Thursday, February 09, 2023

Rare severe drought coincided with Hittite Empire collapse

So called climate change is not a new phenomenon! It certainly predates the industrial age!

Maybe we should get our climate data from archaeologists instead of Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion propagandists and demagogues! Just wondering!😊

"The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, an interdisciplinary collaboration used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely – and prescient – culprit: three straight years of severe drought in an already dry period. ..."

From the abstract:
"The potential of climate change to substantially alter human history is a pressing concern, but the specific effects of different types of climate change remain unknown. This question can be addressed using palaeoclimatic and archaeological data. For instance, a 300-year, low-frequency shift to drier, cooler climate conditions around 1200 BC is frequently associated with the collapse of several ancient civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. However, the precise details of synchronized climate and human-history-scale associations are lacking. The archaeological–historical record contains multiple instances of human societies successfully adapting to low-frequency climate change. It is likely that consecutive multi-year occurrences of rare, unexpected extreme climatic events may push a population beyond adaptation and centuries-old resilience practices. Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world across five centuries, with an empire centred in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices."

Rare drought coincided with Hittite Empire collapse | Cornell Chronicle



Extended Data Fig. 1: Map of East Mediterranean-Near East indicating the major ancient empires (Hatti = Hittites, Egypt, Mitanni, Assyria, Babylonia), several other main political entities sometimes within, sometimes on the margins of, the Hittite Empire


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