From the University of Bradford
Scientists will have to find alternative explanations for a huge population collapse in Europe at the end of the Bronze Age as researchers prove definitively that climate change – commonly assumed to be responsible – could not have been the culprit.
Archaeologists and environmental scientists from the University of Bradford, University of Leeds, University College Cork, Ireland (UCC), and Queen’s University Belfast have shown that the changes in climate that scientists believed to coincide with the fall in population in fact occurred at least two generations later.
Their results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that human activity starts to decline after 900BC, and falls rapidly after 800BC, indicating a population collapse. But the climate records show that colder, wetter conditions didn’t occur until around two generations later.
Fluctuations in levels of human activity through time are reflected by the numbers of radiocarbon dates for a given period. The team used new statistical techniques to analyse more than 2000 radiocarbon dates, taken from hundreds of archaeological sites in Ireland, to pinpoint the precise dates that Europe’s Bronze Age population collapse occurred.
The team then analysed past climate records from peat bogs in Ireland and compared the archaeological data to these climate records to see if the dates tallied. That information was then compared with evidence of climate change across NW Europe between 1200 and 500 BC.
“Our evidence shows definitively that the population decline in this period cannot have been caused by climate change,” says Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, and lead author of the study.
Graeme Swindles, Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds, added, “We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods.”
According to Professor Armit, social and economic stress is more likely to be the cause of the sudden and widespread fall in numbers. Communities producing bronze needed to trade over very large distances to obtain copper and tin. Control of these networks enabled the growth of complex, hierarchical societies dominated by a warrior elite. As iron production took over, these networks collapsed, leading to widespread conflict and social collapse. It may be these unstable social conditions, rather than climate change, that led to the population collapse at the end of the Bronze Age.
According to Katharina Becker, Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at UCC, the Late Bronze Age is usually seen as a time of plenty, in contrast to an impoverished Early Iron Age. “Our results show that the rich Bronze Age artefact record does not provide the full picture and that crisis began earlier than previously thought,” she says.
“Although climate change was not directly responsible for the collapse it is likely that the poor climatic conditions would have affected farming,” adds Professor Armit. “This would have been particularly difficult for vulnerable communities, preventing population recovery for several centuries.”
The findings have significance for modern day climate change debates which, argues Professor Armit, are often too quick to link historical climate events with changes in population.
“The impact of climate change on humans is a huge concern today as we monitor rising temperatures globally,” says Professor Armit.
“Often, in examining the past, we are inclined to link evidence of climate change with evidence of population change. Actually, if you have high quality data and apply modern analytical techniques, you get a much clearer picture and start to see the real complexity of human/environment relationships in the past.”
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So they think cause precedes effect. How scientific.
Lessons unlearned from history are likely to repeat themselves…
Smallpox.
This would have been about the time of when smallpox re-emerged out of India and spread worldwide. It would have had the same impact on populations then that it had on North American populations when introduced by European explorers in the 15th century.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X11007572
I was thinking disease when I read the headline. Look at how the Black Death thinned the population and the 1917 flu epidemic, disease seems way more catastrophic.
When smallpox first made it to Europe is not well constrained, but may not have been present during the real Bronze Age Collapse, c. 3200 years ago.
The BAC is associated with invasions and migrations, so while pestilence may well have played a role, it appears presently that war and famine were more to blame.
Disease does some interesting things as it does not discriminate by economic class. Mortality rates would have been 30 to 50 percent. All it takes is one strong leader or a ruling family to succumb to the illness to start a war with a neighboring tribe/nation. We might have some interrelation between the two. Same goes with economics. The sudden dying off of people in some areas could result in an economic loss to people far removed who depended on their farming/mining/whatever. This could also create instability. In other words, if you could sweep through any population led mostly by despotic dynasties and simply cull every second or third person at random, it could have a dramatic impact on political stability. And when you have an economy based on manual labor, there are economic consequences, as well. e.g. The family who commissioned a bridge to be built might now be dead and there are no longer enough available workers to build it.
