2000 In the Fertile Crescent the use of copper tools has become widespread. There is a shift to a more scarce metal for use as money: silver.
2000 Near what today is Haifa, Israel, at least two neolithic dwellers are infected with tuberculosis.
2000 Another wave of settlements is about to begin into what today is northern Israel.
2000 Give or take a century or two, Malay people begin migrating from the Asian mainland, across the ocean, to join others on Indonesian islands, bringing with them the cultivation of rice and domesticated animals. People called Mon migrate from Central Asia to the southern tip of Burma, where they begin growing rice. People leave the Mulucca Islands and migrate eastward to islands north of Australia.
1950 The Sumerians have been overrun by Amorites and are to disappear as a recognizable people. Their writings, stories and gods are to endure. Sumerian language is to be what Latin will be in Europe in early modern times.
1900 Egypt is united again, followed by the rule of Pharaoh Amenemhet I. Common people have failed to win political power, and local lords are subservient again to one king, but common people and lords have won recognition of having an afterlife like kings. And more importance is given by all to the goddess of justice, Ma'at.
1800 Migrants in magnificent little boats reach Micronesia.
1800 An Amorite king at Babylon, Hammurabi, extends his empire from the Persian Gulf to the city of Haran. He builds roads, creates a postal system and sees himself as conqueror of the world. Babylon is lush with agriculture. In the name of his god of justice, Hammurabi gives his subjects laws about mistreatment of each other.
1750 Along the Yellow River (Huang He), conquerors start building what would be known as the Shang civilization, eventually to stretch four or five hundred miles. The main concern of the Shang kings is power. They take slaves and practice human sacrifice to please the gods they fear. Women are subservient to men. Shang kings claim to be descended from ancestors who reside in heaven. Canals are dug for irrigation.
1750 A literate people move through Canaan, take control of some cities there, and then they conquer northern Egypt. They have horses and light-weight chariots and introduce the Egyptians to the wheel, new musical instruments, new techniques for making bronze and pottery, new kinds of crops, new gods and new weapons of war. The Egyptians call them Hyksos.
1700 Rainfall declines in the Indus Valley and Mohenjo-daro civilization disappears. By now Indo-European hunter-gatherers and farmers have moved into Sweden and have learned to endure winters there.
1700 Between now and 1500 BCE, small pit house villages appear in the Tucson Basin and probably in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. In these villages, archaeologists will find the remains of maize (corn) "ubiquitous." (History of the Ancient Southwest, Stephen H. Lekson, p 41.)
1680 In Egypt, leavened bread is being baked.
1600 Among Hebrew families (the likes of Isaac, Jacob and his wife Rachel) the males rule. Women are regarded as the propery of their fathers or husbands and act only with their consent. Men are allowed serveral wives. A man can easily divorce a wife by putting her out of the house, but a wife was not allowed to divorce her husband. Marriages occurred around the age of thirteen for boys and girls.
1593 Hittites from Asia Minor, with horses and lightweight chariots, sack Babylon, ending the dynasty that had been created by Hammurabi. Then they withdraw.
1525 The Egyptians drive the Hyksos from their land. The Egyptian king, Thutmose I, and his subjects pursue the Hyksos through Canaan and into Syria.
1500 Aryan nomads with horses and light-weight chariots packed in their wagons drop out of the mountains eastward into the Indus valley. They bring with them their sacred hymns and oral history – stories that express their desire to please the gods, including their god Dyaus Pitar (Sky Father).
1480 Hurrians, from the Zagros Mountains, dominate the city of Mari, on the upper Euphrates, and Nuzi, a thriving commercial center. They have overrun and dominate the Assyrians. And around this time they battle the Egyptians who are still in the north around Syria.
1457 (May 9)Â Egypt's army led by Pharaoh Thutmose III battles a Canaanite coalition led by the King of Kadesh: the Battle of Megiddo. The Egyptians rout of the Canaanites forces. It will be described by Wikipedia as "the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail," including body count, and the "first recorded use of the composite bow."
1420 Around now, Mycenae Greeks invade and conquer Crete. Minoan civilization will fade.
1400 Give or take a century or so, along the humid coast of southeastern Mexico, Olmec civilization begins.
1400 In Egypt a water clock is invented.
1350 The Egyptian king, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) rules. He tries to force his subjects to worship the god Aton, whom he believes is the god of the universe. Egypt has withdrawn from Syria and Canaan.
1300 The Assyrians have benefited from the decline of the Hurrians, and they control all of Mesopotamia.
1300 Sometime around now, give or take three or four centuries, people having what anthropologists describe as the Lapita culture begin to sail from islands in the Bismarck Archipelago (just east of New Guinea), eastward into the Pacific. Lapita culture includes pottery, domesticated pigs, dogs and chickens, root and tree crops and fishing.
1300 Writing has appeared in Shang civilization, with characters partly pictorial and partly phonetic, and bronze casting has developed.
1279 Ramses II becomes King of Egypt, in his early twenties. The early part of his reign will focus on building cities, temples and monuments.
1250 Sedentary villages of agriculturalists are in what today is the middle of Mexico's far north.
1213 Ramses II dies, in his eighties.
1207 On a stele in Egypt, Pharoah Merenptah memorializes his victories in Canaan. In the last 3 of 28 lines of text he describes a campaign in Canaan "Israel had been wiped out...its seed is no more." The pictogram used for Israel indicates a tribal or nomadic people lacking a centralized government.
1200 Tribal peoples from Central Asia had been moving westward with their herds, running from droughts. They are pushing other tribal peoples into Asia Minor. Hittites are overrun and begin to disappear as a recognizable people. Waves of illiterate migrants overrun Greece, beginning a "dark age" there. Brown-skinned people begin migrating eastward into Polynesia, to the Tonga and Samoan islands.
1200 The Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo Peoples, have moved to around where the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico will meet.
1200 In China, aristocrats are concerned with their status and they keep records of their family tree, Common common people had no surnames and no pedigree and did not participate in ancestor worship. Unlike aristocrats, marriage among them was without formality and without state or religious sanction. Aristocrats looked down on this with disdain, but wealthy married men felt free to buy a girl from a commoner family and keep her as a concubine. The father selling his daughter made a little money and may have felt that he was getting rid of another mouth to feed and someone whose labor he did not need. For common people, unlike aristocrats, there were no individualized family surnames. All families in a village might have the same surname.
1177 People in boats, perhaps escaping from invasions into Greece, raid the coast of Egypt and are driven off. They land farther east and are to be known as Philistines.
1050 A century or so after the arrival of the Philistines, Hebrews, occupying hilly regions in the Land of Canaan, combine their forces for the first time and confront an army of Philistines near the Philistine outpost at Aphek, and they lose the battle.
1010 The Hebrew David conquers and subjugates Amorities – also known as Canaanites. David has acquired some Canaanite culture and is a man of his time.
timeline 4000-2001 | timeline 1000 to 501
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