As the Bronze Age crumbled around the Mediterranean, Mesoamerica's first civilisation was rising: Olmec San Lorenzo flourished from about 1200 BC, while Egypt barely held off the Sea Peoples around 1175 BC.
The events
- Rise of Olmec San Lorenzoc. 1200 BC · San Lorenzo. On the Gulf Coast of Mexico, San Lorenzo became the first great Olmec centre, famed for its colossal stone heads. The Olmecs are often called the 'mother culture' of later Mesoamerican civilisations.
- Ramesses III repels the Sea Peoplesc. 1175 BC · Nile Delta. Pharaoh Ramesses III defeated the fleet of the Sea Peoples, who had ravaged the Hittite kingdom and Levantine cities. Egypt survived, but the invasions were part of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean.
More amazing facts
- 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.
- 1250 BC · 1976 Ramesses II's mummy was never issued a passport — that's a myth.
- 1250 BC · 1899 China's oldest writing was ground up and swallowed as medicine.
- 1200 BC · 1936 The thylacine vanished from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, yet survived in Tasmania into the 20th century: the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
- 1200 BC · 900 BC The Olmecs moved stone heads weighing tens of tonnes more than 150 km, and nobody knows quite how. These basalt portraits of rulers, up to 3.4 m tall, wear helmets, perhaps for war or the ballgame.
- 1170 BC The first recorded strike took place in Egypt around 1170 BC. Royal tomb builders downed tools over late wheat rations — 'We are hungry!' The authorities heard them out, and work resumed the next day.