Colder is far more detrimental to civilization and the environment than warmer periods. The Alarmists are the ones with their heads in the sands and their arse’s “up in the air” for the greens on that point. +1C to +2C warmer than 1979 is a happy planet. Even higher is okay if, as TCR estimates suggest, it goes slow enough for ecological adaptation. The Earth has been starving for warmth and CO2 for ~3.2 MYA.
As this research on the end of the Bronze Age shows, man and his environment has been living on the ragged edge of die-offs for far too long.
And the prognosticators of a “tipping point” are about as reliable as an ouija board.
Flat hockey stick for Pre-classical Northern Europe wanted. No natural variation need apply.
Two generations…so what are we talking here…seventy/ eighty years?
Wow they are so wonderfully precise with their measurements!
A generation is a lot closer to 20 yrs…
Exactly – so do we really believe they are pinpointing the date of collapse and the date when the climate changed with that accuracy?
All this sound like is typical modern reductionism – there must be a single cause.
Almost always there are multiple causes.
Tim Hammond
November 18, 2014 at 1:16 am
+1.
If only many involved (mainly on the ‘warmist’ side of the continuum) would learn and understand this.
This blog has seen that there are many variables involved. Some – many! – are, very likely, of minor effect.
Ahhh – but others may have a maximum of ten or even twenty per-cent effect (I guess, based on picking a few fingers).
The science is – actually – not settled, as the system is decidedly complex.
Slingo’s new counting box cannot model to even mile squares over a day.
Auto
More like 15 years over the era of humans.
My thoughts exactly.
And for those just getting by it wouldn’t need to be the biggest signal (the steepest change in weather) that caused disaster. The first dampening may have spread blight that caused famine. So far that seems to still be reasonable.
But where’s the press in that?
Unified theory: First decline in weather led to poor harvest led to famine. Famine led to hoarding led to disruption of trade routes and alliances. Disruption led to war and new routes being pioneered. New communication routes led to the spread of smallpox and new technologies (iron).
Now that’s how to do speculative science
The Irish added a major tax to the manufacture of bronze and other pollution generating sectors of their economy and at the same time raised the minimum wage which caused a significant number of wealthy to shift money and other resources to China so widespread unemployment and famine ensued.
Social justice welfare just couldn’t support them all.
China went on to build computers, smart phones, washers and dryers, etc.
mikerestin, now you sound like a historian! If no-one knows, you can just make it up, so they do. Your story is as good as any other story. Let them try and disprove it.
IMO climate was involved. Drought drove northern Indo-European-speaking peoples south into Greece, Anatolia (where there already were some) and Mesopotamia, then across the Med to Palestine (from Philistia, ie it’s named after the Aryan invaders) and Egypt as the Sea Peoples.
Iron replaced bronze because it was cheaper. In its early forms, it didn’t make better weapons, just more of them for the same price. In later centuries metallurgy advanced and steel became better as well as cheaper.
More likely that copper thieves caused the collapse of the bronze age.
I was thinking the same thing. And the team used a new “statistical method” to determine this. We are talking 50 years difference at most for their “precise” dates. The population decline and climate shift must have occurred suddenly within a single year for there to be no overlap on errors of radiocarbon dating in events that took place within 50 years of each other over 1,000 years ago /s.
Using the latest in digital peat bog dating for sure. Note how they say they were using “…new statistical techniques…” for their radiocarbon dating. They used different math and got different numbers… that’s a new technique? I learned that in first grade, subtracting makes things smaller and adding makes them bigger. A single generation is NOT outside the error bars for carbon isotope dating.
Depending on the society a generation can be from as little as 15 to as much as 25 years.
Whoa, hold on there! What’s going to happen to research budgets if – harrumph – they find things unconnected with climate change?
The research budgets will have to be doubled so as to refute the contrary research. The scam depends on it.
“As iron production took over, these networks collapsed, leading to widespread conflict and social collapse.”
