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Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Language Tia Ghose LiveScience Staff Writer Date: 04 December 2012 Time: 11:35 AM ETThe ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform, shown here on a clay tablet documenting barley rations issued monthly to adults and children. The language may have died out as a result of a 200-year drought 4,200 years ago. CREDIT: Public Domain SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces...

An Ancient DisasterIn the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho. “It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara. “Much of where...

Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara, when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape, and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, William Paterson University of New Jersey, and other international institutions explain how this major climate transformation led to a shift in human settlement patterns in Southeast Asia, which is now inhabited by more than 600 million people... To...

Fossil coral records provide new evidence that frequent winter shamals, or dust storms, and a prolonged cold winter season contributed to the collapse of the ancient Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. The Akkadian Empire (24th to 22nd century B.C.E.) was the first united empire in Mesopotamia and thrived with the development of irrigation. Yet, settlements appear to have been suddenly abandoned ca. 4,200 years ago, causing its collapse. The area would also not experience resettlement until about 300 years later. Past studies have shown that the Akkadian Empire likely collapsed due to abrupt drought and civil turmoil. However, the climatic dynamics...

Gol-e-Zard Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago... It appears that the empire became increasingly dependent on the productivity of the northern lands and used the grains sourced from this region to feed the army and redistribute the food supplies to key supporters....

A multi-disciplinary team of scientists has a new theory for why all human civilization abruptly ended on the banks of the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago. According to analyzed archaeological evidence, the disaster of biblical proportions can be explained by a massive explosion, similar to one recorded over 100 years ago in Russia. […] As reported in Science News, at the recently concluded Denver-based ASOR Annual Meeting, director of scientific analysis at Jordan’s Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project Phillip J. Silvia presented a paper, “The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization” during a session on...

Sumerians settled in Mesopotamia, an area of modern Iraq known as the cradle of civilization, more than 6,000 years ago, where they invented writing, the wheel, the plough, irrigation, the 24-hour day and the first city-states. Mission co-leaders Licia Romano and Franco D'Agostino of Rome's Sapienza University said Tuesday they discovered one of their ancient ports in Abu Tbeirah, a desert site about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) south of the town of Nasiriyah. The port's basin, measuring 130 meters (142 yards) in length and 40 meters (44 yards) wide, with a capacity equal to nine Olympics-sized pools, may have also...

The Meghalayan...runs from 4,200 years ago to the present. It began with a destructive drought, whose effects lasted two centuries, and severely disrupted civilisations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley. The Meghalayan Age is unique among the many intervals of the geologic timescale in that its beginning coincides with a global cultural event produced by a global climatic event... The middle phase of the Holocene will be referred to as the Northgrippian, and runs from 8,300 years ago up to the start of the Meghalayan. The onset for this age was an...

...the experts have shown the end of the occupation of this part of the province of Seville happened between the 24th and 23rd centuries BCE, despite evidence of it being frequented and used in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-850 BCE). "In fact, the abandonment of the site seems rather abrupt, without a gradual transition towards a different social model. The possibility that the end of the Valencina settlement was due to a social crisis has been hinted at by the dates obtained from several human skulls separated from the rest of the skeletons in a pit in a Calle Trabajadores...

Tuesday November 13 08:37 AM EST Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer, SPACE.com "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to ...

A team of archaeologists working on a 10-year excavation near the Dead Sea believe they have unearthed the remains of the ancient city of Sodom, detailed in the book of Genesis. This startling discovery was not only done by using the Bible to locate the city, much of the findings confirm the Biblical account of a once-thriving, wealthy metropolis that met sudden, swift destruction as it burned to the ground from a super-powerful explosive force. The findings continue the steady stream of ancient evidence that continues to confirm the accuracy of the Holy Bible. Making The Case For Sodom’s Discovery​...

He is having a number of people, including New Mexico Tech scientists, examine the potsherd to determine what the glaze is. Material engineers at the site said it looks like Trinitite, the substance materials such as sand turn into when subjected to a nuclear blast. However, Collins said he isn't suggesting a nuclear blast hit the site. He doesn't know the cause, but suspects a comet strike or electrical event.

This is a non-political story (but a very cool one nonetheless) which I was first alerted to by John Hawkins at Right Wing News. Archaeologists who have been busily digging into a massive mound in southern Jordan for the last ten years are growing increasingly convinced that they have located the city of Sodom, famously known in the Bible for having been struck down by God due to the sinful ways of its residents. While there aren’t any postcards with “Welcome to Sodom” emblazoned in neon, the ruins are definitely the remains of a massive city-state which thrived from...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – An experienced archaeologist who has spent a decade searching for the ancient ruins of Sodom is now confident that his team has located the ill-fated biblical city and evidence of its sudden destruction. Dr. Steven Collins is a distinguished professor of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque and is also dean of the school’s College of Archaeology & Biblical History. In addition to writing dozens of scholarly books and journal articles, Collins frequently visits the Middle East, where he participates in ongoing archaeological research. Since 2005, Collins has led excavations in the southern Jordan Valley in...

For nearly a millennium, Egypt's early pharaohs presided over a prosperous and wealthy state that built countless temples and palaces, enormous public works, and the famous Giza pyramids. Much of that prosperity depended on the regular inundations of the Nile River in a country that otherwise would be only desert. Then, around 2200 B.C., ancient texts suggest that Egypt's so-called Old Kingdom gave way to a disastrous era of foreign invasions, pestilence, civil war, and famines severe enough to result in cannibalism. In the past decade, climate data revealed that a severe and long-term drought afflicted the region during this...

The long-lost Biblical city of Sodom — a city that the Bible claims was destroyed by God because of its immorality — may finally have been found. Archaeologists have uncovered a slew of monumental structures and artifacts in a Jordan Valley mound known as Tall el-Hammam offering evidence of a city-state that is believed to have thrived during the Bronze Age when other Holy Land cities were being abandoned or were in decline. Based on the location, dates of occupation, and the remains of other ancient cities nearby, archaeologists think it's the best candidate yet for what was once Sodom....

But based on the excavated evidence, the city’s Bronze Age heyday seems to have nevertheless come to a sudden, inexplicable end toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age—and the ancient city became a relative wasteland for 700 years, for the most part void of human habitation. The comparatively paltry or lack of Late Bronze Age material is a testament to this, with the same pattern shown in the smaller, nearby sites. A strange development, thinks Collins, for a great city-state that flourished even through the catastrophic climate changes that arguably led to the collapse of the great cities of...

Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

Caral, the Americas’ oldest civilization, located north of present day Lima, Peru, faced a grave crisis as a result of climate change some 4,000 years ago, archaeologists said. “Droughts were so severe that they could have lasted between 60 and 130 years, which could explain why there were social crises in (civilizations like) Caral, Moche and Tiahuanaco,” archaeologist Ruth Shady, director of the Caral Project, told Efe. Women played leading roles in Caral and a team led by Shady has been working for eight years in Vichama, an urban center near the Vegueta district, in the northern province of Huaura,...

Nine hundred kilometers off the east coast of Madagascar lies the tiny island paradise of Mauritius. The waters are pristine, the beaches bright white, and the average temperature hovers between 22°C and 28°C (72°F to 82°F) year-round. But conditions there may not have always been so idyllic. A new study suggests that about 4000 years ago, a prolonged drought on the island left many of the native species, such as dodo birds and giant tortoises, dead in a soup of poisonous algae and their own feces. The die-off happened in an area known as Mare aux Songes, which once held...