During a period of forty to fifty years, and by the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the twelfth century BC, almost all the cities of essential importance in the eastern Mediterranean region were destroyed, and most of those cities were not rebuilt after that again, that state of destruction I'll call it "the catastrophe."
These were the words of historian Robert Drewes, in the first chapter of his book (1) "The End of the Bronze Age", published by the Princeton University Publishing House more than two decades ago, during which he tries to date, and perhaps He lays out explanations for that puzzling puzzle, where while civilization was at its height, in that piece of world history, it happened during a period of time, which researchers believe is very short, that civilization collapsed in the entire eastern Mediterranean region, and catastrophically.
The book "The End of the Bronze Age"
lean years
This chaos led to a large number of random migrations in all aspects of the region, with a political imbalance that was accompanied by fierce wars in the main cities that collapsed as a result of those wars, while what we call the “palace economy” was replaced in the Aegean and Anatolia region, which marked the Bronze Age. Late, with another economic pattern that characterizes the isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages and extending over several hundred years after the collapse.
The reasons for the occurrence of this civilizational collapse are still unclear, some attribute it to the prevailing economic system, and others to the so-called "Sea Peoples" who took advantage of weakness in the dominant kingdoms at the time to launch successive attacks on them, but there are contemporary research trends (2) that indicate that A severe drought wave hit the eastern Mediterranean region strongly at that time, leading to the spread of famine and disease, and all other features of the disaster followed. In fact, one study specifically refers to an incident that may be somewhat familiar to some.
According to the new study (3), the priests of Egypt were previously aware that there was an approaching danger, perhaps because they had developed a solid knowledge system that works to understand the rises and falls of the Nile water level and predicts the future through it. In that period, Ramesses II, the third pharaoh of Egypt, decided to The nineteenth dynasty, to produce and collect grain, food and water as much as possible and store them in order to prepare for the next drought. The expected visitor came, and the predictions came true. Drought came.
The study says that only the pharaohs, in that last period of the Bronze Age, were the ones who prepared for the coming drought, while famines struck the neighboring regions of Egypt mercilessly. In the north, who were once enemies (the Hittites), after many pleas for help, perhaps because the administration in Egypt feared that the drought would bring them the armies of neighbors in a great attack due to the spread of hunger and poverty, but Egypt, unfortunately, was not able to continue for a long time, as it was The drought is stronger and longer than its capabilities, the kingdom cracked in Egypt, and the Bronze Age collapsed completely.
Researchers get acquainted with this data by comparing pollen grain charts (4) in several regions, and the idea is that the researcher drills in the areas adjacent to the rivers (the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the Jordan River, for example) and then extracts samples at equal distances in Depth, and searches in those samples for the remains of pollen, DNA, and any other things that can indicate the human activity for that period that the sample represents, not only the type of the sample, but its density as well, here the pollen density - in that particular period - came to indicate He pointed out that, in contrast to all the neighboring regions, the activity of collecting and storing grain in the land of Egypt was intense.
From ice to fire
Of course, we do not yet have clear evidence confirming that this happened conclusively, but to understand the relationship of humans to climate, at the level of civilizations, and here we mean their rise and fall, let us investigate our history with climate change, and start from that point where the last ice age ended, about 12,500 years ago, In fact, many people may not know that we, humans, live in what is called an interglacial (5) period. The earth witnessed, during the past two million years, an ice age, during which 50 glacial periods succeeded each other over a long period of time. Among the relatively short interglacials, this is due to what we call "Milankovitch cycles", which are the continuous change of the Earth's position in space that occurs over thousands of years.
When we say "ice age", that does not mean the end of life. Let's consider the situation on Earth only about 20 thousand years ago. Thick ice sheets extended to cover the entire northern hemisphere. We are talking here about the arrival of ice, with a thickness of 3 kilometers above the surface of the earth, to what Its borders now lie at half of the United States of America, England, Norway, and half of Russia. In the south, the heavy snow cover reached South Africa and half of Australia, and in the meantime the rest of the land was struck by successive waves of harsh cold, similar to those we saw in the winter of the kingdoms. The seven from the series "Game of Thrones", or in the movie "28 Weeks Later", and in a more extreme way.
Let us point out here that during ice ages, life does not end, but it is confined to specific ranges and makes a much greater effort to obtain food, which reduces the number of living organisms.
With the end of the last ice age, and our entry into the so-called Holocene era, it became possible for humans to reside in the open instead of sheltering at night in caves, and thus houses appeared.
Here, in the Fertile Crescent(6), that curved region like a crescent across the Persian Gulf, then Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and northern Egypt, civilization began on the banks of the rivers (Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, and Jordan). These were the first signs of human settlement and agricultural work.
Of course, all of this did not arise suddenly, of course. There are traces of human inscriptions in South African caves that are about 70,000 years old. We can also find traces of the existence of agriculture about 20,000 years ago, but what we mean is that period when man began to settle in the form of groups similar to cities. The history of those periods dates back to more than 8,500 years ago, in that period groups of people began to gather and live together. In Palestine, the Natufian culture (7) arose, relative to the Natuf Valley northwest of Jerusalem, which some researchers see as the first step for man to By building the first agricultural societies in history, this culture extended to include large parts of the Fertile Crescent, including all of the Levant, and reached from Iraq to Egypt.
What about the flood?!