No, the collapse of the trade networks was due to political unrest in the Med, which devastated the economies of communities in the Iberian peninsula and Ireland (and also the Aegean and the Levant). This had a cascading effect throughout all of Europe. The switch to iron was necessitated by the collapse of the Bronze industry. Once Iron metallurgy was established, positive feedback effects insured that it would eventually dominate.It was not until the Iron industry became quite mature, was it able to produce products that were superior to what was produced in Bronze.
Bronze continued to be used long after the introduction of iron. Iron supplanted it for workaday tools and weapons but bronze remained a prized material throughout historical times for applications where longevity was required. To this day many ship fittings are still made of bronze. The real problem seems to have been a shortage of tin. This lead to the Phoenicians having to sail to the edge of the world (Cornwall) to secure suppplies.
Securing tin supplies seems to have been one of the reasons for the Roman invasion of Britain with trade in tin between Cornwall and the Mediterranean persisting up to the 9th century AD, long after the Romans left Britain. There was a collapse in demand around 1200 BC which most historians ascribe to the invasion of the Med by a group described as ‘The Sea Peoples’ . Only Egypt seems to have been able to resist them and they left quite good records of their dealings with those they called the Sherden.
The collapse of civilization in the med. could have been caused by good weather in China. Think about it, warm winters mean fewer mongolian horses die which means more mongols. The mongols spread west pushing the sycthians further west pushing the thracians south. The thraians drive the mycaneans onto barren islands where they turn to piracy and raiding. This disrupts Phoenecian trade and weakens them until they fall prey to the pirates(the sea peoples).
Yeah…but…but…you forgot that it rained in 750BC. Article says so, right here: ““We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods.”
Can’t argue with those statistical methods. No Sireeee.
Clowns.
And this part was even better:
“Often, in examining the past, we are inclined to link evidence of climate change with evidence of population change. Actually, if you have high quality data and apply modern analytical techniques, you get a much clearer picture and start to see the real complexity of human/environment relationships in the past.”
So first, he admits the prevalent “bias” in the first sentence…and then, sounding surprised!…states that if you have high quality data…you get a clearer picture!????
Wow.
Actually, the time period of the collapse coincides nicely with the spread of the Hallstatt C culture from 800-500 BCE. These Iron age early Celts spread throughout Europe from western Hungaria to the Iberian Peninsula, and to Ireland and the British Isles. Known for their iron swords and horse culture, it is not a large leap to see them as a European “Mongol Hoard”. A decendent of this culture, Brennus, successfully sacked Rome in 398 BCE.
Nothing new here. The usual suspects, war and conquest, not climate change.
Well there may have been a Mongol Herd, but never a Mongol Hoard.
We have no empirical evidence that explains why those societies collapsed. “Political” unrest is archaeological speak for “we found evidence of warfare.” If the evidence indicates that the unrestful parties were using weapons of the same make and model, then you conclude “civil war.” If the hatchets in the skulls are different from the ones in the dead men’s hands, the opponent was “external,” suggesting invasion. “Political unrest” would certainly cause problems in production and distribution, but conversely problems in production and distribution would also just as certainly lead to political unrest. Imagine the “unrest” if the water supply to New York City or Phoenix were cut in a serious and long term manner.
Iron is known as the “poor man’s metal” because it was widely available as bog iron, magnetite and hematite, much more common than copper ores. Bronze in contrast was vastly more costly to produce. The copper is easy enough to find, but tin is a different tale. The wide spread trade networks needed to successfully yield an adequate bronze supply would also facilitate the spread of diseases among formerly more isolated populations.
The Hittites seem to have tried to keep iron production methods “secret,” but all metallurgy has its roots in the manufacture of fire ceramics, and the first metal produced is copper because of that. Iron is produced in enough different ways prehistorically and classically to suggest that it to has multiple origins and very likely was the result of experimentation by creative thinkers, reasoning by extension that if doing “this” to “that” could yield copper, then what happens if we apply the same “this’s” to different “thats”. Since even the softest wrought iron has advantages over bronze, the historical results are predictable.
