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.
i am going to have to memorize this statement -- very powerful and true!
i suggest that climate had more to do with the sudden downfall of the egyptians than anything else. government spending problems are a lot like the frog in boiling water analogy. when the temperature increases slowly to the boiling point, the frog does not notice the problem until it is dead.
taking this to a different direction, climatic changes occur naturally and run in cycles. in fact, there are multiple cycles in play all the time. trying to keep the climate stable, like our environmentalist friends do, is futile. it is another example of gross government spending that causes civilizations to be less productive than they otherwise would. and with that, we need to go to the top and remind ourselves of your excellent quote about the pyramids!
That's pretty interesting. Would be fun to try it again, this time with rocks all the same size but different colors. Then try it again with rocks all the same size and same color but different weights. PhDs have been awarded for less than that!
I've had a lifelong interest in ancient civilizations, doesn't matter if it's "Chariots of the Gods" type pseudoscience or hard archaeology.
We swapped some posts the other day about what to call an archaeology bump list, was there a decision?
These were my suggestions, I don't know if their were others:
- Digging the Past
- Stones, Bones, Tomes and Thrones
- Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths
I think Ernest and callisto liked "Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths." Would dinosaur finds fit there or elsewhere?
Whew!
Party on.
It oesn't seem likely that the Lost Tribes are going to come into play in the period around 2200 BC, since this is even before Abraham went to Canaan. Weren't the Lost Tribes scattered around 800 BC to 600 BC by the Assyrians and the Chaldeans?
What this event tat the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom might relate to is the rise of the foreign (possibly Semitic) Hyksos kings over Egypt, who are believed by many to have been ruling when Joseph became advisor to Pharoah.
Here's an interesting link to a Ten Tribes article that I'd bookmarked:
Yes, they were captured and moved to the fertile crescent area in waves by the Assyrians over a few years time. The single date 722 BC is commonly used as a marker.
I believe the Hyksos link to be a valid one.
The Lost Tribes link you posted is an interesting and thought provoking one. But in my mind the sudden appearance of MILLIONS of Celts in history at the same place and same time the Isrealites go "over the hill" commands attention. The other isolated little splinter groups that claim to be from the Lost Tribes are miniscule in size compared to the Celts, and don't seem to match up in other ways.
No, 2000 BC is way too early.
What I think confuses many authors and scholars is that there were LOTS of different Hebrews roaming around that part of the world at that time. Abraham was just one, but his huge line of descendents gets virtually all the attention. Then, when some other group appears of historic interest authors try to relate those people to Abraham and his offspring. Makes for lots of misteaks IMHO.
For Example, many/most of the books on the CELTS are full of nice pictures of what is identified as Celtic art, but much of the narrative content is way off base. Fortunately, as result of good archeology in very recent years the Celts are being re-examined and re-defined quite differently. It is literally changing history.
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| By Kenneth Chang ABCNEWS.com If it weren’t for a prolonged cool spell about 12,500 years ago, perhaps we’d still be hanging out as hunter-gatherers and never bothered with civilization. At that time, a major source of food for people living in the Middle East was vast fields of einkorn, wheat, barley and rye. These plants, particularly sensitive to cool temperatures, suffered when the warmth since the last Ice Age was interrupted by a 1,000-year-long cool and dry period called the Younger Dryas. Necessity is the Mother of Farming The beginnings of farming appear to coincide with the Younger Dryas.
According to Ofer Bar-Yosef, an anthropologist at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, that’s no coincidence. Instead of relying on what was growing naturally, he says, people started clearing land and planting seeds to insure they would have enough food. “It caused people to initiate cultivation,” he says. Bar-Yosef’s findings also narrow the location of the first farmers to the western half of the “Fertile Crescent” — an arcing swath of the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf north to Turkey and then back down through Syria, Lebanon and Israel toward Egypt. According to Bar-Yosef, the wild varieties of grains thrived in the western region and were transplanted elsewhere later. As people settled down and developed agriculture, towns and eventually civilization arose. That’s not the only time that climate may have shaped the course of humanity. Bar-Yosef and other researchers presented findings about climate and civilization last Saturday at the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science meeting in Anaheim, Calif. “We are probably more affected more by weather and climate than we think we are,” says Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and another of the speakers at the Anaheim session. Not Always Like Today Until a few years ago, most scientists believed the climate of the past 11,000 years — a period known as the Holocene that followed the Younger Dryas — has been stable and uninteresting, and thus of little influence on the fortunes of civilization. However, climate records reconstructed from ice and sediment cores around the world paint a less benign weather history. While the temperature and rainfall swings haven’t been as wild as some periods in Earth’s history, they do appear enough to topple nations.
In 2280 B.C., a civilization called the Akkadians absorbed Tell Leilan. A century later, the town had emptied out and remained unpopulated for three centuries. The entire Akkadian civilization collapsed and disappeared. “There is a depopulation, desertion of northern Mesopotamian region,” says Harvey Weiss, professor of prehistorical archaeology at Yale University, who led excavations at Tell Leilan, “and Tell Leilan’s abandonment is simply typical of that process.” Long Drought Climate records show rainfall dried up in the Middle East around 2200 B.C., which would have deprived farmers of needed winter rains. In cores dug up in the Gulf of Oman to the south, sediments deposited during this time show very different minerals, indicating different wind patterns. Other archaeological sites show that cities to the south, surrounded by irrigated fields, swelled in population at the same time. When the climate connection to the Akkadian collapse was first presented a few years ago, some wondered whether farmers had inadvertantly caused their own ruin by overfarming. Data from other researchers gleaned from lake sediments around the world indicate the 2200 B.C. climate shift was a global event. “This has now put a lot more details together for it,” Weiss says.
Another major climate swing was the Little Ice Age, which froze Europe in the 1400s and killed off Viking settlements in Greenland. And perhaps also the one occurring today. Temperatures, nudged up by emissions of greenhouse gases, have risen sharply since the beginning of the century, but the wind patterns are largely unchanged, creating an unnatural combination of conditions. “You put those two together,” Mayewski says, “you have potentially greater instability in climate. It could turn out it is more important that humans have changed the stability of climate than just the temperature.” Those potential instabilities — droughts, heat waves, fiercer storms — could change the course of history yet to come. 
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S U M M A R Y A cool shift in climate may have spurred the start of farming and civilization.
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I suggested elsewhere for the dinosaurs. I don't know what became of the effort for this list. Frankly, I don't even know how to use a 'bump-list.' I will put you on my 'hand written' list for these articles.
I know how to ping them, but haven't set one up.
Ernest is the bump-list semi-deity.
We can set up another list for prehistoric critters (I guess that's me!) called Dinos and Dragons or somethinb.
Not so fast...
Meteors are often called "falling stars."
And we know for a fact that Kenneth (what is the frequency?) Starr is an alien, and might be possessed of a longer than human lifespan.
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