Fall of Ancient Civilization Offers Climate Warning

Two scholars have a new explanation for the collapse of one of the great Bronze Age civilizations.  The Assyrian empire of the 7th century BC – based in Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq – may have collapsed at least in part because of a population explosion and climate change in the form of sustained drought.

And, they point out, there are lessons in ancient history for the modern world as well.

Adam Schneider, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, and Selim Adali, of the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, put forward their proposal in the journal Climatic Change.

They say that demographic and climatic factors played an indirect but significant role in the collapse of a civilization chronicled not just in clay tablets and archaeological marvels but in the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian Old Testament.

Historic links
The climate change theory of history is now well established.  In the last two years, researchers have linked both the dissolution of the Minoan empire in the ancient Mediterranean and the collapse of Levantine civilizations of the near East and the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley to sustained drought.

Others have identified seasons of plentiful rainfall as the impetus for the conquest of Russia, China and Persia by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan.

The connections with modern conflict, too, have been made before.  In 21 studies of upheaval and conflict in modern societies, researchers have found clear links with rises in temperatures.

And just days after the Assyrian study was published in Climatic Change, research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified a link between temperature and rainfall anomalies in sub-Saharan Africa and violence in the region during the last 30 years.

Read More at Fall of Ancient Civilization Offers Climate Warning