The world in AD 750

Africa

Aksum, the old kingdom of the highlands of northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea, no longer issued coins in AD 750. David Phillipson, in a lecture published by the British Academy in 2001, dates the end of Aksumite coinage to the seventh century, when settlement at the capital also shrank sharply; one factor he discusses is Arab control of the Red Sea, which cut the kingdom off from the international trade routes it had used. On the Nile, the Christian kingdoms of Nobadia and Makuria, whose capital was Dongola, had merged into one state, probably at the end of the seventh century and early in the eighth at the latest, according to the University of Warsaw’s Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, which excavates the site. The Nubians had repelled Arab invasions in 641 and 652, and the agreement both sides then signed, the baqt, lasted some 500 years whoever ruled Egypt.

West Asia

The Abbasid cause had gone public in Khorasan in 746 or 747, when Abu Muslim raised the standard sent by the Abbasid imam and his followers put on black. Ghulam-Hosayn Yusofi’s account in the Encyclopaedia Iranica follows the Khorasani armies west: in 749 they took Nahavand, where Arabs had defeated the Persians a century before, and on August 27 of that year their general Qahtaba died defeating the Umayyad governor of Iraq on the advance to Kufa. Marwan gathered the armies of Syria, Mosul and the Jazira and confronted the rebels on the Greater Zab, then fell back to Egypt, where he died. Abu Muslim stayed in Khorasan throughout; in 755 the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, had him killed.

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

Europe

In AD 750 the Frankish king was still, in name, the Merovingian Childeric III. Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, later described those last Merovingians as owning only an empty title and riding to the yearly assembly in an ox cart driven by a plowman, while the mayor of the palace governed. The Annals of Lorsch record that in 749 Pippin sent Burchard, bishop of Würzburg, to Pope Zacharias, who answered that the man who held the power should be called king; under the following year, which the editors correct to 751, the annal has Pippin anointed at Soissons and Childeric shorn and sent to a monastery. In Constantinople Constantine V had ruled since 741, and Dumbarton Oaks, which holds his seals, records that he made no attempt to save Ravenna, the Byzantine capital in Italy, when the Lombards took it in 751, and that his Council of Hiera in 754 set down the Iconoclast theory of images for which later historians reviled him.

• Was Charlemagne surprised by his coronation in 800?AD 800
• The Oseberg ship: buried in 834, dug out in 1904AD 834
• A ship in a mound, 1939: Basil Brown at Sutton HooAD 625

East Asia

Xuanzong, emperor since 712, had by now left much of daily government to his chief counsellor Li Linfu, who held the post for 19 years. Ulrich Theobald’s history of the dynasty describes a treasury emptied by wars with Tibet, with Nanzhao in Yunnan and with the Khitans, a court where the relatives of the concubine Yang Guifei had gained high office since 743, and the rise of the military commissioner An Lushan, who by 755 governed three regions of the northeast and rebelled that year. In Japan the emperor had ordered a colossal bronze statue of Rushana in 743, and work began at Nara once the capital returned there from Shigaraki. Tōdai-ji’s own history records that the statue was cast in 749, that its hall was built at the same time, and that the great eye-opening ceremony was held in 752.

South Asia

In Bengal, the Khalimpur copper plate of the Pala king Dharmapala recalled the years before his father Gopala came to power as matsyanyayam, a state of lawlessness, and said that the prakritis raised Gopala to power to end it. A. M. Chowdhury, writing for the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh’s Banglapedia, notes that prakriti can mean either subjects or principal officers, so who chose Gopala remains uncertain, and he dates the reign to about 756 to 781. In the Deccan, the Rashtrakuta ruler Dantidurga had issued a copper plate in 742 recording a land grant made after bathing in the sacred pond at Ellora. Jayaram Poduval of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda writes that the only inscribed Rashtrakuta monument at Ellora, Cave 15, was carved soon after Dantidurga claimed independence from his Chalukya overlords.

