Posted on 11/16/2003 11:05:23 AM PST by blam
Drought that destroyed a civilisation
MARTIN WILLIAMS November 11 2003
IT is one of history's biggest mysteries and has confounded experts for hundreds of years. But a team of scientists believe they have discovered why the world's first great civilisation, established in Egypt nearly 5000 years ago, crumbled and plunged into a dark age that lasted for more than 1000 years.
The researchers, including one academic from St Andrews University, have produced new evidence linking the demise of the Egyptian Old Kingdom with decades of drought after a study of layers of sediment at the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia.
The Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza are among the only remaining legacies of the Old Kingdom, which lasted from 2575 to 2150 BC, before the time of Tutankhamen, Ramses, and Queen Nefertiti. The destruction of the pharaohs' power and the collapse of central government had followed 1000 years of cultural advancement, with its characteristic architecture, literature, and art.
The famine that followed the drought was so severe that there is evidence people violated the royal dead and that some were forced to eat their own children. Some of the theories for the collapse of the world's greatest dynasties have included political conflict and an invasion from Asia.
But most historians believe the initial breakdown was prompted by significant drops, over two or three decades, in the level of the Nile, whose annual floods were crucial for the irrigation of crops. Texts from the period say that the famine was brought about by the failure of the floods, but there has been little scientific proof of this. Other scientific studies have shown a short-lived but pronounced decline in rainfall and reduced water-flow around 2150 BC over an area that extended from Tibet to Italy.
Researchers now believe they have proof that the downfall of the kingdom was triggered by a drought caused by a shift in climate and resulting in a decrease in the Nile floods.
One of the team, Dr Richard Bates, of St Andrews University's school of geography and geosciences, said sediment samples from the lake bed during the three-week climate-change study showed that drought conditions existed in the lake at the relevant time.
After making 12-metre bore holes in the lake bed, the team discovered that lake sediments had given way to drier soils 4.5 metres down, showing that the lake, usually around 14 metres deep, was at best shallow and at worst completely dried out.
As sediment is estimated to fill lakes at an average of 1mm a year, the team said the drought conditions discovered coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom era, approximately 4500 years ago.
Dr Bates, who carried out the research with Dr Henry Lamb, a scientist from the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, said yesterday: "The indications are that we have found drought periods and a significant change in climate and lake levels at about the right time frame.
"It tells us that the lake has certainly been a heck of a lot shallower than it is today and potentially it has dried out, or parts of it have dried out. "What we did was log the sediment through the base of the lake, which is the ground truth in terms of telling what the environmental conditions were like. "As you go deeper into the sediment you go back in time into the age of the lake and one of the primary goals for this first trip was to see if we can get back sediments as far back as 4500 years ago which marked the end of the Old Kingdom."
The group also hopes to use the data to establish whether the same – or worse – could happen today, by uncovering the secrets of climatic change. They believe it will help governments to prepare for future extreme weather conditions.
The team is now preparing to radiocarbon date the samples at a laboratory in Florida for final confirmation of their age and plans to carry out further seismic studies next year.
IT is one of history's biggest mysteries and has confounded experts for hundreds of years.
But a team of scientists believe they have discovered why the world's first great civilisation, established in Egypt nearly 5000 years ago, crumbled and plunged into a dark age that lasted for more than 1000 years. The researchers, including one academic from St Andrews University, have produced new evidence linking the demise of the Egyptian Old Kingdom with decades of drought after a study of layers of sediment at the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia.
The Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza are among the only remaining legacies of the Old Kingdom, which lasted from 2575 to 2150 BC, before the time of Tutankhamen, Ramses, and Queen Nefertiti.
The destruction of the pharaohs' power and the collapse of central government had followed 1000 years of cultural advancement, with its characteristic architecture, literature, and art.
The famine that followed the drought was so severe that there is evidence people violated the royal dead and that some were forced to eat their own children. Some of the theories for the collapse of the world's greatest dynasties have included political conflict and an invasion from Asia.
But most historians believe the initial breakdown was prompted by significant drops, over two or three decades, in the level of the Nile, whose annual floods were crucial for the irrigation of crops. Texts from the period say that the famine was brought about by the failure of the floods, but there has been little scientific proof of this. Other scientific studies have shown a short-lived but pronounced decline in rainfall and reduced water-flow around 2150 BC over an area that extended from Tibet to Italy. Researchers now believe they have proof that the downfall of the kingdom was triggered by a drought caused by a shift in climate and resulting in a decrease in the Nile floods.
