Disaster That Struck The Ancients

BBC ^ | 7-26-2001 | Fekri Hassan

[blam]

Thursday, 26 July, 2001, 12:12 GMT 13:12 UK

Disaster that struck the ancients

The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom had built the mightiest legacy of the ancient world - the pyramids at Giza. But after nearly a thousand years of stability, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years.

What happened, and why, has remained a huge controversy. But Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues.

His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. The hieroglyphs there reported "all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children".

Dismissed as exaggeration and fantasy by most other Egyptologists, Fekri was determined to prove the writings were true and accurate. He also had to find a culprit capable of producing such misery.

Stalactites and stalagmites

"My hunch from the beginning was that it had to do with the environment in which the Egyptians lived." Fekri felt sure the Nile, the river that has always been at the heart of Egyptian life, was implicated.

He studied the meticulous records, kept since the 7th Century, of Nile floods. He was amazed to see that there was a huge variation in the size of the annual Nile floods - the floods that were vital for irrigating the land.

But no records existed for 2,200BC. Then came a breakthrough - a new discovery in the hills of neighbouring Israel. Mira Bar-Matthews of the Geological Survey of Israel had found a unique record of past climates, locked in the stalactites and stalagmites of a cave near Tel Aviv.

What they show is a sudden and dramatic drop in rainfall, by 20%. It is the largest climate event in 5,000 years. And the date? 2,200 BC.
As Israel and Egypt are in different weather systems, Fekri needed evidence of some worldwide climate event to link this to the collapse of the Old Kingdom. And the evidence came out of the blue.

Geologist Gerard Bond, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, looks for climate evidence in the icebergs of Iceland. As they melt on their journey south, they leave shards of volcanic ash on the ocean floor.

Dry lake

How far they travelled before melting tells him how cold it was. Cores of mud from the ocean floor revealed to him regular periods of extreme cold - mini ice ages - in Europe every 1,500 years, and lasting 200 years. And one mini ice age occurred at 2,200 BC.

Fekri Hassan: Looked at lake-bed cores

Gerard's colleague, Peter deMenocal, looked at climate records for the rest of the world at exactly the same time. From pollen records to sand, the story was the same - a dramatic climate change from Indonesia to the Mediterranean, Greenland to North America.

Scientists were confirming everything Fekri believed - severe climate change causing widespread human misery 4,200 years ago, misery we are only now learning about for the first time.

Back in Egypt, Fekri wanted to put the last piece of the puzzle in place. He wanted direct evidence of this severe climate change in the Nile. And he found it drilling cores in a large lake that had been fed by a tributary of the Nile in ancient times.

He discovered in the critical period, as the Old Kingdom collapsed, the lake had dried up completely - the only time in the whole history of this lake that this had happened. At last, Fekri felt he had proved that the writings on Ankhtifi's tomb were really true. It was nature that had driven people to desperation.

[e_engineer]

Is there any more information about this on line? I'm really curious if you were you able to resolve enough detail to determine the shape of the "spike" waveform. Did it have the ringing and rapid attack/slow decay that is typical of a lightning discharge? Sorry in advance if this post is messed up! (1st post on FR after a year of lurking)

[RadioAstronomer]

Not messed up at all! :)

We caught two solitary spikes about 3 minutes apart with smaller ones around it that were so close to the baseline, they could be anomalies in the noise floor.

[First_Salute]

Valles Caldera

I wonder that the Valles Caldera of the Jemez Mountain Range, though now classified as "resurgent," was initiated by impact.

I suspect that an impact where the Earth's magma subsurface level is "just right," effectively "fractures" the crust of the earth and in slow motion, resembles something like this:

Combine High Speed and Time Lapse, BMumford.com

Ulysses Patera on Mars, showing two impact craters of later dates than the resurgent structure.

The smaller impacts did not cause "fractures." While the larger, older impact did, causing a large outward plume, some of which then collapsed back upon the hole, the heat and heat of vibration smoothing the matter --- whereas in the case of the Valles Caldera, the resulting splash is Redondo:

It's just a theory.

[blam]

A good possibility. I read a report about the 1628BC eruption of Thera and a guy (Mike Baillie) speculated that it may have been initiated by a comet fragment impacting. (not likely in my opinion)

[blam]

"The god Enki had warned some of them, and they were warned to flee northward from their ruined cities, taking no food or cooking pots with them for fear those had been touched by the ghost.

