World History in a Year (Week 29): 100s BC
This week we’re going to start with South and Central Asia, because turmoil and changes in power in the region affect a lot of other developments. Early in the century (185 BC), the Mauryan emperor in India was assassinated and overthrown by his general Pushyamitra Shunga, who founded the Shunga Dynasty. It was never as large or powerful as the Mauryans, however, with its territory largely limited to the Ganges basin.
Setting the stage in Central Asia, remember that the Greco-Bactrians (in Afghanistan) and the Parthians (roughly northeast of Iran) both broke off from the rule of the Seleucids during the previous century. Now the Greco-Bactrians took advantage of the upheaval in India to expand into Pakistan; but they also immediately suffered a coup back home. This led to the original Greco-Bactrian Dynasty, now called the Indo-Greek kingdom, ruling Pakistan, while the coup leader Eucratides ruled the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in Afghanistan.
The Parthians, for their part, expanded to conquer most of the Seleucid territory in Iran and Mesopotamia, leaving the Seleucids with only a bit of Syria. (Also in this century, the Romans pushed the Seleucids out of Anatolia and the Maccabean revolt created an independent Jewish state in Judea, so the Seleucids were really losing on all fronts.)
The next phase of Central Asian turmoil involved the rise of the Xiongnu, a confederation of steppe nomads who came together under a powerful leader early in the century, possibly in reaction to the creation of the Han dynasty. The complicated thing with Central Asia is that both ethnicity and territory could be very fluid among nomadic groups. Depending on ebbs and flows of power and alliances, the ethnic identities of groups could change, and groups who were attacked and driven out of their territory could migrate long distances. In this case, the Xiongnu expansion drove their rivals, the Yuezhi, so far west that the Yuezhi slammed into the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and destroyed it. The Yuezhi also pushed another group, the Saka or Indo-Scythians (related to the Scythians in Ukraine, despite wide geographical separation – like I said, people in central Asia could move a lot), into the Indo-Greek kingdoms. This caused the Pakistan area to split into multiple small states.
So basically, Alexander the Great’s successor states in central and western Asia – Seleucids, Greco-Bactrians, and Indo-Greeks – get pretty well taken out this century.
But we’re not done with Central Asia yet, because the Han Dynasty were also having serious problems with the Xiongnu, and sent trade and diplomatic missions into Central Asia to try to find allies against them. These weren’t really successful on the military-alliance front, but they did open up trade (China particularly wanted high-quality Central Asian horses), and when the Xiongnu confederation started breaking apart later in the century, the Han managed to extend their control well into Central Asia. They set up trade relations with the Parthians – who, in all the chaos, managed to expand their territory into more of western Central Asia – and this was when the Silk Road trade began. By the end of the century there was a regular route for trade in goods all the way from China to the Roman Republic and Egypt.
Another important trade route was along the Red Sea: this century was when the Nabatean trading centre of Petra became important. With the collapse of the Seleucids and the rise of independent Judea, one of the best trade routes connecting the Arabian Peninsula to the Romans was to go up the Red Sea and then overland through Petra to reach the Mediterranean. The Nabateans, in what is now southern Jordan, lay directly across that route. So the Nabateans could basically charge transport fees to everyone going through Petra, and they, like the Parthians, were doing very nicely as middlemen. The rock-cut tombs of their rulers and aristocracy, in the canyon walls surrounding Petra, are a striking mix of Greco-Roman, Assyrian, and other architectural styles.
Next we'll highlight a few developments in domestic politics of the Han and the Romans. The Han Dynasty gradually consolidated and centralized power over the course of the century, and was probably at its strongest around the end of the 100s BC. This century was also when the Han began the creation of a professionalized civil service, though it wasn’t as systematic as it would become in later times. Periodically, government officials were asked to nominate new ones, who would go through a job interview testing their skills and character in front of the emperor. Additionally, the Han created a training school for civil servants, run by Confucian scholars and oriented around knowledge of the Confucian classic texts.