Central Asia

Yutaka Yoshida, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, calls the fifth to eighth centuries the heyday of Sogdian merchants in China, especially the hundred years before An Lushan’s rebellion, when the Tang controlled Central Asia; An Lushan himself was the son of a Sogdian father and a Turkish mother, and his surname points to Bukhara. The Tang claim over the region was checked the next year. In 751, at Talas, Abbasid forces under Ziyad ibn Salih defeated the Tang general Gao Xianzhi, who had answered appeals from threatened Sogdian princes, and C. Edmund Bosworth writes that only after that battle was Arab rule in Transoxania free from challenge. Tibet, one of the powers whose wars drained the Tang treasury, occupied the southern Silk Road during the An Lushan rebellion.

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

The Americas

At Tikal, Yik’in Chan K’awiil (r. 734–766) had buried his father Jasaw Chan K’awiil under Temple I and defeated two of Calakmul’s major allies, and Robert Sharer of the Penn Museum describes the result as a final period of expansion along Tikal’s recovered east-west trade routes. Copán was still recovering from 738, when its 13th king, Waxaklajuun Ubaah K’awiil, was captured and put to death by his vassal of Quirigua 113 days after dedicating the rebuilt Great Ball Court; the 15th king, K’ak’ Yipyaj Chan K’awiil (r. 749–763), rebuilt the city’s prestige with the Hieroglyphic Stairway. In the Andes, the Wari capital near Ayacucho covered almost 15 square kilometers, with a population the archaeologist Isbell estimated at 40,000, and by the mid-eighth century Wari controlled much of highland Peru and parts of the coast, up to 320,000 square kilometers. Christina Conlee and three colleagues, writing in Antiquity in 2021, note that scholars still disagree over whether Wari was an empire.

• Three painted rooms at Bonampak, c. 790, entered by outsiders in 1946AD 790
• Joya de Cerén: a Maya farming village sealed by Loma Caldera ashAD 630
• How Did the Maya Track the Cycle of Venus — Without a Telescope?AD 900

Oceania

No written record survives from Australia or the Pacific islands for AD 750. A 2020 study led by David Sear of the University of Southampton, published in PNAS, placed the first traces of pigs or people at Lake Te Roto on Atiu, in the Southern Cook Islands, between AD 800 and 1004, earlier than other models, while noting that the date of East Polynesian settlement is much debated. The same team’s lake core from Samoa records a dry period around AD 700, with a two-sigma range of AD 528 to 872, and the authors argue that a prolonged regional drought helped drive voyagers east.

Sources

• Proceedings of the British Academy 111, David W. Phillipson: "Aksum: An African Civilisation in its World Contexts" (Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture, 2001)
• Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Virtual Nubia: "Nubia"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Yūsofī: "Abū Moslem Ḵorāsānī" (1983, updated 2018)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Constantine V (741–775)"
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Annals of Lorsch: The pope makes the Carolingians kings" (from Thatcher and McNeal, 1905)
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Einhard: The Life of Charlemagne" (translated by Samuel Epes Turner, 1880)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Tang Dynasty: Political History" (2017)
• Tōdai-ji: "東大寺の歴史 (History of Tōdai-ji Temple)"
• Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, A. M. Chowdhury: "Gopala" (Internet Archive copy, 2024)
• Sahapedia, Jayaram Poduval (Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda): "The Architecture of Ellora Caves"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Yutaka Yoshida: "Personal Names, Sogdian i. In Chinese Sources" (2006, updated 2012)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, C. Edmund Bosworth: "Central Asia iv. In the Islamic Period up to the Mongols" (1990, updated 2017)
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Time of Kings and Queens" (2012)
• Antiquity 95 (384), Conlee, Kellner, Walker and Noriega: "Early imperialism in the Andes: Wari colonisation of Nasca" (2021)
• PNAS 117(16) via PubMed Central, Sear and colleagues: "Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought" (2020)