The world in AD 50

Africa

Mauretania, the last client kingdom on Rome’s African coast, had become two provinces only a few years earlier. Caligula had invited its king Ptolemy, son of Juba II, to Rome and had him killed; a freedman of the king named Aedemon then led a revolt, and Claudius annexed the country in 44, splitting it into Mauretania Tingitana in the west and Mauretania Caesariensis in the east. A stela at Volubilis, in present-day Morocco, honors Marcus Valerius Severus, son of Bostar, who commanded local auxiliaries against Aedemon and then won from Claudius Roman citizenship, the right to marry non-Roman wives and a ten-year tax exemption for his people. His wife, Fabia Bira, daughter of Izelta, paid for the monument; Bouke Slofstra, writing on Livius.org, reads the father’s name as Punic and the women’s names as native Libyan, following Thouvenot’s 1949 study of Volubilis.

• Was Cleopatra a seductress, and was she Egyptian? What the ancient sources say30 BC

West Asia

Gotarzes II held the Parthian throne in AD 50, having returned to it after his brother Vardanes I was assassinated around 47. He died in 51, and his successor Vonones II was followed almost at once by Vologases I, whom Tacitus called the son of Vonones and a Greek concubine; the reign of 51 to 78 follows G. R. F. Assar’s chronology. In 52 Vologases invaded Armenia, took its capitals Artaxata and Tigranocerta and made his younger brother Tiridates king, breaking a treaty of 20 BC that let Rome appoint the kings of Armenia. A hard winter and an epidemic forced him home, and the Armenian question passed to Nero’s reign.

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

Europe

Claudius, emperor since 41, adopted his stepson Lucius Domitius in AD 50, the year of the consuls Gaius Antistius and Marcus Suillius, and the boy, born in December 37, became Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus on February 25. Tacitus wrote that the freedman Pallas pushed the adoption through and that Claudius gave Nero, “with his three years’ seniority,” precedence over his own son Britannicus, while Agrippina, Nero’s mother and the emperor’s wife, received the title Augusta. The same year she had a colony of veterans planted in the Ubian town on the Rhine where she was born, the future Cologne, and it took its name from her. In Upper Germany auxiliaries turned back a raid by the Chatti and freed, in Tacitus’s words, “a few survivors of the Varian disaster” after forty years in slavery, and the Chatti then sent envoys and hostages to Rome.

• Pompeii in AD 79, from Pliny's letters to the plaster castsAD 79
• How the Herculaneum scrolls are being read without being openedAD 79
• A birthday invitation on a wooden leaf from Roman VindolandaAD 100
• Bronze gears from a wreck off Antikythera modeled the Greek sky100 BC

East Asia

Emperor Guangwu, who reigned from 25 to 57, was the Han ruler in AD 50, and the Book of the Later Han records an embassy from the eastern edge of his world in his last year. In 57, it says, the state of Na in Wa sent tribute, its envoy calling himself a grandee, and Guangwu bestowed a seal and ribbon. A farmer named Jinbei found a gold seal under a stone on Shikanoshima island, now part of Fukuoka in Japan, in 1784, and the scholar Kamei Nanmei matched it to that passage. Fukuoka City’s register of cultural properties gives its mass as 108.729 grams and its face as 2.347 centimeters on a side, the one-inch square of Han official seals, and states that forgery claims have been ruled out by comparison with ancient Chinese seals and by scientific measurement.

• Why Sima Qian accepted castration to finish the Shiji99 BC

South Asia

A Kharoshthi inscription from Takht-i Bahi is dated to the 26th regnal year of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares and to year 103 of an era that A. D. H. Bivar, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, identifies with the Vikrama era beginning in 57 BC. That puts the inscription in AD 46 and his accession around AD 20. Coming down from Drangiana and Arachosia into the Punjab, Gondophares expelled the Kushan prince Kujula Kadphises from Taxila after a brief incursion that Bivar infers from a single coin find, and his realm lasted until about AD 60. D. W. MacDowall argued that several kings bore the name Gondophares, so coins credited to one ruler may belong to more than one.

• 'A veritable Roman town': Arikamedu and the Arretine sherds of 1945AD 50
• 'Carving done by the ivory-workers of Vedisa': who paid for Sanchi50 BC

Central Asia

Suoche, the oasis kingdom of Yarkand, dominated the Tarim Basin under its king Xian, who had succeeded his brother Kang in 33. According to the Hou Hanshu, in John Hill’s translation, Guangwu granted Xian the seal of Protector General of the Western Regions in 41 and then took it back when Pei Zun, governor of Dunhuang, objected that foreigners should not hold such authority; Xian styled himself “Great Protector General” anyway. When 18 kings sent their sons to court in 45 asking for a real Protector General, Guangwu sent them home, and after Xian annexed Kucha in 46 the emperor told the king of Shanshan that each kingdom should seek help “wherever they can, to the east, west, south, or north.” Toward the end of Guangwu’s reign Xian also took Khotan, whose new king, Guang De, defeated him in 61.

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

The Americas

Recuay potters in the northern highlands of Peru worked in three colors, black, white and red, on vessels that the Cleveland Museum of Art dates broadly between AD 1 and 700. One shows what may be the house of an elite family, with two groups of people inside and three of them holding cups, which the museum reads as a ceremonial gathering. In the Calima region of Colombia, goldsmiths of the Yotoco period, dated by the same museum from AD 1 to 800, hammered bilobed chest ornaments that rank among the largest torso ornaments made in the ancient Americas and were apparently worn by chiefs. The museum’s date ranges span centuries, so none of these pieces can be tied to AD 50 itself.

• The Maya shell zero, and the Long Count it served36 BC
• 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

Chuuk and Pohnpei, in Central Micronesia, had probably been settled not long before. A 2022 ancient DNA study in Science led by Yue-Chen Liu of Harvard Medical School puts the oldest evidence of people in Central Micronesia at about 2,000 years ago, with pottery on Pohnpei that resembles late Lapita ware, and dates the mixing of Lapita-related and New Guinea-related ancestry in Chuuk and Pohnpei to between 2,100 and 1,800 years ago. Eleven ancient individuals from Pohnpei carried about 27% Papuan ancestry, the same share as people on Chuuk and Pohnpei today. Present-day CHamoru of Guam, in the Mariana Islands, were the only Remote Oceanian group in the study with no detectable Papuan ancestry.

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

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Claudius"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Nero"
• LacusCurtius, Bill Thayer: Tacitus, Annals, Book XII, chapters 1-40 (Loeb Classical Library translation, 1937)
• Livius.org, Bouke Slofstra: "Stela of Marcus Valerius Severus"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Vologases I"
• 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)
• City of Fukuoka, Cultural Properties of Fukuoka City: "Gold seal (inscribed Kan no Wa no Na no Kokuo)" (in Japanese)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. D. H. Bivar: "GONDOPHARES" (2002)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Architectural Vessel" (2020.222)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Mother-and-Child? Vessel" (2010.210)
• The Cleveland Museum of Art: "Pectoral (Chest Ornament)" (2015.2)
• Science 377(6601) via PubMed Central, Liu et al.: "Ancient DNA reveals five streams of migration into Micronesia and matrilocality in early Pacific seafarers" (2022)