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Unidentified Peruvian figure. Antiguo Peru : primera epoca. 1929.

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World History in a Year (Week 15) - 1400s BC

The 1400s BC open a new era in the history of Western Asia, with a system of international politics appearing for the first time. At some point during the the hazy period of the 1500s BC, a set of powerful states had emerged: New Kingdom Egypt (notably, the reign of Hatshepsut was during this century); Mitanni, in the area of Syria; the Hittites, in central Anatolia; and Babylonia, now ruled by a group called the Kassites. These states maintained regular diplomatic relations with each other; they made diplomatic marriages with each other; their rulers addressed each other as “brother”; they engaged in regular trade in the form of sending each other “gifts” of goods and expecting reciprocal “gifts” in exchange. Historians have described the system as similar to the Great Powers of Europe in the 1800s AD: these states competed and warred with each other, but they were in general agreement that they were peers and everyone else was a lesser player. Elam in western Iran was slightly below their level; smaller states were clients or vassals of the great powers. For example, Egypt and Mitanni jockeyed for authority over Ugarit, a trading centre on the eastern Mediterranean coast; Babylon had the colony of Dilmun on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf.

The other major change in Western Asia in the 1400s BC was that it had fully entered the era of chariot warfare. The exact time when chariots reached Western Asia seems unclear, with some putting it around the 1600s BC with the Hittites in Anatolia and the Hyksos in Egypt, but the 1400s BC are when chariots became a common military technology there. Some of the terminology used in manuals for training of chariot-horses came from the Old Indic language, the same as the names of the Mitanni rulers, indicating the knowledge of chariots and their use came from Central Asia.

On the periphery of the Western Asian and Egyptian great powers, another new power was rising: not quite a peer, but independent, on a similar level to Elam. This was Mycenae, the first mainland Greek state. Around 1450 BC the Mycenaeans conquered the Minoans – at any rate, Minoan cities and palaces on Crete were destroyed, Crete began importing Mycenaean goods rather than exporting Minoan goods, and Mycenae took over as the main maritime trading power as the Eastern Mediterranean, so that looks like the most likely explanation.

Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean may not have been the only area of the world with powerful clashing states at this time. In a vast set of platforms, temples, and monuments at Sechín Alto in Peru, there are carvings of armed warriors alongside disemboweled and mutilated victims. We do not know if the people of the Sechín culture warred with other powerful groups in lowland Peru at the time, such as the Manchay to the south or the Cupisnique to the north, or if they warred among themselves or against less powerful peoples. The art could even be a depiction of a mythological event. But whatever the specifics, this does seem to indicate a society where warfare and violence had a prominent place.

The Cupisnique, Sechín, and Manchay all had monumental temples around this time, indicating governments and religious hierarchies powerful enough to mobilize people for their construction. The major site of the Cupisnique (in the Moche valley, which will be the heart of a much later empire) was Caballo Muerto, with eight pyramid mounds; the largest of these pyramids, Huaca de Los Reyes, had three successively smaller plazas flanked by colonnaded halls with sculptures of human and feline heads, forming a dramatic approach to the pyramid itself. The pyramids had smaller upper-storey interiors, probably restricted to rulers and high priests. The Sechín Alto temple was similar in design, but even larger, with four courtyards flanked by buildings leading to a pyramid mound 300m x 250m in area and around 40m tall. And it is only one of several such religious monuments built by the Sechín people. The Manchay culture likewise had a major U-shaped pyramidal temple with carved friezes; in their case the friezes depicted a spider deity.

This illustrates how much of a difference in our understanding of history is made by the fact that people in Western Asia kept written records on clay tablets, a material that could be preserved. Because of this, we know an immense amount about their rulers, politics, international relations, economics, and daily lives. Events in Peru at the same time might have been every bit as complex and dramatic, but with only ruins and art to go on, we know far less about them.

The last event we will cover this week is the beginning of an approximately half-century long age of discovery in the Pacific by Austronesian peoples. By the 3000s BC, Austronesians had settled Taiwan; by the 2000s BC they had expanded to the Philippines. By around the start of the 1400s BC, Austronesian people from the Philippines discovered the Northern Mariana Islands and were the first people to inhabit them – a journey which involved an eastward open-water voyage of about 2500km, the longest in human history up to that point. They also expanded to already-inhabited areas in much of Indonesia. This was the precursor to even greater migrations and discoveries in later centuries.