World History in a Year (Week 30): First century BC
We’ll start this century with Rome, because it had an unusual trajectory. Empires succumbing to civil war and splintering isn’t uncommon; it’s one of the classic ways ancient empires fell, along with “military overextension”, “gradual decline” and “idk, something environmental?” It’s less typical to instead hear the reverse: “the empire fell into civil war and conquered everything in the vicinity.” But that’s what Rome did in the first century BC.
Rome’s tumultuous century started off early, with a couple civil wars, a coup d’etat, and the slave revolt of Spartacus all occurring in the 90s to 70s BC. This set a stage where any successful general posed the risk of seizing power. The first general with great success was Pompey, who captured Anatolia, Syria and Judea for Rome in the 60s BC, putting an end to the remainder of the Seleucid kingdom. Not much later, in the 50s BC, Julius Caesar countered by conquering Gaul. The course of the subsequent civil war between these two brought both Pompey and Caesar successively to Ptolemaic Egypt, where Pompey was killed. All this was followed by the famous events of Caesar’s assassination, the civil war against the assassins by Octavian and Marc Antony, and yet another civil war between Marc Antony and Octavian in which Mark Antony allied (and liaised) with Cleopatra of Egypt, ending with Octavian’s victory, conquest of Egypt, and taking the title Augustus Caesar in 27 BC, beginning the Roman Empire. Whew!
The conquest of Egypt was a major gain for the Romans. Egypt was tremendously wealthy, a major grain producer and centre of trade, and the Romans had no compunction about draining that wealth for the benefit of the imperial core territory. With control of Egypt they now held territory connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thus to the Indian Ocean trade. This trade greatly expanded during the century. Up until this time, trade from Egypt to India has gone along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula; but in the first century BC, sailors gained a better understanding of the geography and the monsoon winds, and learned how to sail a direct route across open sea from the mouth of the Red Sea to the coast of India. This shortened the journey greatly. Additionally, the sea route was preferable to the overland route because Pompey’s conquests in western Asia had brought Rome into direct contact with Parthia, and the Romans had almost immediately gotten in fights with them, with two Roman attempts to invade Parthia ending in serious defeats for Rome. This made overland trade with India and China via Parthia more difficult. However, notwithstanding this, overland Silk Road trade continued during various parts of the century.
Both land and sea trade at these distances was largely a matter of small or lightweight luxury goods. Central and western Asia and Rome all coveted Chinese silk; China was fascinated by Roman glasswork, particularly beads; and India was a source of pepper and spices, among other things.
India’s Shunga Dynasty fell in 73 BC, and through the rest of this century and the next India had a larger number of smaller states, with the Shatavahana kingdom in the southwest being one of the largest. Though smaller, these states were wealthy and made great profit from trade with the Roman Empire, as attested by the incredible number of Roman coins found in India.
In the area around Pakistan, this century also saw the fall of the remnants of the Indo-Greek kingdoms to the Indo-Scythians (Sakas). Combined with the fall of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies to Rome (not to mention Greece itself) this meant the end of all of the successor states of Alexander the Great. However, in both cases, the conquerors became Greece’s cultural heirs, adopting elements of Greek culture. Some Saka art combines disctinctly Greek styles with Induan ones. And when the Romans captured Athens in 86 BC they carried off much of its library to Rome, stimulating Roman writing on philosophy, science, and literature. The influence of Greek literature on Rome also ties in with another key pattern in this century.
In the first century BC, Rome, India, and China each wrote their foundational histories or mythologies. In Rome, this was Virgil’s Aeneid, connecting Rome to ancient Greek epics of the Iliad by presenting the Romans as the heirs of the Trojans, with a divinely-mandated destiny to conquer Italy and build an empire. Virgil wrote it in the late first century BC following Augustus’ rise to power. In India, the composition of the two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, is also estimated to date from the last two centuries BC. Both the Mahabharata and the Aeneid present ambivalent attitudes towards war: they mythologize the rise of conquering empires while nonetheless portraying the incredible destructiveness and tragedy of war, and in both cases their protagonists consider stopping and choosing a peaceful life, before being spurred on by the gods to their climactic battles.
In China, Sima Qian completed his Records of the Grand Historian, the earliest comprehensive history of China that we have, and a model for many later Chinese histories. It began with a detailed chronological treatment of Chinese history starting from the legendary period before the Xia Dynasty and continuing all the way through to the Han, and followed this with thematic essays and biographies. This is the source for most of the non-archaeologicial detail we have about the Qin, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. The biographies included many anecdotes contrasting good and bad rulers: Sima Qian, having been castrated by the state after speaking in defense of a defeated general, had a keen awareness of the dangers of abuses of power.
