Here’s a quick look at the world around 1000 BCE
The world population is about 50 million.
The Bantu expansion is just beginning, from a homeland on the present Nigeria/Cameroon border. It will eventually cover most of Africa south of the equator. The expansion is sometimes told as a story of first farmers replacing hunter-gatherers. But, as with the Indo-European expansion, this now looks to be too simple. Other farmers and herders reached east Africa before the Bantu; traces of their languages survive as eastern Bantu substrates. So the Bantu had something extra – social organization? malaria resistance? – going for them.
Seafarers with roots in the Lapita culture have already reached Western Polynesian – Samoa and Tonga, previously uninhabited.
The Olmec are flourishing in Meso-America. A controversial find (the Cascajal block) suggests they are just taking up writing.
In China, the Mandate of Heaven has passed from the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou.
In the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, the Late Bronze Age collapse has opened up space for smaller states. Tyre and other Phoenician city-states are sailing the Mediterranean. Phoenicians are using an alphabet that Greeks will eventually adapt. There might be other borrowings: Odysseus might originally have been Phoenician. At least that was the argument of the early twentieth century French diplomat and classicist Victor Bérard. He thought that Homer had folded an earlier Phoenician picaresque tale into his epic. James Joyce was very taken with this theory; Joyce’s Levantine Leopold Bloom owes something to Bérard’s Phoenician Odysseus.
Further south, Philistines and Israelites have been duking it out, with Israelites gaining the upper hand under David* (king from 1010 to 970 BCE). The Iron Age conventionally begins now, with the widespread use of iron – more abundant and cheaper than bronze.
On the steppe, horses have long been domesticated, but people are now learning to make effective use of cavalry – fighting in formation and firing volleys from horseback. This is the beginning of 2500 years in which the division between Steppe and Sown will be central to Eurasian history.
* Everybody knows that David killed Goliath (1 Samuel 17). However, according to 2 Samuel 21:19, Goliath was killed by Elhanan of Bethlehem. (Depending on which version of the Bible you use, the victim might be given as the brother of Goliath, but the italicised bit is a later interpolation. It’s plain Goliath originally.) Probably the Elhanan story is the original one, and the whole David-and-Goliath story amounts to later resume-padding on the part of David at the expense of a subordinate. See The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero for this and other demonstrations of how we can recover likely truths from historical texts.
Logarithmic History 