The world in AD 650

Africa

Sorghum was still mostly a crop of the Niger River in what is now Mali. Louis Champion and four colleagues, writing in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences in 2021, trace its earliest West African evidence in the Inland Niger Delta to Jenne-Jeno around 250 BC and date its spread through the delta to about AD 500; it reached sites away from the river, such as Sadia on the Seno Plain, only around the tenth century. The mounds at Sadia had not yet begun to rise. The authors’ 27 radiocarbon dates place the foundation of its five settlement mounds, which cover about 3 hectares, in the middle of the eighth century.

West Asia

Yazdegerd III had come to the throne in 632, and by 650 little of his empire was left to him. Michael Morony, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, dates the end of Persian resistance in Fars to the Islamic year 30, or 650, after a campaign in which the city of Estakhr was taken and left in ruins while Yazdegerd moved to Gur, today’s Firuzabad. The king then went to Kerman and on to Sistan, lost the support of both governors, and headed for Marv, where in 651 the local governor Mahuya turned against him; he was killed as he fled the city. His son Peroz eventually took refuge at the Tang court, and Matteo Compareti notes that the Tang had been exchanging embassies with the Arabs themselves since at least 651.

Europe

Constans II (r. 641–668), a grandson of Herakleios, spent his reign on the defensive. Dumbarton Oaks, whose collection holds his seals, credits him with organizing the Anatolikon and Opsikion themes in Asia Minor against the Arabs and records that he was forced to accept peace with the Arab general Mu’awiya in 651; in 653 he had the pope arrested and exiled. Seals from 647 to 651 show the emperor standing, with a beard that grows longer from one issue to the next. In Northumbria, Bede writes, Bishop Aidan died on August 31, 651, twelve days after King Oswin of Deira, whom his rival Oswy had had murdered. Aidan’s successor Finan built the church on Lindisfarne not of stone but of hewn oak, roofed with reeds, “after the manner of the Scots.”

• A ship in a mound, 1939: Basil Brown at Sutton HooAD 625
• Procopius's Buildings, Hagia Sophia and the dome that fell in 558AD 537
• Alcuin's letters on Lindisfarne, 793, and a cemetery dug since 2016AD 793
• Was Charlemagne surprised by his coronation in 800?AD 800

East Asia

Queen Jindeok’s gifts went to the Tang emperor with Beommin, the eldest son of Kim Chunchu, who would later rule Silla as King Munmu (r. 661–681). The Samguk sagi, in the annotated text published by the National Institute of Korean History, dates the embassy to the fourth year of her reign, 650, and records that Gaozong appointed Beommin chief minister of the Court of the Treasury before sending him home. The institute’s notes add that the real author of the ode is unknown, and that the Old Book of Tang gives the poem in slightly different wording. Gaozong, emperor since 649, issued a new law code, the Yonghui code, in 651.

• Two histories of Emperor Yang's canals, and a fivefold gap in 608AD 605

South Asia

Mamallapuram, on the coast of Tamil Nadu, takes its name from Mamalla, a title of the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I (r. 630–668). The Archaeological Survey of India attributes most of the town’s monuments to his reign, including its rock-cut rathas and the scenes sculpted on open rock, and names the Five Rathas as the most important of its nine monolithic temples, each cut from a single rock. The survey also notes that Mamallapuram had already been a seaport in the first century AD, when the Periplus was written, and that colonists sailed from it to Southeast Asia.

• Act No. 39 of 2010 and the Nalanda that Xuanzang describedAD 629

Central Asia

Samarkand’s king in these years was Varkhuman, and Matteo Compareti, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, writes that between 650 and 655 Gaozong recognized him as governor of Samarkand and Sogdiana. In 658, with Sogdiana by then inside the Tang protectorate in Central Asia, the emperor sent an envoy to Varkhuman’s court for a formal investiture; in another entry Compareti dates the Tang defeat of the Western Türks to 657 to 659. Fragmentary inscriptions naming Varkhuman as sovereign survive on the western wall of the Hall of the Ambassadors at Afrasiab, the old site of Samarkand, where murals found in 1965 show embassies bringing plain silk from China and yak tails from the mountains, alongside men from Korea with feathers on their headgear, a figure the painters seem to have borrowed from Chinese art rather than drawn from life.

• Who actually carried goods along the Silk Road?AD 600
• Did one battle in 751 carry papermaking to the West?AD 751

The Americas

Calakmul, seat of the Kaan dynasty, had its greatest successes under Yuknoom Ch’een II (r. 636–686). Robert Sharer of the Penn Museum writes that the dynasty relied on alliances with client states rather than on taking territory for itself. Palenque was one of the most important Maya cities of the Classic period; the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) places its peak between 615 and 783, and its most famous ruler, K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, died in 683 after a life the institute estimates at about eight decades. The stone slab over his sarcophagus, found in 1952 inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, measures 3.80 meters by 2.20 meters.

• Joya de Cerén: a Maya farming village sealed by Loma Caldera ashAD 630
• Three painted rooms at Bonampak, c. 790, entered by outsiders in 1946AD 790

Oceania

Pottery-bearing layers on Kosrae and Pohnpei, the high volcanic islands of what is now the Federated States of Micronesia, show that both had been settled continuously since 2,000 to 1,800 years before present, several centuries before AD 650. A 2022 study in PNAS by Juliet Sefton and her colleagues found that the sea around the two islands has risen by about 4.3 meters over the past 5,700 years, probably because the land subsided, so traces of even earlier settlement may lie underwater. The stone complexes of Nan Madol on Pohnpei and Leluh on Kosrae came much later, built about 770 to 750 and 640 to 560 years ago.

Sources

• Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 13(4) via PubMed Central, Louis Champion, Dorian Q. Fuller, Sylvain Ozainne, Éric Huysecom and Anne Mayor: "Agricultural diversification in West Africa: an archaeobotanical study of the site of Sadia (Dogon Country, Mali)" (2021)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Michael G. Morony: "ʿArab ii. Arab Conquest of Iran" (1986, updated 2016)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Matteo Compareti: "Chinese-Iranian Relations xv. The Last Sasanians in China" (2009, updated 2013)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Constans II (641–668)"
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book III"
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), Korean History Database, Samguk sagi, Silla annals 5: "진덕왕이 태평송을 짓다" (Queen Jindeok composes the Ode to Great Peace, 650), with annotations
• Archaeological Survey of India: "Group of Monuments Mahabalipuram (1984), Tamil Nadu"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Matteo Compareti: "Afrāsiāb ii. Wall Paintings" (updated 2018)
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Time of Kings and Queens" (2012)
• Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Lugares INAH: "Palenque"
• Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), press bulletin: "El INAH emprende nuevos estudios de conservación en la lápida de Pakal, en Palenque, Chiapas" (2023)
• PNAS 119(52) via PubMed Central, Juliet P. Sefton and colleagues: "Implications of anomalous relative sea-level rise for the peopling of Remote Oceania" (2022)