The world in AD 700

Africa

Along the Swahili coast most settlements were small villages of earth and thatch, but a few were larger. Jeffrey Fleisher and his colleagues, writing in American Anthropologist in 2015, date Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar to about AD 500 to 900 and say it had spread over 17 hectares by 750, while Tumbe, on the north coast of Pemba Island, covered 20 to 30 hectares and held local and imported goods from the seventh to the tenth centuries. Radiocarbon dates put the earliest occupation of Chibuene, on the southern coast of Mozambique, between 700 and 1000. Alexander Antonites and his co-authors, in a 2025 PNAS study, note that glazed pottery made in the Persian Gulf, probably at Basra, turns up in the earliest levels of such ports, Chibuene, Kilwa and Shanga among them.

West Asia

Official Arab coinage began in Syria about 692, Michael Bates writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, with gold and copper designs derived from Byzantine coins and silver ones from Sasanian drahms, and the designs changed quickly over the following years. In the year 79, or 698 to 699, new dirhams carrying only Arabic religious inscriptions were introduced at Damascus and at nearly 30 mints across the east. A few mints, among them those of Fars, went on striking Sasanian-style silver for a time, and the last regular Arab-Sasanian drahm is dated 704 to 705. Bates adds that the weight of these older coins varied from under 2 grams to more than 4, with no evidence of strict central regulation.

• What was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and what did it translate?AD 830

Europe

Bede, the monk of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, records that the missionary Wilbrord, better known as Willibrord, was consecrated archbishop of the Frisians in Rome by Pope Sergius in 696. Pepin, whom Bede calls duke of the Franks, had lately subdued Hither Frisia and driven out its king, Rathbed, and he gave Wilbrord a seat for his see in a castle the Frisians called Wiltaburg and the Franks called Utrecht. Between 695 and 705 the throne in Constantinople changed hands three times. Dumbarton Oaks, which holds the imperial seals, records that the general Leontios deposed Justinian II in 695 and was himself overthrown by Tiberios III, while Justinian, exiled to Cherson, sought help from the Khazar khagan and married his daughter; in 705 he and the Bulgar khan Tervel marched on the capital and took back the throne.

• A ship in a mound, 1939: Basil Brown at Sutton HooAD 625
• Alcuin's letters on Lindisfarne, 793, and a cemetery dug since 2016AD 793
• Was Charlemagne surprised by his coronation in 800?AD 800
• The Oseberg ship: buried in 834, dug out in 1904AD 834

East Asia

Wu Zetian, the widow of Emperor Gaozong, had enthroned and replaced two emperors and acted as regent before taking the throne herself in 690, and Ulrich Theobald’s history of the Tang calls her the only female emperor in Chinese history. He credits her with opening official careers to men of talent who lacked connections at court, and with spending heavily on Buddhist monasteries and on the enlargement of the Longmen Grottoes; she was forced to retire in 705 and died that year. A Khitan revolt in 696 gave Dae Joyeong his opening in the northeast. In the Old Book of Tang, as the National Institute of Korean History presents it, he defeated the Tang general Li Kaigu, built a walled seat on Mount Dongmo and in the Shengli era (698–699) declared himself King of Zhen, ruling more than 100,000 registered households; that history calls him of a separate branch of Goguryeo, the New Book of Tang calls him a Sumo Mohe who had submitted to Goguryeo, and his origins are still disputed.

South Asia

The Chalukya king Vijayaditya Satyasraya reigned from 697 to 733, and the Archaeological Survey of India names the Sangamesvara temple he built as the oldest at Pattadakal, the town where Chalukya kings were crowned. Its tower lacks the projection called a sukanasika, which the survey says brings it nearer to the Pallava temples of the time than to the Chalukya temples that followed. The Pallavas ruled from Kanchipuram, where the district administration dates the Kailasanatha temple to the seventh century and credits it to Rajasimha, also known as Narasimhavarman II. At Pattadakal, the Virupaksha temple built by a queen of Vikramaditya II (733–746) was influenced by that temple at Kanchipuram, according to the survey.

Central Asia

Panjikant, about 60 kilometers east of Samarkand and the easternmost city of Sogdia, was nearing its height. Boris Marshak, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, places the city’s heyday at the end of the seventh century and especially the first quarter of the eighth, when even poorer families often lived in two-story houses and the ceremonial halls of the rich were painted with royal feasts, hunts, the exploits of Rostam and figures from the Mahabharata. Before Dewashtich, whose rule Marshak dates to about 706 or 708 until 722, the city was governed by a Turk, Chukin Chur Bilga, whose name appears on its bronze coins. The Türks themselves had been reunited around 680 under Ashina Guduolu in what Chinese histories call the empire of the Later Türks, according to Theobald.

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

The Americas

In 695 Tikal struck back at Calakmul, seat of the Kaan dynasty whose alliance had defeated it in 562, and won. Robert Sharer of the Penn Museum writes that this one battle changed the course of lowland Maya history, and credits the recovery to Tikal’s 26th king, Jasaw Chan K’awiil (r. 682–734). At Copán, Waxaklajuun Ubaah K’awiil had taken the throne that same year, and one of his monuments proclaims that Copán ranked with Tikal, Palenque and Calakmul as the four greatest kingdoms of the Maya world. In the Andes, Erik Marsh and his colleagues modeled 102 radiocarbon dates from Tiwanaku for PLOS One in 2023 and found that work on its two most ambitious monuments, the Akapana and the Pumapunku, fell mostly in the 600s and that monument building ended around AD 720.

• 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

Guam, the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, had been home to people for more than 2,000 years; the earliest archaeological sites in the Marianas date to about 3,500 years ago. Irina Pugach and her colleagues, reporting ancient DNA in PNAS in 2021, found that two people buried at the Ritidian Beach Cave site about 2,200 years ago had ancestry that traces to the Philippines, and they place the stone-pillar houses of the later latte period only around 1,000 years ago. Far to the south, potters in Tonga had stopped making vessels long before. David Burley and two co-authors put the end of the Polynesian Plainware phase there no later than 2350 years before present, around 400 BC, and note that no Polynesian society was making pottery when Europeans arrived.

Sources

• American Anthropologist 117(1) via PubMed Central, Jeffrey Fleisher and colleagues: "When Did the Swahili Become Maritime?" (2015)
• PNAS 122(5) via PubMed Central, Alexander Antonites and colleagues: "New evidence for early Indian Ocean trade routes into the South African interior" (2025)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Michael L. Bates: "Arab-Sasanian Coins" (1986)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 99.35.2386: "Dinar" (dated 79 AH/698–99 CE)
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book V"
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Justinian II (685–695, 705–711)"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Tang Dynasty: Political History" (2017)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 사료로 본 한국사: "발해의 건국" (The founding of Balhae)
• Archaeological Survey of India: "World Heritage Sites: Pattadakal"
• Kancheepuram District Administration, Government of Tamil Nadu: "Places of Interest"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Boris I. Marshak: "Panjikant" (2002)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Boris I. Marshak: "Dēwāštīč" (1994)
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Time of Kings and Queens" (2012)
• PLOS One 18(11) via PubMed Central, Erik J. Marsh and colleagues: "The center cannot hold: A Bayesian chronology for the collapse of Tiwanaku" (2023)
• PNAS 118(1) via PubMed Central, Irina Pugach and colleagues: "Ancient DNA from Guam and the peopling of the Pacific" (2021)
• PLOS One 13(2) via PubMed Central, David V. Burley, Sean P. Connaughton and Geoffrey Clark: "Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga" (2018)