Comet Encke

Hi crystalk. It has taken me all this time to make the connection to the god Enki and the comet Encke. Hmmm, I wonder? (It does keep coming back)

[stands2reason]

That's one of my pet theories, that climate is what caused every dramatic change in human history. Have you heard about the climate change that was supposed to have caused the Plague?

[gitmo]

Here is the schedule of mini-ice ages that destroy civilizations (according to the author's numbers):

4200 years ago
2700 years ago
1200 years ago
300 years from now

We need to drive SUVs and use freon as much as possible or we are DOOMED. DOOMED I TELL YOU!

[varon]

............the inherent folly of government spending. It may keep people busy, and it may look like things are getting done, but it merely squanders human and physical resources, and is inherently uneconomic. A collossal waste of productive human energy -- and for what? To assuage the ego of some delusional tyrant.

And this differes from our federal government, how?

[Junior]

I do know that a hell of a lot of lives and resources were wasted in the building of some of the most wasteful structures in human history.

The pyramids were built by professionals, not slaves. Additionally, they are still around 4200 years later. Has any other thing man built lasted that long? The Egyptians evidently got their money's worth from that project -- and then some.

[Maceman]

The pyramids were built by professionals, not slaves. Additionally, they are still around 4200 years later. Has any other thing man built lasted that long? The Egyptians evidently got their money's worth from that project -- and then some.

I doubt that the grunt work for building them was done by professionals. But even if it was, it was a colossal waste of resources. After all, I'm sure that the pyramids' constriction cost a staggering amount of human time and energy relative to what we available for more productive use. And I'm certain that they were not paid for with voluntary contributions from the general populace.

The fact that they are still around 4200 years later is certainly amazing. It is certainly a tribute to the skill of the designers and planners, and a cultural benefit to those of us alive today -- who of course did not have to bear any of the burdens of paying for the pyramids' construction. But they represent an awful lot of capital being tied up virtually forever for no real productive benefit to those who were forced to pay for them.

Building huge, unimaginably expensive monuments to the egos of leaders is no way for a society to prosper. There is an opportunity cost, which consists of the productive benefit to society of the activity that never happened because so much capital was wasted on a useless public works project.

Just because the structures are still standing is no reason to think the Egyptians got their money's worth out of the effort. If you think they did, perhaps you'd be kind enough to explain to me from a cost-benefit standpoint how the pyramids brought value to the people who paid for them in blood, sweat and treasure.

[vannrox]

[vannrox]

New Evidence for Global Climate Disaster in 3rd Millennium BC
From: Harvey Weiss <harvey.weiss@yale.edu>
From: Science, Volume 279, Number 5349, 16 January 1998, pp.325-326

Sea-Floor Dust Shows Drought Felled Akkadian Enpire
Richard A. Kerr

When civilizations collapse, the blame is often laid on the culture itself--leaders who overreached, armies that faltered, farmers who degraded the land. Such were the conventional explanations for the end of the world's first empire, forged by the Akkadians by 2300 B.C. Their reign stretched 1300 kilometers from the Persian Gulf in present-day Iraq to the headwaters of the Euphrates River in Turkey. They were the first to subsume independent societies into a single state, but the Akkadian empire splintered a century later, not to be reunited in such grandeur for 1000 years.

In 1993, however, archaeologist Harvey Weiss of Yale University proposed that the Akkadians were not to blame for their fate. Instead, he argued that they were brought low by a wide-ranging, centuries-long drought (Science, 20 August 1993, p. 985) that toppled other civilizations too, including those of early Greece, the pyramid builders in Egypt, and the Indus Valley in Pakistan. Many archaeologists were skeptical because the timing of these collapses was imprecise, and purely social and political explanations seemed to suffice. But now Weiss's theory, at least as applied to the Akkadians, is getting new support from a completely independent source: an accurately dated, continuous climate record from the Gulf of Oman, 1800 kilometers from the heart of the Akkadian empire.

At the annual fall meeting last month of the American Geophysical Union here, paleoceanographers Heidi Cullen and Peter deMenocal of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and their colleagues reported that a sediment core retrieved from the bottom of the gulf matches Weiss's version of events: The worst dry spell of the past 10,000 years began just as the Akkadians' northern stronghold of Tell Leilan was being abandoned, and the drought lasted a devastating 300 years. The new results illustrate, says Weiss, that climate change "is emerging as a new and powerful causal agent" in the evolution of civilization.

Some archaeologists aren't willing to accept that the same drought changed history across the Old World, however. That argument "just doesn't float," says archaeologist Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University. But he and others agree that the new marine record lends support to the climate-culture connection that Weiss identified at the ruined city of Tell Leilan in the northern part of Mesopotamia, a region that includes parts of present-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Weiss began excavations there, on the Habur Plains of northeast Syria, in 1978.

