World History in a Year (Week 31): First century AD
Both the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China conducted censuses in the early first century AD, and both of them had populations of around 60 million people. (Going by broad estimates, since the censuses didn’t cover everyone.) This gives some perspective on the scale of the ancient world at the time. On the one hand, 60 million would have been staggeringly larger than any Bronze or Iron Age states, and is an incredible number to control and administer with the technology of the ancient world. The Roman and Han empires together might have constituted a third or more or more of the entire global population at the time.
Yet looking at it from another point of view, 60 million people is around the population of present-day Italy. All the people of the ancient Roman Empire, from Spain to Syria to Egypt, were the same number that fit into Italy today. Likewise, a single midsize province of China today – let’s say Hubei, a fairly central one – equals the entire population of ancient Han China.
Beyond the borders of these two large empires, we still have Parthia in Iran, various smaller states in India, the Nabateans around Petra in present-day southern Jordan, and Meroë in Sudan, all of them engaged in trade. Parthia in particular was keenly aware of the value of its position as a middleman. Near the end of the century China attempted to send a diplomatic envoy to Rome, but they were discouraged by the Parthians, who would lose out if China and Rome established direct relations.
There are also three new states of note that join this expanding network of trade in this century. In terms of overland trade, a new player in central Asia was the Kushan state, in the area of present-day Afghanistan, which was founded by the Yuezhi people who had been driven to the area by the Xiongnu in the previous century.
Aksum, in the area of present-day northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, tied into the Indian Ocean trading network, exporting African products like ivory, gold, copper, iron, and salt. This made it a competitor of Meroë for the Red Sea trade.
On the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, the state of Funan in Southeast Asia, near the mouth of the Mekong River, was likewise closely involved in trade, initially more as a transshipment point and stopover between India and China than an exporter itself.
Our knowledge of the Indian Ocean trade in this era comes not just from archaeology, but increasingly from written sources. A treasure trove for historians, and cited by virtually every source I’ve found on ancient trade networks, is The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written by a Greek merchant in this century. The Erythraean Sea is the Red Sea, but the scope of the text goes substantially beyond that, east to India and south along the coast of Africa. It mentions an African port called Rhapta, whose location is not known but which may have been in Tanzania. And things were changing even further south in Africa, as iron-using Bantu cattle herders from eastern Africa expanded as far as what is now Zambia and Angola, which up until this point had been inhabited by hunter-gatherers.
With trade networks came greater exchanges in religious ideas, and this century saw the origin and expansion of both Christianity as well as the expansion of Mahayana Buddhism. Christianity reached from its origins in the Levant to as far as Rome and, according to some Christian traditions, to southern Asia, while Mahayana Buddhism spread through Central Asia and reached China. Both religions would ultimately become far more prominent in the new regions they reached – Europe and East Asia respectively – than in their regions of origin. This is when we really see the start of the phenomenon of “world religions”, religions that attracted converts on a large scale well beyond the regions and cultures within which they originated. At the same time Wang Chong, the first known materialist philosopher in China and an early scientist (he described the water cycle), argued that Heaven (Tian) had no awareness or involvement in human affairs, and was skeptical of omens, portents, and supernatural powers.
Another religious transformation in this period was the start of the use of statues in worship by Jain and Hindu religions (which would be joined by Buddhism in this regard the next century). Many of the most prominent monuments in eastern, southern, and southeast Asia incorporate Hindu and Buddhist statuary, including massive ones like the Leshan Giant Buddha. But in the 400s BC, you would have found statues of the gods in ancient Greece, but no Hindu or Buddhist ones in India. Early Buddhists only represented Buddha by symbols – his footprint, a Bodhi tree, the wheel of dharma. It was only over the course of the last two thousand years that things flipped. (Though there is a caveat to this – statues were used in folk religions in India centuries before they were used in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.)
Having done a broad survey of the eastern hemisphere. we’ll now focus in on some more specific political developments in the Roman and Han Empires. Both went through some major tumults, both experienced natural disasters, and both, as empires do, harshly suppressed rebellions of subject peoples. Examples of the latter were the First Jewish Revolt in AD 66-74, in which the Romans destroyed the Herodian Temple and razed Jerusalem; the revolt of Boadicea in England in AD 60; and the revolt of the Vietnamese against rule by Han China in AD 40-43, led by the sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi.
