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Empires in the dust
Discover, March, 1998 by Karen Wright
In his own excavations of the same period, Weiss had already found evidence of desertion: mud-brick walls that had fallen over day floors and were covered with, essentially, 300 years' worth of compacted dust. And once he made the drought connection at Tell Leilan, he began turning up clues to the catastrophe everywhere he looked. In 1994, for example, Gerry Lemcke, a researcher at the Swiss Technical University in Zurich, presented new analyses of sediment cores taken from the bottom of Lake Van in Turkey, which lies at the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The new results indicated that the volume of water in the lake--which corresponds to the amount of rainfall throughout western Asia--declined abruptly 4,200 years ago. At the same time, the amount of windblown dust in the lake increased fivefold.
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Weiss came to believe that the effects of the drought reached downriver to the heart of Mesopotamia, causing the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. The collapse itself is undisputed: written records describe how, soon after it tad consolidated power, Akkad crumbled, giving way to the Ur III dynasty in--when else?--2200 B.C. The cause of this collapse has been the subject of considerable speculation. But Weiss's studies of early civilizations have convinced him that their economies--complex and progressive though they may have been--were still fundamentally dependent on agricultural production. In fact, he notes, one hallmark of any civilization is that it requires a life-support system of farming communities toiling away in the fields and turning over the fruits of their labor to a central authority. The drought on the Habur Plains could have weakened the Akkadian Empire by drastically reducing agricultural revenues from that region. People fleeing the drought moved south, where irrigation-fed agriculture was still sustainable. For want of a raindrop, the kingdom was lost.
"Well, believe it or not, all my colleagues had not figured that out," says Weiss. "They actually believed that somehow this empire was based on bureaucracy, or holding on to trade routes, or getting access to exotic mineral resources in Turkey." But the drought itself is documented, Weiss says, in passages of cuneiform texts. Images from a lengthy composition called the Curse of Akkad, for example, include "large fields" that "produced no grain" and "heavy clouds" that "did not rain." Scholars had decided that these expressions were mere metaphor.
And many still stand by their interpretations. "I don't agree with his literal reading of the Mesopotamian texts, and I think he has exaggerated the extent of abandonment in this time period," says Richard Zettler, curator of the Near East section at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Zettler doesn't question the evidence for drought, but he thinks Weiss has overplayed its implications. Although Tell Leilan may well have been deserted during the putative hiatus, for example, nearby cities on the Habur Plains show signs of continuing occupation, he says. As for the Curse and other Mesopotamian passages describing that period, says Zetder, "there are a lot of questions on how to read these texts--how much of it is just literary license, whatever. Even if there is a core of historical truth, it's hard to determine what the core of truth is."
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