The world in AD 600

Africa

Three kingdoms held the Nile valley south of Aswan: Nobadia, whose capital was Faras; Makuria, with its capital at Dongola between the third and fourth cataracts; and Alwa, with its capital at Soba farther upriver. The Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw, which excavates at Dongola and Soba, dates the official conversion of Nobadia’s king to 543 and that of Makuria to around the middle of the sixth century, and calls the origins and history of Alwa very poorly known. Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast, had become the seat of a new kind of Roman province. Dumbarton Oaks credits Maurice with creating the exarchates of Ravenna and Carthage, where a single governor, the exarch, held both civil and military power, at a time when Berber raids troubled Roman North Africa.

West Asia

Khosrow II had been king since 590, but for most of that decade he did not fully control his own empire. When the general Bahram Chobin rebelled, Khosrow fled to Roman territory and wrote to Maurice for help; James Howard-Johnston, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, dates his formal restoration, after a victory near Ganzak, to early in his second regnal year by its coin issues, and Dumbarton Oaks records that the peace of 591 gave Maurice most of Armenia and a very favorable boundary in Mesopotamia. In 600 Khosrow’s uncle Bestam, in revolt since 595, raised four provinces on the fringes of the Alborz mountains, among them Amul and Tabarestan on the Caspian shore. Howard-Johnston places the last of that rebellion in 602, and Khosrow’s undisputed rule over his empire in the autumn of that year, 11 years after his restoration.

Europe

Peace with Persia let Maurice move troops to the Danube. The Livius timeline, drawn from Walter Pohl’s history of the Avars, lists a 598 settlement that raised Roman payments to the Avar khagan to 120,000 solidi, followed in 599 by an offensive in which the general Priscus won victories opposite Viminacium and over the khagan’s own army at the Tisza. Around 600 the Avars made peace treaties with the Franks and with the Lombards, whose king Agilulf reigned in Italy from 591 to 616. Two years later, Dumbarton Oaks notes, Maurice ordered his troops to winter north of the Danube to save money; they rebelled and marched on Constantinople, and on November 23, 602, Howard-Johnston writes, a middle-ranking officer named Phocas seized power.

• A ship in a mound, 1939: Basil Brown at Sutton HooAD 625

East Asia

Yang Jian (r. 581–604) had taken the throne from the Northern Zhou in 581 and conquered the Chen, the last of the southern dynasties, in 589; Ulrich Theobald’s history of the dynasty credits his government with a common currency, the equal-field system, the Kaihuang law code and an imperial canal, while the heavy building and the three failed Goguryeo campaigns of his son Yang Guang, Emperor Yang (r. 604–617), came in the next reign. In 598 Goguryeo had struck first, its king leading more than 10,000 Malgal troops into Liaoxi in the Zizhi tongjian’s account, though the National Institute of Korean History’s Sinpyeon Hanguksa doubts that he went in person. The Sui answered with 300,000 men by land and sea; the institute records that summer rains stalled their supply lines and disease broke out, and that after Goguryeo sent envoys to apologize the two states dealt peacefully for about 10 years. In Japan the regent for Empress Suiko was her nephew, Prince Shōtoku (573–621), to whom the Nihongi credits a seventeen-article constitution dated to the summer of 604.

South Asia

Brahmagupta, the foremost Indian mathematician of his time, was born in 598, possibly at Ujjain, in the dates given by J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson for the MacTutor archive at the University of St Andrews. In 628 he completed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta at Bhillamala, now Bhinmal, and in it defined zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself. In the Deccan the Chalukyas ruled from Vatapi, today’s Badami. The Bagalkot district administration gives Mangalesha, brother of Kirtivarman I, a reign of 598 to 610 and credits him with completing the town’s cave temples; Pulakeshi II, whom the same page calls the greatest ruler of the dynasty, followed in 610.

• Sihagiri in the Culavamsa: Kassapa I's rock palace at SigiriyaAD 477
• Thirty copies of Ajanta and the Crystal Palace fire of 1866AD 470

Central Asia

The Türk khanate no longer answered to one ruler. Ulrich Theobald dates its division into an eastern and a western khanate to 581, after the death of Taspar Qaghan, in years of harsh winters and internal quarrels, and describes how the Sui set the eastern princes against each other: the court gave two princesses in marriage to Ran-gan, a lesser khan, settled his followers on Chinese territory and let him take the title Qimin Qaghan, while his rival Dulan Qaghan (r. 588–599) was killed in battle by his own officers. The western khan Datou had sided with Dulan and after Dulan’s death moved into what is now Mongolia as Bujia Qaghan, until in 603 about a dozen tribes deserted him for Qimin.

• Who actually carried goods along the Silk Road?AD 600

The Americas

Tikal, once the strongest of the Maya cities, had been beaten. Robert Sharer of the Penn Museum writes that the Kaan, or snake, dynasty and its allies won a decisive victory over Tikal in 562, soon moved their seat to Calakmul, and dominated Tikal from there for more than a century. At Palenque the ruler was a woman, Lady Yohl Ik’nal, who reigned from 583 to 604. In the Andes, a 2023 study in PLOS One by Lima and four colleagues, built from summed radiocarbon dates, finds that warfare on the Moche north coast had been rising since about AD 500, while in the southern highlands of Wari and Tiwanaku it reached its lowest level around AD 600.

• Joya de Cerén: a Maya farming village sealed by Loma Caldera ashAD 630

Oceania

Australia and the Pacific islands left no written record for AD 600, and the year can be reached only through radiocarbon ranges. At the Sigatoka Sand Dunes, east of the mouth of the Sigatoka River in Fiji, Burial Ground 1 was excavated by Simon Best in 1987 and 1988; 10 radiocarbon dates on human bone place its burials across about 600 years in the middle of the first millennium AD. Estelle Herrscher and her co-authors, measuring isotopes in 38 adults for PLOS One in 2024, found six dietary patterns separated by how much marine food people ate, and differences between men and women that they tie to daily work rather than to burial custom.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica, James Howard-Johnston: "Ḵosrow II" (2000, updated 2018)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Maurice Tiberios (582–602)"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Avars" (timeline after Walter Pohl, The Avars, 2018; modified 2020)
• Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Virtual Nubia: "Nubia"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Political History of the Sui Dynasty" (2017)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Tujue 突厥, Gök Türks" (2011)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 신편 한국사 5: "고구려의 요서 공격" (Goguryeo's attack on Liaoxi)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 사료로 본 한국사: "고구려와 수의 전쟁" (The Goguryeo–Sui war)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "The Constitution of Prince Shōtoku" (from W. G. Aston's Nihongi translation)
• MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson: "Brahmagupta" (2000)
• Bagalkot District Administration, Government of Karnataka: "Badami Caves"
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Time of Kings and Queens" (2012)
• PLOS One 18(11) via PubMed Central, Lima, Gayó, Gurruchaga, Estay and Santoro: "1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes" (2023)
• PLOS One via PubMed Central, Herrscher, Valentin and colleagues: "Life histories in Fiji as reconstructed from first millennium CE Sigatoka Sand Dune burials using isotopes" (2024)