Tell Leilan was a major city covering 200 acres by the middle of the third millennium B.C., and its people thrived on the harvests of the plains' fertile fields. But, unlike the farmers of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, who used irrigation from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to ensure bountiful harvests, the farmers of Tell Leilan depended on plentiful rainfall to water their fields. Less than a century after the people of Akkad in central Mesopotamia extended their reach into the north, those rains began to fail, says Weiss.

When Weiss and Marie-Agnes Courty, a soil scientist and archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, dug through the accumulated debris of Tell Leilan, they encountered an interval devoid of signs of human activity, containing only the clay of deteriorating bricks. The abandonment began about 2200 B.C., as determined by carbon-14 dating of cereal grains. Soil samples from that time showed abundant fine, windblown dust and few signs of earthworm activity or the once-abundant rainfall. All this suggested that the people of Tell Leilan, and, presumably, its environs, retreated in the face of a suddenly dry and windy environment, triggering the collapse of the Akkadian empire's northern provinces. Only after the signs of dryness abated, about 300 years later, was Tell Leilan reoccupied.

Weiss went further, however, proposing that refugees from the drought went south, where irrigation helped protect crops. Droves of immigrants would have further strained a sociopolitical system already stressed by the same drought, he says, until the whole system collapsed under the strain. And he noted that the pyramid-building Old Kingdom of Egypt, the towns of Palestine, and the cities of the Indus Valley went into precipitous declines at about the same time and apparently also suffered unstable climates.

It's a neat story, but critics questioned whether the drying really was catastrophic enough to bring down all of Mesopotamian civilization, where irrigation would have helped farmers cope with the drought. And they were even more skeptical that such a drought could have felled other cultures across the Old World. To test these ideas, deMenocal and Cullen decided to see just how big and bad the drought really was. They analyzed sediment from the Gulf of Oman, reasoning that if all of Mesopotamia had become a dust bowl, the hot northwest summer wind called the Shamal would have blown that dust down the Tigris and Euphrates valley, over the Persian Gulf, and finally into the Gulf of Oman, 2200 kilometers from Tell Leilan.

Cullen and deMenocal looked for this far-traveled dust in a 2-meter sediment core spanning the past 14,000 years, which was retrieved from the Gulf of Oman by paleoceanographer Frank Sirocko of the University of Kiel in Germany. In samples taken every 2 centimeters along the core, they measured the amounts of dolomite, quartz, and calcite--minerals that today dominate the dust blown from Mesopotamia by the Shamal. They found that wind-blown dust levels in the Gulf of Oman were high during the last ice age until about 11,000 years ago, then settled down to levels more typical of today. But in the sample from 2000 B.C. plus or minus 100 years, as dated by carbon-14, the abundance of dust minerals jumped to two to six times above background, reaching levels not found at any other time in the past 10,000 years.

The extreme dustiness--which suggests a wide-ranging area of dryness--persisted through the next sample 140 years later but faded away by the third sample, indicating a duration of a few hundred years. The team also tracked isotopes of strontium and neodymium, which occur in different ratios in dust from different regions. They confirmed that during the dust pulse, the proportion of minerals with a composition similar to that of the soils of Mesopotamia and Arabia increased.

Given the uncertainties of carbon dating, the marine dust pulse and the abandonment of Tell Leilan could still have been several centuries apart. But Cullen and deMenocal found in the core another time marker that makes a somewhat tighter connection. Less than about 140 years before the dust pulse is a layer containing volcanic ash. And Weiss had already reported that a centimeter-thick ash layer lies just beneath the onset of aridity and abandonment at Tell Leilan. The strikingly similar elemental compositions of the two ashes imply that they stem from the same volcanic event. If so, then Tell Leilan was abandoned just after the start of a climatic change of considerable magnitude, geographical extent, and duration. "There's something going on, a shift of atmospheric circulation patterns over a fairly large region," says Cullen.

Some archaeologists agree that this climate shift did change history outside northern Mesopotamia. “Most people who work in this range of time don't pay much attention to climate,” says archaeologist Frank Hole of Yale; “rather, it's political and social events [that matter]. ... But I think the evidence is overwhelming that we've got something going on here.” While conceding that climate and culture interact, a number of archaeologists still think that Weiss is pushing the connection too far. Drought may well have driven people from farmland dependent on rainfall, like that around Tell Leilan, says Lamberg-Karlovsky, but Weiss “generalizes from his northern Mesopotamia scenario to a global problem. That's utterly wrong. ... Archaeologists fall in love with their archaeological sites, and they generalize [unjustifiably] to a larger perspective.”

