Three years of severe drought coincided with the end of the Hittite Empire

8 Feb. () –

Tree-ring and isotope records point to three straight years of severe drought as the most likely cause of the collapse of the Hittite Empire, more than wars or internal struggles.

The Hittite Empire arose around 1650 BC in semi-arid central Anatolia, a region that includes much of present-day Turkey. During the next five centuries, The Hittites were one of the major powers of the ancient world, but around 1200 BC, the capital of Hattusa was abandoned and the empire ceased to exist.

To find an explanation for the much-debated collapse of the empire, Sturt Manning, a professor of arts and sciences in classical archeology at Cornell University, teamed up with Jed Sparks, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Manning and Sparks combined their labs to analyze samples from the Midas Mound on Gordion, a 53-meter-tall man-made structure located west of Ankara (Turkey). The burial mound contains a wooden structure believed to be the burial chamber of a relative of King Midas, possibly his father. But just as important are the slow-growing junipers – which live for centuries, even a millennium – that were used to build the structure and contain a hidden paleoclimate record of the region.

the researchers analyzed the growth patterns of tree rings, with unusually narrow rings likely indicating dry conditions, along with changes in the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 recorded in the rings, indicating the tree’s response to moisture availability.

Their analysis reveals a general shift towards drier conditions from the late 13th to the 12th century BC, and they pinpoint a dramatic continuous period of severe drought around 1198-96 BC, plus or minus three years, which coincides with the chronology of the disappearance of the Hittites.

“We have two complementary sets of tests,” Manning says. it’s a statement. The width of the rings indicates that something really unusual is happening and, being very narrow rings, it means that the tree is struggling to stay alive.” In a semi-arid environment, the only plausible reason for this is that there is little water , so it is a drought, and this has been especially serious for three consecutive years.” From a critical point of view, stable isotope evidence from tree rings confirms this hypothesis, and we can establish a consistent pattern even though all of this happened over 3,150 years ago.”

In three consecutive years of drought, hundreds of thousands of people, including the massive Hittite army, would face famine, even starvation. The tax base would crumble, as would the government. Survivors would be forced to emigrate, an early example of climate change inequality.

Severe weather events may not have been the only cause of the Hittite Empire’s collapse, the researchers noted, and not all of the Middle East was in crisis at the time. But this particular dry spell may have been a turning point, at least for the Hittites.

“Situations where prolonged and extreme events like this occur over two to three years are the ones that can destabilize even well-organized and resilient societies,” Manning said.

This finding is especially relevant today, when world populations are faced with catastrophic climate change and global warming.

“We may be approaching our own breaking point“, says Manning. “We have a range of things that we can cope with, but as it stretches too far beyond us, we will reach a point where our adaptive abilities will no longer keep up with what we are dealing with. “.