1900s BCE Near East mass migration
2000 BCE to 1900 BCE
Sometime around 2000 BCE and 1900 BCE, a series of events leads to a large swath of destruction starting from Eastern Anatolia (now Eastern Turkey) to the Aegean Sea.
The destruction, traveling along the traditional trade routes, leaves a series of burnt and destroyed cities in its wake.
The 1900 BCE Near East mass migration refers to the theory that the refugees from this invasion or event caused a mass migration of Indo-European peoples, who would become the Mycenaean Greeks, from their former settlements into south and central Greece displacing the former non-Greek inhabitants of Greece.
Little is known about these non-Greek people, possibly Pelasgians, who were either conquered or absorbed by the Greek migration.
It is clear however that their language used the suffices -nthos, -ssos, -ndos for place names.
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The fabled Yellow Emperor of the legendary Xia, or Hsia, Dynasty is a cultural hero who Chinese mythology regards as the ancestor of all Han Chinese.
Among his other accomplishments, the Yellow Emperor has been credited with the invention of the principles of Traditional Chinese medicine, and to have invented the earliest form of the Chinese calendar: its current sexagenary cycles are counted based on his reign.
Also attributed to him is the yellow bell, or huang chung, the name given to the absolute (fixed) pitch produced by a bamboo pipe of set length.
The nameless, long-vanished people with brown hair and long noses will be found in the Small River Cemetery No. 5, lying near a dried up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, most of which is now covered by the inhospitable Takimakan desert in what is now China’s northwest autonomous province of Xinjiang.
The Afanasevo culture, as an early extreme outlier of presumably Indo-European culture, is an automatic candidate for being the earliest attested representative for speakers of the Tocharian stock; it occupied the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai Mountains during the eneolithic era, c. 3300 to 2500 BCE.
The Tocharian languages may have been introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north, as argued by Mallory and Mair (2000:294–296, 314–318)
The apparently Caucasoid trading nation had, however, disappeared from the area by 1900 BCE; its connection to the westerly and specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture, which flourished from about 2000 BCE to 900 BCE) is unknown.
Some of the two hundred mummies have been analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fujan University, who stated in 2007 that their DNA contains markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.
Carbon tests conducted at Beijing University indicated that the oldest part of the cemetery dates to 1980 BCE.
A report published by in February 2010 in the journal BMC Biology, based on studies by a team of geneticists led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University and coauthored by Li and Hui, states that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China.
The male mummies, some of which sport tattoos, had a Y chromosome mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia but rarely in China.
The mitochondrial DNA, transmitted down the female line, consists of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe.
Zhou’s team concluded that the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before their arrival in the Tarim Basin.
The invention of the spoked wheel allows the construction of lighter and swifter vehicles.
The earliest known examples are in the context of the Andronovo culture, dating to around 2000 BCE.
Soon after this, horse cultures of the Caucasus region will use horse-drawn spoked wheel war chariots for the greater part of three centuries.
The destruction associated with the 1900s BCE Near East mass migration crosses into Europe in what is now Bulgaria, bringing an end to Bulgaria's early Bronze age, with archaeological evidence showing that the Yunacite, Salcutza, and Ezero centers had a sudden mass desertion during this time.
The combined attacks of the Amorites, a Semitic people from the west, and the Elamites, a Caucasian people from the east, destroy the Third Dynasty of Ur by 2000 BCE.
The invaders nevertheless carry on the Sumero-Akkadian cultural legacy.
A large-scale migration of federated Amorite tribes, likely triggered by the twenty-second century BCE drought, infiltrates Mesopotamia from the west from the twenty-first century BCE, resulting in the occupation of Babylonia proper, the mid-Euphrates region, and Syria-Palestine.
They set up a mosaic of small kingdoms and rapidly assimilate the Sumero-Akkadian culture.
They are one of the instruments of the downfall of the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, and acquiring a series of powerful kingdoms, culminate in the triumph under Hammurabi of Babylon.
The land of the Amorites ("the Mar.tu land") is associated in the earliest Sumerian sources, beginning about 2400 BCE, with the West, including Syria and Canaan, although their ultimate origin may have been Arabia.
The ethnic terms Amurru and Amar were used for them in Assyria and Egypt respectively.
Amorites seem to have worshipped the moon-god Sin, and Amurru.
The Semitic-speaking Amorites, who penetrate Canaan from the northeast, become the dominant element of the population.
In Syria as well as in Canaan, the Amorite newcomers thoroughly mix with the Hurrians; their civilization is intimately connected with that of the towns of the Phoenician-Canaanite coast.
The pharaohs give costly gifts to those princes, such as the rulers of Qatna and ...
Among the wide range of views regarding the Amorite homeland, the more extreme of these is the view that kur mar.tu/m t amurrim covered the whole area between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, Arabia included.
The other extreme is the view that the “homeland” of the Amorites was a limited area in Syria (Jebel Bishri).
One minority theory refers to Arabia in general as the area from where the Amorites once came.
Another refers to a limited area (unknown) in Arabia, the mountain district of Martu.
However, as the Amorite language is a northwestern Semitic language, it is likely that they originated from what is now modern Syria.
...Ugarit, who are loyal to Egypt.
The earliest Ugaritic contact with Egypt (and the first exact dating of Ugaritic civilization) comes from a carnelian bead identified with the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I, 1971 BCE–1926 BCE.