Sao Carlos (SP)
A series of devastating droughts may be behind the collapse of one of the Bronze Age superpowers, the Hittite Empire, which ruled much of modernday Turkey and Syria more than 3,000 years ago.
The conclusion comes from a study that used the wood of old trees as a kind of climate calendar of the time and recorded the fluctuations in precipitation practically year by year.
The new dates on the Hittite fall are important in understanding not only the end of that civilization, but also the broader collapse of several powerful states that existed in the Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age.
At that time, a wave of destruction swept over the palaces of the Mycenaean kings in Greece, the citadel on the Turkish coast called Troy by the Greeks (an area independent of the Hittite Empire, as far as we know), and several citystates in what is now Israel and Palestine. Several factors appear to have contributed to this widespread collapse, but weather may have been a major factor in several locations.
The new study on the Hittites has just been published in the journal Nature. In it, the team coordinated by Sturt Manning of Cornell University (USA) proposes that the entire 13th century BC was affected by increasingly arid conditions in what is known as central Anatolia, a region of Turkey that was the heart of the Hittite Empire.
This period of unfavorable climatic conditions would have culminated in three years of very severe drought, which researchers believe probably corresponds to the period between 1198 BC and 1198 BC. and 1196 B.C. correspond to The dates are very close to the estimate for the time when the Hittite capital, the mighty city of Hattusa, appears to have been evacuated and abandoned by what remained of the empire’s administration. Some time later the buildings were set on fire.
“Three consecutive years of drought [dessa magnitude] are very unusual nothing like this has happened in over a century,” Manning said Sheet.
“We are talking about a very specific episode that the people, and in particular the ruling elite, the Great King and his bureaucracy, have not been able to cope with in this relatively short period of time,” he explains. It would be something of the final straw (or lack thereof) for an Imperial system that is already relatively fragile over the long term.
“A year of intense drought affecting a large area can destroy life, even in the modern world. Two consecutive years often destroy longterm resilience strategies, such as making it impossible to feed pets on farms. third year in a row is very rare and very serious,” argues Manning. “In the premodern world, it would end up undermining authority [do rei]both from the inability to collect taxes and feed the army, and from a symbolic point of view: the gods clearly failed and rejected the rulers.
For centuries prior to this final crisis, the Hittites had held a prominent place among the great powers of the Mediterranean and Middle East. They waged wars and had diplomatic relations with Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt. Against this last kingdom they fought in 1274 BC. in the village of Kadesh near the presentday border between Syria and Lebanon in one of the most important battles of antiquity. The battle, led by Pharaoh Ramses 2nd on the Egyptian side and King Muwatalli 2nd on the Hittite side, involved thousands of soldiers seated on horsedrawn chariots and ended in a kind of draw.
To establish an accurate chronology of climate variability in the region, researchers analyzed the wood used in a gigantic funerary monument erected in the ancient town of Górdion, 230 km from the Hittite capital. Although erected centuries after the end of the empire, the monument used wood from centuriesold juniper, the structure of which corresponds to a calendar published around 1800 BC. B.C. begins
A year of intense drought affecting a large area can destroy life even in the modern world. Two years in a row often destroy longterm resilience strategies, making it impossible to feed pets on farms, for example. A third year in a row is very rare and very serious.
This conclusion is possible because trees develop by forming growth rings in their trunks, each corresponding to one year of the plant’s life. When the weather is good, such rings are thick, when there is a lack of water they become thinner in the worst case less than a millimeter wide.
In addition, experts used methods to accurately date the wood and to study the presence of different forms of the chemical element carbon in its composition, which also provide evidence of more or less dry times. All of this resulted in an estimate of dates consistent with other Late Bronze Age records.
However, Manning says caution should be exercised when attributing the decline in other states to the same drought at the time. “Every area is different,” he recalls. Cities that disappeared off the coast of Syria, like Ugarit, probably had very different climatic conditions, he recalls. On the other hand, it’s possible that Greece, the adjacent regions of the Aegean, and perhaps Italy too, suffered from very similar droughts.
If the phenomenon was more widespread, it could explain another element that the texts of the time mention without great detail: the attacks of the socalled peoples of the sea, groups that came and arrived perhaps from Sardinia, Sicily and Greece itself, for example Egypt and the coast of the Middle East. These groups may have been a mixture of pirates and refugees. “Overall, the Late Bronze Age portrait is complicated,” summarizes Manning.