From here on out, we’ll be covering one century per week. That means the Americas are fairly out of focus this week, because pinning events there down to a specific century is still tricky during this period.

So far, we’ve introduced four state-level societies: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Caral-Supe starting in the 3000s BC, and Harappa in the 2000s BC. Harappa and Caral-Supe, after reaching their height in the 2000s BC, may have begun to decline in the 1900s BC. Additionally, Mesopotamia had returned to being broken up into numerous small city-states following the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2004 BC. Urbanization didn’t decrease in 1900s BC Mesopotamia, though, which suggests that agriculture and the economy were doing well at this level. One new city-state founded in this period was Assur (Assyria). 

A new state-level society joins our list this week: the Minoans in Crete. The 1900s BC saw the start of the peak period of the Minoan civilization, including urbanization, the building of the first “palaces” (which were really central administrative and economic buildings more than royal residences), and the introduction of the pottery wheel. The Minoans were the first state-level society we’ve seen whose wealth came primarily from maritime trade rather than agriculture: they traded widely in the Eastern Mediterranean, with artefacts in Palace of Knossos dated to around 1900 BC including ostrich eggshell and ivory (via Egypt) as well as obsidian from the Cyclades and objects from Western Asia.

Speaking of Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, after starting to re-establish centralized power in Egypt around 2040 BC, completed the process in the 1900s BC under the rule of Amenemhet I. In a piece of political intrigue, he’s speculated to have actually been a vizier who overthrew the previous pharaoh, Mentuhotep IV. Amenhotep I’s son Senusret I further expanded Egypt’s territory, recapturing Lower Nubia (basically, the part of Egypt south of Aswan) from the Sudanese Kerma kingdom. He also established relationships with some towns on the eastern Mediterranean coast of West Asia, an area from which Egypt imported cedar wood.

Last week’s post mentioned the bronze-producing Sintashta culture in the Ural Mountains. By the 1900s BC, the Sintashta were making the world’s first chariots, which in later centuries would move east to China and west to Mesopotamia and revolutionize ancient warfare. Gravesites of the Sintashta culture contain the remains of chariots and chariot horses, predating the earliest definite Western Asian depictions of chariots.

Pretty much due south of the Urals, in the vicinity of what is now eastern Turkmenistan, was an urban society termed the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). Getting a clear picture of this is incredibly difficult – the centuries of its existence are so disputed that some archaeologists have its start at the same time that other ones have its end! So what I’m giving is just one possible version of its history.

The BMAC culture reached its height around the 1900s BC, with irrigation agriculture and large walled towns containing palaces or citadels. One of its main cities was Gonur Depe. There was trade between Sintashta and the BMAC culture, possibly involving Sintashta trading horses to them. There also appears to have been contact between Harappa and an Iranian culture starting around this period, including new types of pottery, burials incorporating precious objects, and the introduction of horses. This contact could have involved trade from Sintashta to BMAC and thence to Harappa.

In addition to Sintashta, another site of bronze production was Britain, which produced its first bronze around this time. Britain was well-positioned for it, as it had both copper (in Wales) and tin (in Cornwall), whereas most places needed to engage in long-distance trade for one or the other (usually for tin, which was rarer). One of the oldest discovered mines, a copper mine at Llandudno in Wales, dates back to this period, and would grow substantially larger in later centuries.