A near-contemporary of Tutankhamun in China was an army general.
Fu Hao, wife of the Shang king Wu Ding, led military campaigns and served as high priestess; her intact tomb, found in 1976, earned her the name 'the Chinese Tutankhamun'.
The events
- Fu Hao, queen and generalc. 1200 BC · Yinxu, Anyang, China. One of the many wives of the Shang king Wu Ding, Fu Hao was a general and high priestess whose campaigns are recorded on oracle bones. Her tomb, found intact in 1976 with weapons and over 700 jades, earned her the name 'the Chinese Tutankhamun'.
- Oracle bone inscriptionsc. 1250 BC · Yin. At the Shang capital of Yin under King Wu Ding, diviners carved questions to the ancestors on turtle shells and ox bones. These are the earliest known Chinese writing, the direct ancestor of modern characters.
14th century BC · 12th century BC
More amazing facts
- 1370 BC We even know the season when the Egtved Girl was buried in Denmark: summer, 1370 BC. The tree rings of her oak coffin say so, and a yarrow flower had been laid on it.
- 1350 BC · 1963 In ancient Egypt a pregnancy test used grain: a woman urinated on wheat and barley, and if they sprouted, she was pregnant.
- 1323 BC · 1922 Tutankhamun's dagger was forged from a meteorite.
- 1323 BC · 1939 Tutankhamun's trumpets were silent for over 3,000 years, then played live on BBC radio in 1939 to some 150 million listeners.
- 1305 BC · 1982 One of the richest Bronze Age shipwrecks was found by a sponge diver who sketched 'metal biscuits with ears'. They were copper ingots: ten tonnes of them on a 14th-century BC ship off Turkey, plus a gold scarab of Nefertiti.
- 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.