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Empires in the dust - collapse of Bronze Age cultures in 2,200 A.D

Discover, March, 1998 by Karen Wright

Some 4,000 years ago, a number of mighty Bronze Age cultures crumbled. Were they done in by political strife and societal unrest? Or by a change in the climate?

Mesopotamia: cradle of civilization, the fertile breadbasket of western Asia, a little slice of paradise between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Today the swath of land north of the Persian Gulf is still prime real estate. But several millennia ago Mesopotamia was absolutely The Place to Be. There the visionary king Hammurabi ruled, and Babylon's hanging gardens hung. There the written word, metalworking, and bureaucracy were born. From the stately, rational organization of Mesopotamia's urban centers, humanity began its inexorable march toward strip malls and shrink-wrap and video poker bars and standing in line at the DMV. What's more, the emergence of the city-state meant that we no longer had to bow to the whims of nature. We rose above our abject dependence on weather, tide, and filth; we were safe in the arms of empire. Isn't that what being civilized is all about?

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Not if you ask Harvey Weiss. Weiss, professor of Near Eastern archeology at Yale, has challenged one of the cherished notions of his profession: that early civilizations--with their monuments and their grain reserves, their texts and their taxes--were somehow immune to natural disaster. He says he's found evidence of such disaster on a scale so grand it spelled calamity for half a dozen Bronze Age cultures from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley--including the vaunted vale of Mesopotamia. Historians have long favored political and social explanations for these collapses: disruptions in trade routes, incompetent administrators, barbarian invasions. "Pre-historic societies, simple agriculturists--they can be blown out by natural forces," says Weiss. But the early civilizations of the Old World? "It's not supposed to happen."

Yet happen it did, says Weiss, and unlike his predecessors, he's got some data to back him up. The evidence comes from a merger of his own archeological expertise with the field of paleoclimatology, the study of climates past. His first case study concerns a series of events that occurred more than 4,000 years ago in a region of northern Mesopotamia called the Habur Plains. There, in the northeast corner of what is present-day Syria, a network of urban centers arose in the middle of the third millennium B.C. Sustained by highly productive organized agriculture, the cities thrived. Then, around 2200 B.C., the region's new urbanites abruptly left their homes and fled south, abandoning the cities for centuries to come.

Weiss believes that the inhabitants fled an onslaught of wind and dust kicked up by a drought that lasted 300 years. He also believes the drought crippled the empire downriver, which had come to count on the agricultural proceeds of the northern plains. Moreover, he contends, the long dry spell wasn't just a local event; it was caused by a rapid, region-wide climate change whose effects were felt by budding civilizations as far west as the Aegean Sea and the Nile and as far east as the Indus Valley. While the Mesopotamians were struggling with their own drought-induced problems, he points out, neighboring societies were collapsing as well: the Old Kingdom in Egypt, early Bronze Age cities in Palestine, and the early Minoan civilization of Crete. And in the Indus Valley, refugees fleeing drought may have overwhelmed the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. The troubles of half a dozen Bronze Age societies, says Weiss, can be blamed on a single event--and a natural disaster at that.

Weiss first presented this scenario in 1993, when soil analyses showed that a period of severe dust storms accompanied the mysterious Habur hiatus. "I was thinking you can't have a microregion drought," he recalls, "because that isn't how climate works. It's got to be much bigger. And I said, 'Wait a minute, didn't I read about this in graduate school? Weren't there those who, 30 years ago, had said that drought conditions were probably the agency that accounts for all these collapses that happened in contiguous regions?"' says Weiss. "Back in the late sixties we had read this stuff and laughed our heads off about it."

In 1966, British archeologist James Mellaart had indeed blamed drought for the downfalls of a whole spectrum of third-millennium civilizations, from the early Bronze Age communities in Palestine to the pyramid builders of Egypt's Old Kingdom. But when Mellaart first put forth this idea, he didn't have much in the way of data to back him up. Weiss, however, can point to new paleoclimate studies for his proof. These studies suggest that an abrupt, widespread change in the climate of western Asia did in fact occur at 2200 B.C. Samples of old ocean sediments from the Gulf of Oman, for example, show signs of extreme drought just when Weiss's alleged exodus took place. A new model of air-mass movement explains how subtle shifts in atmospheric circulation could have scorched Mesopotamia as well as points east, west, and south. And recent analyses of ice cores from Greenland--which offer the most detailed record of global climate change--reveal unusual climatic conditions at 2200 B.C. that could well have brought drought to the region in question.

Empires in the dust - collapse of Bronze Age cultures in 2,200 A.D

Discover, March, 1998 by Karen Wright

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