Meanwhile, Rome was both becoming militarily stronger – it conquered much of Greece, and crushed the remnant of Carthage in the Third Punic War – and experiencing some serious internal conflicts. The one that I want to highlight, because of its relationship to future events, was the conflict around the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (commonly referred to in histories as the Gracchi). The start of the conflict involved a lot of land conquered in Rome’s various wars and taken over by large landowners; Tiberius Gracchus wanted to redistribute it to landless Romans. To be clear, this was imperialism either way – a dispute about how to distribute the spoils of war. Tiberius did a variety of things pushing the boundaries of Roman political processes during the fight over the law, and accumulated a lot of power around carrying it out, and this culminated in other members of the Roman government gathering supporters and beating him to death with clubs. Further conflicts around his brother’s political career led to a fight in which thousands of people were killed and Gaius Gracchus committed suicide. I am vastly oversimplifying this – it’s a huge topic in Roman history and historians’ opinions seem to range from the Gracchi as popular reformers to the Gracchi as the first-century-BC equivalent of Trump. But the element that stood out to me was: in these conflicts, killing people who seemed like they were accumulating too much political power became an established Roman tradition. The killing of Julius Caesar in the next century wasn’t a one-off: it was the invocation of an established practice that the conspirators were deliberately hearkening back to.
The 100s BC were also a time of major building projects in Rome, India, and Mesoamerica. (We have less archaeological evidence from China because their buildings were mainly of wood.) In Rome, wealth taken from conquered areas enabled the upper classes to build large mansions for themselves, as well as sponsoring temples and other public buildings to increase their prestige. With Rome’s conquests in Greece, the Romans adopted Greek architectural styles.
In India, although the Shunga Dynasty was Hindu, the most famous building project of this era was Buddhist: the Great Stupa at Sanchi (an expansion of a smaller stupa built in Mauryan times). A stupa is a hemispherical building containing Buddhist relics; unlike many other religious buildings, worship does not involve entering the building, but walking circuits around it (circumambulation).
Here's the Great Stupa (the gateway in front of it is from a later time; photo from Wikipedia):
Like much Roman monumental construction of the time, the building of the Great Stupa was funded privately, but the class composition of its contributors was much more varied. The names of some 800 donors are inscribed on the monument, often along with their occupations, and include landowners, bankers, merchants, and many types of artisans. Nearly half of the donors were women. This highlights that female Buddhists evidently had significant financial resources, and also that Buddhism seems to have particularly appealed to people who were defined as lower-status by Hindu standards: the Vedic texts firmly subordinated women to men and defined their lives around service to a husband, while within the caste system merchants were vaishyas (the third of the four main groups), and artisans were shudras (the lowest group). The appeal of Buddhism to merchants, combined with the increase in long-distance trade, would be of great importance in the later spread of Buddhism to central, eastern, and southeast Asia.
In Mesoamerica, this century marked the start of the first period of major Mayan construction, particularly at the great city of El Mirador in the lowlands south of the Yucután Peninsula. El Mirador has architecture on a scale previously thought to be specific to the later Classic Maya period. The city was 2km across, with two major pyramid complexes. The Danta complex contains the largest pyramid at the site, 75m high: for context, this is on a par with the tallest pyramid in Classic Maya-era Tikal. The El Tigre complex has a pyramid 55m high. These largest pyramids are not standalone, but surrounded by a massive number of other pyramids and temples, and connected by a large stone causeway. The picture below (from The Maya, 10th edition, by Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston) shows what El Mirador could have looked like in its prime:
A 12km causeway, 2-6m high and 20-40m wide and coated in white plaster, connected El Mirador to the neighbouring city of Nakbé, home of the oldest-known Mayan pyramids (possibly from the 500s BC).
The key to all this monumental construction was the large amount of limestone in the region. Limestone was a convenient and easily-cut stone for building in itself; the Maya also burned it and mixed it with water to make the white plaster they used to coat their temples and causeways. Additionally, mixing bits of limestone with a limestone-clay composite called marl and with mud from wetlands created a type of concrete.
A massive mural from the nearby site of San Bartolo shows that the central elements of Mayan mythology were in place by this time, incorporating stories of the Hero Twins and Maize God and an entity archaeologists term the Principal Bird Deity. I’ll give Michael Coe’s summary of it in a supplementary post later this week.
West of the Mayans, the Zapotec city of Monte Albán also had substantial monumental construction during this century. Its people levelled out the top of the mesa it was built on and covered it in white plaster to create a ceremonial plaza large enough to fit the city’s total population (some 17,000 people). Temples, palaces, and a massive pyramid-mound faced the plaza. A building in the centre of the plaza had stones inscribed with over 40 place-names, likely of cities that Monte Albán had conquered: by this time the city ruled the whole of the Oaxaca Valley. Commoners lived on the terraced slopes of the mesa.
To the northwest in the Basin of Mexico, Teotihucán reached a similar size (around 20,000) through immigration from the surrounding region, becoming the principal rival of the city of Cuicuilco in the same region. So it’s not a matter of just one region or people in Mesoamerica being at a strong point during this period, but three different regions rising simultaneously.
