991, updated 2013)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Later Zhao Empire and Ran-Wei" (2011)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Former Qin Empire" (2011)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Former Yan Empire" (2011)
• Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, collection: "The Gupta king Chandragupta I and his queen, Kumaradevi, obverse side of a coin issued by the Gupta king Samudragupta" (F1999.38.3)
• National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: "History & Culture"
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Funerary Urn" (1944.78)
• PLoS One 13(2) via PubMed Central, Burley, Connaughton and Clark: "Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga" (2018)