Posted on 12/08/2001 2:51:43 PM PST by blam
Thursday, 26 July, 2001, 12:12 GMT 13:12 UK
Disaster that struck the ancients
The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom had built the mightiest legacy of the ancient world - the pyramids at Giza. But after nearly a thousand years of stability, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years.
What happened, and why, has remained a huge controversy. But Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues.
His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. The hieroglyphs there reported "all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children".
Dismissed as exaggeration and fantasy by most other Egyptologists, Fekri was determined to prove the writings were true and accurate. He also had to find a culprit capable of producing such misery.
Stalactites and stalagmites
"My hunch from the beginning was that it had to do with the environment in which the Egyptians lived." Fekri felt sure the Nile, the river that has always been at the heart of Egyptian life, was implicated.
He studied the meticulous records, kept since the 7th Century, of Nile floods. He was amazed to see that there was a huge variation in the size of the annual Nile floods - the floods that were vital for irrigating the land.
But no records existed for 2,200BC. Then came a breakthrough - a new discovery in the hills of neighbouring Israel. Mira Bar-Matthews of the Geological Survey of Israel had found a unique record of past climates, locked in the stalactites and stalagmites of a cave near Tel Aviv.
What they show is a sudden and dramatic drop in rainfall, by 20%. It is the largest climate event in 5,000 years. And the date? 2,200 BC.
As Israel and Egypt are in different weather systems, Fekri needed evidence of some worldwide climate event to link this to the collapse of the Old Kingdom. And the evidence came out of the blue.
Geologist Gerard Bond, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, looks for climate evidence in the icebergs of Iceland. As they melt on their journey south, they leave shards of volcanic ash on the ocean floor.
Dry lake
How far they travelled before melting tells him how cold it was. Cores of mud from the ocean floor revealed to him regular periods of extreme cold - mini ice ages - in Europe every 1,500 years, and lasting 200 years. And one mini ice age occurred at 2,200 BC.
Fekri Hassan: Looked at lake-bed cores
Gerard's colleague, Peter deMenocal, looked at climate records for the rest of the world at exactly the same time. From pollen records to sand, the story was the same - a dramatic climate change from Indonesia to the Mediterranean, Greenland to North America.
Scientists were confirming everything Fekri believed - severe climate change causing widespread human misery 4,200 years ago, misery we are only now learning about for the first time.
Back in Egypt, Fekri wanted to put the last piece of the puzzle in place. He wanted direct evidence of this severe climate change in the Nile. And he found it drilling cores in a large lake that had been fed by a tributary of the Nile in ancient times.
He discovered in the critical period, as the Old Kingdom collapsed, the lake had dried up completely - the only time in the whole history of this lake that this had happened. At last, Fekri felt he had proved that the writings on Ankhtifi's tomb were really true. It was nature that had driven people to desperation.
All those years...and the Egyptians never sold out naming rights to a corporate sponsor!
Check the bookmarks on my profile page.
Very probably this event, to whatever extent natural or man-made, was the same event that devastated Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah and which seems to have virtually melted certain areas of the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
This may also have changed world climates and caused rainfall in Egypt to cease, made the Sahara a true desert, etc.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr0004.htm
Its about the The Armies of Sumer and Akkad, 3500-2200 B.C.
Mike G L Baillie
Palaeoecology Centre, School of Geosciences, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
e-mail: mbaillie@queens-belfast.ac.uk
In 1988 the observation was made that narrowest-ring events in Irish sub-fossil oak chronologies appeared to line up with large acidities in the Greenland ice records from Camp Century and Dye3. Three of the events, at tree-ring ages 2345 BC, 1628 BC and 1159 BC turned out to be of particular interest as they contributed to debates on the Hekla 4 eruption in Iceland, dated to 2310±20 CalBC, Santorini in the Aegean, dated to circa 1670-1530 CalBC, and, possibly, Hekla 3, linked by Hammer and colleagues to their 1120±30 BC acid layer. It quickly became apparent, most notably through comments from Kevin Pang, that the two later events might relate in some way to the start and end of the Chinese Shang dynasty. It is equally of interest that the Egyptian New Kingdom traditionally spans the approximate range 1570 to 1080 BC. So the question arose whether these two volcano-related events could have caused widespread dynastic change. In order to proceed with this debate it is necessary to attempt to get a better handle on the nature of the effects. This paper will look at information from American and Fennoscandian tree-ring records and make some attempt to define the nature of the 1628 BC and 1159 BC events; are they truly abrupt, as would be expected with volcanoes, or are they imposed on pre-existing downturns. Existing exidence suggests that the latter may be the case. If this is correct, it seems appropriate to ask what might have caused the downturns? This question leads logically to the speculation that loading of the atmosphere from space might be a significant factor in the environmental downturns.
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MIKE BAILLIE is a professor in the Palaeoecology Centre, School of Geosciences, Queen's University, Belfast, N. Ireland. After reading physics at Queen's he moved into Archaeology and Palaeoecology taking a particular interest in chronology. His specialism is dendrochronology, and he has been involved in the construction of some of the first, long, oak chronologies. Using information from tree-ring records, he has attempted to identify abrupt environmental downturns in the past and to demonstrate their effects on past human populations. He publishes widely on these and related topics and is the author of A Slice Through Time: dendrochronology and precision dating (London: Routledge 1995).
It looks like there could have been a solar minimum, a major volcanic eruption and a meteor impact all at about the same time.
Geez.... Me too!! I read a follow up report on this incident about how everyone was suprised that the ejecta went back into space 2,000 miles, about 10 times greater than the model forecasted.
Take the Mississippi, which is so important to the lives and fortunes of people who live on its banks, and transport it to a much drier climate -- or consider the Colorado, and the use made of its water -- and you get an idea of how important the river was, and how difficult it would be to have the whole process in private hands in ancient times.
Ancient civizations lasted for a very long time with all the faults that we'd attribute their fall to. Rome is another example. What we see as Roman decadence lasted centuries before the empire fell.
Judging by your links, you'll like this site.
Unless you know the facts you don't have the right to have an opinion.
Thanks. Very good article.
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