One of the team, Dr Richard Bates, of St Andrews University's school of geography and geosciences, said sediment samples from the lake bed during the three-week climate-change study showed that drought conditions existed in the lake at the relevant time.
After making 12-metre bore holes in the lake bed, the team discovered that lake sediments had given way to drier soils 4.5 metres down, showing that the lake, usually around 14 metres deep, was at best shallow and at worst completely dried out.
As sediment is estimated to fill lakes at an average of 1mm a year, the team said the drought conditions discovered coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom era, approximately 4500 years ago.
Dr Bates, who carried out the research with Dr Henry Lamb, a scientist from the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, said yesterday: "The indications are that we have found drought periods and a significant change in climate and lake levels at about the right time frame.
"It tells us that the lake has certainly been a heck of a lot shallower than it is today and potentially it has dried out, or parts of it have dried out. "What we did was log the sediment through the base of the lake, which is the ground truth in terms of telling what the environmental conditions were like. "As you go deeper into the sediment you go back in time into the age of the lake and one of the primary goals for this first trip was to see if we can get back sediments as far back as 4500 years ago which marked the end of the Old Kingdom."
The group also hopes to use the data to establish whether the same – or worse – could happen today, by uncovering the secrets of climatic change. They believe it will help governments to prepare for future extreme weather conditions.
The team is now preparing to radiocarbon date the samples at a laboratory in Florida for final confirmation of their age and plans to carry out further seismic studies next year.
To me, ruddy and fair suggests red haired and blued eyed with a "ruddy" white complexion, like an Irishman, or any of his many Celtic European relatives.
I think at that early date that they were still 'light' Caucasians however, I'm not prepared to argue the point.
I'm presently completing a book by Dr Robert Schoch (He's the geologist/geophysist who dated the Sphinx at about 9,000 years old) titled The Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders. He thinks the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia may have been from Sundaland. (The area around Indonesia that went underwater at the end of the Ice Age.) So...
You mean like this one?
Don't understand.
Nah, fluoride in the drinking water, yah, that's it.
Oh. Been a while since I read that thread.
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Nah, this was about 500 years before Moses and the Exodus.
Or about the time of Joseph's drought in Egypt?
All human beings are ultimately of the same stock and there has been plenty of genetic mixing over the years. There is a reason why there is a northern band of Ural-Altaic languages running from Finland to Japan and a southern band of Indo-European languages running from Ireland and Iceland to India and China. In some cases, the Europeans went East. In other cases, the Asians went West. Look at the Lapps in Finland or the Europeans that carried Tocharian to China. And there was also quite a bit of North to South churning, too (there is a reason why there are dark haired and dark skinned Irishmen and I've read that the Japanese have a Malaysian genetic component as well as a Siberian one).
If you are really interested in the topic, I'd suggest doing a search on Amazon for Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and take a look at his History and Geography of Human Genes. I also personally suspect (and some initial studies in Europe seem to suggest this) that they will ultimately find a different pattern of X and Y chromosome inheritence in many areas due to foreign warriors marrying local women and women being sent to other groups in trade.
Finally, I'd warn against confusing genetics and languages or cultures. "German" and "Celtic" are language and culture based divisions, not necessarily genetic divisions. Remember that the "Celts" once spread from Greece to Ireland yet the "Celts" on the fringes of Ireland and Scotland are genetically simliar to the Basques of Spain while I suspect the "Celts" in Macedonia were genetically closer to the Greeks or Hittites. Why? Just because a language or culture moves does not mean that genetics are carrying it. And even where the genes do move with the language and culture, there was (and still is) plenty of mixing and assimilation rather than replacement or extermination.
To put this another way, the people of Ireland and Scotland are not now genetically Germanic or Italic simply because they now speek a Germanic pidgin language with Italic influences (English). African-Americans do not magically gain Germanic genes simply because they speak English, either, or have picked up European religions or cultural elements. Genes do not carry language and culture nor do language and culture follow neat genetic boundaries. Yes, there are African-Americans with Northern European genes because of the now close contact between those two genetic pools in the United States and elsewhere. There are also plenty of European Americans walking around with American Indian, Asian, and African genes for much the same reason. A similar process has been going on for thousands, if not millions, of years. Even in the case of the widespread replacement and extermination of the indiginous people in North America, there are plenty of American Indian genes in the European gene pool and plenty of European genes in the American Indian gene pool.
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