The world in AD 950

Africa

At Igbo-Ukwu, in what is now southeastern Nigeria, Thurstan Shaw excavated a single compound, Igbo Isaiah, between November 1959 and February 1960 and found over 64 kg of cast bronze and smithed copper and over 63,000 glass and carnelian beads. Shaw read four of his radiocarbon dates as pointing to the ninth century, but Susan Keech McIntosh, reviewing the site’s research in 2022, notes that each carried a standard error of 110 to 145 years and that newer samples from pits there date to between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. The most common glass among the analyzed beads was a plant-ash soda-lime glass made in Mesopotamia, Iran and the eastern Mediterranean, and McIntosh traces beads of that type along an eastern Niger route through Essouk-Tadmekka, Gao and Ile-Ife by the ninth or tenth century, if not earlier.

West Asia

Ahmad ibn Buya, son of a fisherman from Daylam, entered Baghdad on December 19, 945, and the caliph made him amir al-umara, or great amir, with the title Mu’izz al-Dawla. Tilman Nagel, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, cites the historian Ibn Miskawayh, a keen observer of the politics of his day, who judged the great amirate a fatal turning point because its holder controlled the government and the revenues without feeling responsible to the caliph. Within the family, though, Ahmad counted as a deputy of his brothers: meeting the eldest, Ali, near Arrajan in 948, “he kissed the ground before him.” When Ali died childless in December 949, leadership of the clan passed to the second brother, Hasan, called Rukn al-Dawla, whose son Adud al-Dawla had already been named Ali’s successor in Shiraz.

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Europe

Constantine VII gained sole power in January 945, 37 years after his father, Leo VI, had crowned him; a month earlier the sons of Romanos I Lekapenos had deposed their father, and now they were deposed in turn. Dumbarton Oaks, in its exhibit of imperial seals, calls his reign “from a military perspective, unspectacular” and credits him with works on foreign policy, the provinces and court ceremony, among them the De administrando imperio; his seals give him the title autokrator, “sole ruler.” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the translation on Yale’s Avalon Project, has no entry for 950 at all. It records that Anlaf Curran came to Northumbria in 949, that the Northumbrians expelled him in 952 and took Eric, son of Harold, and that in 954 “the Northumbrians expelled Eric; and King Edred took to the government of the Northumbrians.”

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East Asia

The Khitan ruler Yelü Deguang had occupied Kaifeng and proclaimed himself emperor of the Liao in 947, and when his troops withdrew north, Liu Zhiyuan, a Shatuo Turk who commanded in what is now Shanxi, declared a Han dynasty that historians call the Later Han. Ulrich Theobald, in his ChinaKnowledge history of the Five Dynasties, dates this “extremely short-lived” state to 947–950 and describes power struggles at its court after Liu’s death, won by Guo Wei, a commissioner of military affairs, who proclaimed a new Zhou dynasty in 951. Guo Wei tried reforms to lighten the burden on the peasantry, and his adopted son Chai Rong later campaigned against the Liao, the Northern Han and the Later Shu in Sichuan.

South Asia

Khajuraho, in central India, was the principal seat of the Chandella kings, who filled it with tanks and temples. The Archaeological Survey of India assigns the temple of Vishnu now known as the Lakshmana temple to King Yasovarman, with the date AD 954, and the Visvanatha, Parsvanatha and Vaidyanatha temples to his successor, Dhanga. The largest temple at the site, the Kandariya Mahadeva, came later and is attributed to King Ganda, who reigned from 1017 to 1029.

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Central Asia

The Qarakhanids, a confederation of Turkic tribes that later ruled from the Tarim basin to the Oxus, were turning to Islam in these years. Michal Biran, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, names Satuq Bughra Khan, who died about 955, as the first of the dynasty to convert, at Artuj, a village near Kashgar, with a jurist from Bukhara of the Samanid family acting as go-between; after converting he took Kashgar with the help of volunteer fighters from Farghana. The mass conversion of “the famous 200,000 tents” followed in 960, shortly after his death. Biran adds that none of the dynasty’s own chronicles survive beyond a few quoted paragraphs, so its early history rests mainly on its coins and on the records of its neighbors.

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The Americas

Chaco Canyon, in what is now New Mexico, had a new great house, Peñasco Blanco, occupied from about 900 to 1125 on a mesa. Pollen cores studied by David Lentz and his colleagues in 2021 show juniper falling from 20% of the canyon’s pollen before 600 BC to 4% by AD 600 and 2% by 1100, and earlier work they cite found juniper for building being brought in from the Zuni Mountains, 75 km away, as early as 850. In northwestern Belize, Lara Sánchez-Morales, Timothy Beach and their colleagues reported in 2026 that Maya farmers kept using the Birds of Paradise wetland fields through the Terminal Classic, 800 to 1000, while settlements on uplands about 100 m higher and less than a kilometer away were widely abandoned.

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Oceania

Pohnpei, the third largest island in Micronesia, may have seen the first building at Nan Madol within a few decades of 950. Chuan-Chou Shen and his colleagues obtained 171 uranium-thorium dates on coral fragments used as building material there and, publishing in 2024, identified an early construction phase from about 930 to 1130, well before the 1180 to 1200 previously given for the founding of the Saudeleur dynasty. When that work began, the island stood about 1.2 m higher relative to the sea than it does now, and the whole site may have been dry land rather than the more than 100 artificial islets and canals seen today.

Sources

• African Archaeological Review via PubMed Central, Susan Keech McIntosh: "Igbo-Ukwu at 50: A Symposium on Recent Archaeological Research and Analysis" (2022)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Tilman Nagel: "Buyids" (1990)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (945–959)"
• Yale Law School, Avalon Project: "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Tenth Century"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Five Dynasties: Political History"
• Archaeological Survey of India: "Group of Monuments at Khajuraho"
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Michal Biran: "Ilak-khanids" (2004)
• PLoS One via PubMed Central, Lentz and colleagues: "Ecosystem impacts by the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA" (2021)
• PNAS via PubMed Central, Sánchez-Morales and colleagues: "Maya Postclassic persistence in the Birds of Paradise Wetland Fields, Belize" (2026)
• PNAS Nexus via PubMed Central, Shen and colleagues: "Links between climatic histories and the rise and fall of a Pacific chiefdom" (2024)