The Han Dynasty was an empire on a par with Rome, and in the 100s BC its conquests had, in addition to Central Asia, extended to the northern Korean peninsula and the Red River in northern Vietnam. In the first century BC, Korea reacted to its powerful neighbour with the formation of the first Korean states: Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. This is known as Korea’s Three Kingdoms period (not to be confused with China’s later Three Kingdoms period), and would last for several centuries.
Internally, the Han Dynasty started to struggle in this century. Their conquests in Central Asia had been extremely expensive, and the tax increases to pay for them increased unrest as peasant farmers who could not afford them resorted to banditry. Decentralization and the power of regional lords relative to Han-appointed governors increased, and aristocratic large landowners gained tax exemptions, which further strained government finances. These challenges were aggravated by a number of child or weak emperors who were heavily influenced by those around them, such as aristocrats, mothers, wives, or eunuchs. The aristocratic family of Wang became particularly powerful and closely connected with the emperor in the later part of the first century BC, which would have major implications during the next century.
Once again, we’ll conclude with the Americas.
The first century BC and first century AD were the height of the Preclassic Maya. El Mirador remained at its peak, and was joined by other major Mayan kingdoms to the south: Kaminaljuyu, in the Guatemalan highlands near the present-day site of Guatemala City, and Izapa, near the Pacific coast. All three had art showing central scenes and figures from Mayan mythology, indicating a shared culture and religion, and all three had writing. Both Kaminaljuyu and Izapa featured stelae: tall pillars with written inscriptions and artistic carvings. However, not much of the inscriptions have been translated, other than dates.
Kaminaljuyu lay on the shores of a now-vanished lake, surrounded by an extensive network of agricultural canals, fields, and terraces. Limestone was less available in this area than in the Maya lowlands, so unlike those of El Mirador, the pyramids of Kaminaljuyu were built of clay and earth; they served as tombs for its rulers. Izapa, to the south, likewise had a number of platforms and pyramids, along with numerous bas-relief carvings depicting scenes from Mayan mythology. An interesting commonality between Han China and the Mayans was the use of jade in burials of rulers: one tomb in Kaminaljuyu had an elaborate jade headdress, while some Han royalty were buried in suits composed of many small pieces of jade strung together on gold wire.
A major new development in the Mesoamerican calendar is also seen in this century – the first known use of the Long Count. This was the third element of the Mesoamerican calendar, in addition to the 260-day ritual calendar and 365-day solar calendar. The first two calendars provided unique identifiers for each day in a 52-year cycle; the Long Count enabled them to distinguish between 52-year cycles, and is of great archaeological value in providing exact dates for events. But although it is often referred to as the “Mayan” calendar, the first known uses of the Long Count cam from two places outside the Mayan regions: a little west of the Mayan area, in Chiapa de Corzo, and on the Gulf Coast at the former Olmec site of Tres Zapotes. Both locations have inscriptions with Long Count dates corresponding to the 30s BC that use the Long Count. So this calendrical system is general to Mesoamerica, not specific to the Mayans.
Also beyond the Mayan areas, Zapotec Monte Albán expanded its rule beyond the Oaxaca valley in this century, with it art appearing to register its conquests of surrounding areas, or perhaps to honor fallen warriors. Further northwest in the Basin of Mexico, Cuilcuilco and Teotihuacán were the principal cities and rivals, but Teotihuacán had the advantage in trade. It was located near a major source of obsidian, the best material for blades (Mesoamerica still did not use metal, and even when it started to do so several centuries later, used it only for decorative purposes), and also had better access to trade with the Gulf Coast that Cuilcuilco did. Teotihuacán exported obsidian in exchange for cotton fabrics and luxuries like precious stones and colourful feathers.
Finally, in eastern North America the time from around 200 BC to AD 400 is known as the Hopewell period. This appears to have been a time of prosperity, peace, and widespread trade. Large numbers of conical earthen mounds were built, some containing log-lined tombs for prominent people Various other types of earthworks enclosures were also built, including on hilltops and around graveyards. Trade goods are found from areas wide distances apart, including copper from the shores of the Great Lakes, obsidian from far west in what is now Wyoming, and seashells from the coast. The site for which the period is named, Hopewell in Ohio, shows all of these features: mounds, earthworks, and large amounts of obsidian and copper.