Even in Mesopotamia, “you do not have by any means a universal collapse of cultural complexity,” says Lamberg-Karlovsky. For example, at 2100 B.C., in the midst of the drying, the highly literate Ur III culture centered in far southern Mesopotamia was at its peak, he says, as was the Indus River civilization to the east, which thrived for another 200 years. Weiss counters that cuneiform records show that Ur III did in fact collapse 50 years later, apparently under the weight of a swelling immigrant population and crop failures. That timing still fails to impress Lamberg-Karlovsky, who concludes that Weiss is “getting little support for the global aspect of it.”

Such support may yet come from climate records being retrieved from around the world. In an enticing look at the postglacial climate of North America, Walter Dean of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver found three sharp peaks in the amount of dust that settled to the bottom of Elk Lake in Minnesota. Dust peaked at about 5800, 3800, and 2100 B.C., plus or minus 200 years, according to the counting of annual layers in the lake sediment. During the 2100 B.C. dust pulse, which lasted about a century, the lake received three times more dust each year than it did during the infamous Dust Bowl period in the U.S. in the 1930s. But the archaeological record doesn't reveal how this drought affected early North Americans, who at that time maintained no major population centers.

In another sign that the Mesopotamian drought was global, Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio State University and his colleagues found a dust spike preserved in a Peruvian mountain glacier that marks "a major drought" in the Amazon Basin about 2200 B.C., give or take 200 years. It is by far the largest such event of the past 17,000 years. But it doesn't seem to have had entirely negative effects; indeed, it roughly coincides with a shift in population centers from coastal areas of Peru, where the ocean provided subsistence, to higher regions, where agriculture became important. As more such records accumulate in the rapidly accelerating study of recent climate, archaeologists will have a better idea of just how much history can be laid at the feet of climate change.

[6ppc]

indexing

[blam]

"But it doesn't seem to have had entirely negative effects; indeed, it roughly coincides with a shift in population centers from coastal areas of Peru, where the ocean provided subsistence, to higher regions, where agriculture became important."

Dr Robert Schoch thinks these folks moved inland to get away from the tsunamis on the coast due to meteorite impacts in the Pacific ocean. There may have been a swarm during this period.

[Justa]

". . . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished...."

"And then in his anger the immortal God who dwells on high shall hurl from the sky a fiery bolt on the head of the unholy: and summer shall change to winter in that day."

-1918 translation of the "Sibylline" by H.N. Bate.

"From peak to loftiest peak the earth takes fire,
And cracks and splits, as all its saps suspire.
Grass wilts; and with their leaves the tree trunks flare;
And cornfields feed the flame that leaves them bare.
Small matters these--walled cities melt away;
Whole tribes and peoples turn to ashes gray;
The mountain masses with their forests burn:
Athos and Oete; Tmolus in his turn;
And Taurus smokes upon Cilicia's shore;
And Ida's many fountains gush no more;
Cynthus and Othrys, Haemus, yet unknown,
And Eryx burns, and virgin Helicon;
Parnassus lifts his two candescent spires;
And Etna streams with duplicated fires;
Dindyma, Mycale, and Mimas glow;
And Rhodope must shed her ancient snow;
Not Scythia's native frosts can keep her free;
Cithaeron, not his native sanctity;
And Pindus burns with Ossa, mighty names,
And mightier yet than both, Olympus flames;
Cold Caucasus with conflagration shines,
Air-piercing Alps, and cloud-capped Apennines.
Thus Phaethon, where'er he turns his gaze,
On every side beholds the world ablaze;
And faint, and breathing air at furnace heat,
He feels the car red-hot beneath his feet.
Wrapped in a pitchy pall of blinding smoke,
While cast-up ash and cinders sear and choke,
He knows not where he is, nor whither bound,
Dragged by the horses where they choose the ground.
Robbed, by the heat, of moisture, Libya's plain
Turned then to desert, ne'er to bloom again;
And as the sun-burned blood boiled up, they say,

-Ovid, The Metamorphoses

[Ciexyz]

Iraqi crater bump. Interesting read.

[blam]

"Iraqi crater bump. Interesting read."

LOL. Made all the way though, huh?

[Aarchaeus]

Sumer is somewhat older

OK, I'll spring for this one.

Wasn't Sumer before the Fall?