At that point, William Ryan and Walter Bateman (8) intervened to suggest, at that time, that the Black Sea was a fresh lake whose level is about 150 meters lower than what we know now, but with the end of the ice age and the melting of ice in many regions of the world, the sea surface rose at rates Quick, a gap opened in the narrow strip separating the Mediterranean black and white seas about 8,500 years ago, and within several years an area of thousands of kilometers was flooded with water, which led to epic, wide and rapid migrations of the human populations of those areas, envisioning some research work, William James Burroughs, in his book "The Prehistoric Climate", that this incident is related to the story of the flood, which we know is rooted in the depths of history, going back more than 4,500 years in the past, but this is of course uncertain and receives a lot of controversy.
In any case, that period of human history fell entirely in the hands of the climate change that occurred, after they were locked in caves with limited movement during the ice age, the area of green cover increased exceptionally and everywhere in the region after it ended, and this included fruits, vegetables and grains, which gave Humans in the Fertile Crescent region had a better chance for a more easy life, so they multiplied more, and became more stable, and with stability, humans had more freedom to create political and economic systems, then art, language, and everything else appeared that can distinguish what we give the term civilization.
But that goodness did not last long.
In Egypt, for example, according to a recent study (9) from the University of Pennsylvania that used pollen charts among other tools, the pharaohs faced four deadly droughts between 3000 and 6000 years ago, the last of which was the one we talked about at the beginning of the report, and one of these The events were the massive, global drought that occurred about 4,200 years ago, which had very serious social, political and cultural repercussions (from famines to wars), which likely played a role in the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and also affected the cultures of the Mediterranean other average.
Some traces of the Mayan civilization in Mexico (Reuters)
This did not happen in our region only. In fact, the impact of climate change on human paths was evident in all the steps of their (10) large migrations over the thousands of years preceding civilization, the inhabitants of the regions of Chile and Peru 15 thousand years ago, for example, and the migrations of the Chinese two thousand years ago. Only, harsh climatic changes also helped to collapse (11,12,13) many civilizational patterns, such as the Mayans, the ancient Pueblo peoples, the Harpas, and the Vikings in Greenland, who were pushed to the west with temperatures dropping little by little.
You see, humans are under the control of climate everywhere and every history, at that point there is no difference between us and polar bears.
In his book "Desertification and Land Uses in Heliopolis"(14), Salah Tahoun divides the reasons for the collapse of civilizations in the ancient world into three theories. It is related to the conditions in which civilization arose and developed, and here we mean the climate conditions. When drought hits the land, civilizations collapse, which depend mainly on water in rivers, like a house made of playing cards, and the third imagines a model that combines this and that.
Chaos orbit
It is difficult, of course, to determine the size of the role that climate change played in the history of that region of the world, exactly as it is difficult to determine that size in relation to the contemporary world, but what researchers agree on in this field is that these harsh changes in climate patterns negatively affected the situation. The political, economic and social existing in the region at the time, whether it played a major role, or contributed to pushing developments forward to a zone of no return, or merely played the role of "the straw that broke the camel's back."
In the end, no one knows what exactly happened. Historians are collaborating with environmental scientists in a new research field that has witnessed extensive activity in the recent period, in an attempt to understand the impact of climate changes on the paths of human civilization, its fall and prosperity, in the hope that this will give us an opportunity to read the future, Here we are, humans, once again suffering with climate change, while we imagine that it did not happen in 800 thousand years, this time from the manufacture of human hands, according to (15) 97% of research work in this field.
Can civilization collapse again?
There is a degree of similarity, related to economic interdependence, between the conditions in the Late Bronze Age and contemporary conditions. While the eastern Mediterranean is seen, in that period, as a region of "civilizations", it was one intertwined civilization with Egypt at its center, but economic interdependence is a problem. Critical, because it is like dominoes, as soon as one falls, everyone follows it. Some explain the reasons for the collapse of civilization in the late Bronze Age with this theory, so that climate change plays the role of the factor that pushed the first domino piece, but that also means that in the contemporary world we are facing a similar problem. For the same reasons.
In addition, Christian Parenti, in his book (16) "Tropic of Chaos", indicates that the world is heading towards a catastrophe, as climate change strongly affects the political, economic and social conditions of people living mainly between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, we are talking here about 3 billion people This could lead to more extreme political turmoil between and within those countries, which in turn could lead to extreme climate migrations from the bottom of the world to the top.
According to Parenti, this is something that the countries of the world located in the north of the tropics will not be able to easily deal with, which may cause a wide and continuous state of political turmoil, which may mean - in one way or another - a form of civilizational collapse. Here we must ask: Will it restore same date?
Through every setback they went through, humans were able to fight the battle against nature and get out of it to complete their civilization.
They did not become extinct, but the losses of the battle were so heavy that they could not be imagined, but our contemporary battle is not very different from the side of nature, as it seems.
But we, humans, have new tools, such as science, technology, and the ability to communicate super in a digital age, many environmental scientists believe that - despite the losses that have already occurred - we can hold on, we can mitigate the effects of climate change by adhering to a limit of average altitude Earth's temperatures are below the barrier of a degree and a half or less, through the use of the planet's most brilliant minds in developing resistance systems, but in order for this to happen, humanity must unite, which we do not see on the ground, the contemporary world is spending a very severe period of disintegration.
It says only one thing!