In terms of political upheavals and natural disasters within the imperial core, the Han experienced more serious ones than the Romans. The Han Dynasty is divided into two halves by the Wang Mang Interregnum in the early first century AD, in which the prominent aristocrat Wang Mang seized power and attempted to establish his own dynasty. In a country where natural disasters were seen as a loss of the Mandate of Heaven, his attempt was possibly aided by serious floods shortly preceding it, and fell in part due to even more severe flooding and famine during it. In these floods, the Yellow River changed its course massively, including splitting to run both north and south of the Shandong Peninsula and turning the peninsula into an island, with catastrophic effects. Fields in areas inundated by the river’s new course were destroyed; those the river’s course change took it away from were left without water supply. Rebellions by peasants devastated by the flooding and by aristocrats displeased with agricultural reforms toppled Wang Mang and restored the Han. But the tumult associated with this period, intermittent loss of control in Central Asia, and the flight of some aristocrats to port cities in southern China all contributed to China’s interest in seaborne trade via southeast Asia rather than relying only on the overland Silk Road.
The Roman Empire did not face the same scale of political disruption, but Augustus’ dynasty (called the Julio-Claudians) could not be considered stable: out of five emperors, it included two who were infamous as mad tyrants – Caligula and Nero. Nero’s reign ended with a civil war over the throne, contemporary with the First Jewish Revolt, and was won by a general involved in suppressing the revolt: Vespasian. Vespasian was succeeded by his two sons, the latter of whom was assassinated. In the next century, Rome would explore a different, and quite unique, method of managing monarchical succession.
Rome’s big natural disaster of this period – the eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii – is more famous for its immense value to archaeologists than for its impact on the Roman Empire. But across the world in Mesoamerica, volcanic eruptions would be politically pivotal.
The eruption of the Xitle volcano in the Basin of Mexico destroyed Teotihuacán’s rival city of Cuicuilco, while the eruption of an even larger volcano, Popocatepetl, drove people to flee much of the rest of the Basin. Refugees from both areas swelled the population of Teotihuacán, multiplying its size to perhaps 80,000 people. At the same time, Teotihuacán’s leaders made major changes in urban development. From this point on, the city was laid out on a grid plan (that is, streets running at right angles to each other) – a layout rarely seen elsewhere in the Americas, and similar to Roman cities of the same time. But while in Roman cities the streets ran north-south and east-west, in Teotihuacán the orientation was 15.5 degrees east of north and 15.5 degrees north of west, aligning with the sunset at the start of the rainy season and flooding the city with light as this most fertile time of the year, which was accompanied by religious celebrations.
Also like Roman cities, Teotihuacán’s main streets were two running at right angles to each other and meeting in the city’s centre. In Roman cities these were called the Cardo (north-south) and Decumanus (east-west); in Teotihuacán one was called the Street of the Dead. The Street of the Dead and its counterpart were each around 6.5km long. The core ritual area ran from one end of the Street of the Dead, where the Pyramid of the Moon was built, down to the intersection of the two main streets, the site of the city’s market and its political core. Halfway between the two rose the Pyramid of the Sun. Estimates of the dates of construction of these two great pyramids vary, but the early phases of both were completed around this century; successive expansions of both would continue over the next few centuries.
The scale of these pyramids is still impressive today, though the surrounding city is gone. From The Mayans (Coe and Houston, 10th ed., 2022), here’s the Pyramid of the Moon:
And here is the view down the Street of the Dead from the Pyramid of the Moon, past the Pyramid of the Sun:
This began a time that would become a reference point for the rest of Mesoamerican history, just as ancient Rome was for Europe and the Han Dynasty was for China: a golden age to be hearkened back to and emulated.
This was likewise a high point in the power of both Zapotect Monte Albán and the Preclassic Maya. With regard to the latter, the first uses of the Long Count calendar in Mayan regions date to this time, as do the earliest Mayan dynasties; the rulers of Tikal traced their line back to the first century AD. A tomb found at Tikal may be that of the first ruler of this dynasty, buried with a greenstone mask, stingray spine, and seashell, along with pottery and many other grave goods. Damage to the skeleton suggests death in battle, while defensive fortifications at El Mirador and elsewhere along with artistic depictions also support the idea of warfare between multiple powerful Mayan states.
In South America, northern Peru also underwent growth and development in this period. Maize farming appears to have intensified, with expansion of both field and irrigation systems. Local governments rose in several parallel valleys, and settlements became larger: the largest, in the Virú valley, had 30,000 buildings. In the next century, the region would see the rise of a new empire: the Moche.