Oh, obviously, the collapse in the population was caused by burning all that charcoal to smelt bronze and producing massive CO2 fumes, or, maybe it was all that driving round in bronze chariots powered by heavily farting oxen or horses. Oh, yes, 97% sure.
“The impact of climate change on humans is a huge concern today as we monitor rising temperatures globally,” says Professor Armit.
+++++++
So maybe there was a group of quasi priests who forecast gloom and doom about record and rising temperatures and how this new fangled bronze tipped plough was stripping the earth of vegetation. So maybe the people listened to the forecasts of doom and voluntarily stopped producing food. And the climate cooled. And the people died. And now we know they died before it cooled.
Looks like a correlation to me.
Professor Armit shows that the collapse was not caused by climate change. So what the $%^& is the rationale for then saying that the impact of climate change on humans is a huge concern today? It has absolutely zip all do do with anything in the paper!!!
if he doesn’t say so his paper could be interpreted as denying the fact that climate change is bad
Well Mike, isn’t he just saying that some people – especially politicians – are concerned, so he is doing research on the subject?
Theology and religious beliefs aside, a few stories in the Old Testament around the time of the judges and early kings of Israel (1000 BC) speak of large land animals such as lions and bears in Palestine, which would require adequate forests and food chains to support their existence. That certainly hasn’t been the case in more modern times.
“Palestine” was a Roman construct to rid themselves of the pesky Judeans.
Peoples’ Front of Judea, please
Judean People’s Front, thank you
Splitters!
Today, bears, cougars, and jaguars are found in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. European Lions probably persisted until around 100 BC in the Levant.
They are also in Chicago, Pullman WA and Jacksonville. Based on their poor records, they must all be toothless. 🙂
sleepingbear dunes,
S’truth Sir.
Durn critters are too adaptable!
(Indeed, cougars/mountain lions/pumas have a wide range, from wet coast rain forest to dry areas in SW US.
(Some in FL are darker brown on top, called Panther there. The three listed above are the same critter, minor colouring differences except in FL, whereas there is much more variety in South America where the NA variety probably came from.
Jaguars are spotted but are not leopards, except about 6% are solid black, often called “black panther”.)
The account of the amount bronze used for Solomon’s temple, c. 942 BC, is that it could not be reckoned. The descriptions of the bronze sea on the bulls, the bronze pillars, capitals, and lattice work with pomegranates are hard to imagine. I have never seen anything quite like the lattice work in any excavations. They engaged in various shipping ventures with Tyre for gold also.
The mining, trading, and metal work of the early Europeans and Med civilizations was truly extensive. I seriously doubt that economies were lost and destroyed for hundreds of years because the peasants lost their ruling elite. But this is the way some people write history, and that is what they have stated here. There just as easily could have been extensive free trade and social mobility, in which the protection and facilitation of trade, rather than its domination and control, was the job of the bravest leaders – perhaps heads of families. They call this the heroic society I think. And there were extraordinary innovations, and perhaps hundreds or even thousands of languages on the European continent.
Because these patchwork of cultures were so interconnected by Phoenician sea trade and commerce, the total destruction of some of these ports and cities would have been devastating and periodically there were terrible ash clouds and tsunamis, and cooling, then agricultural losses and immigration. The severity of earthquakes around Italy is astounding.
I just finished a book about the Dec. 24th 1908 Messina quake. It is hard to comprehend so much destruction in a few moments, followed by the immediate tsunami. Every town in the area on both sides of the straight were flattened in a single moment. There were definitely atmospheric precursors to this quake.
December 28th, 1908
fyi – Solomon is mythical and his palace in Jerusalem never existed. (He is an appropriation of Amenhotep III who was the first Atonist, hence Sol – Amen.) However, I agree with your bigger point. The Sea People devastated the eastern coastal cities and this alone could lead to civilization collapse.
Their slave trade must have made Pre-Civil War farmers in the southern US seem like pikers.
Caz, Just because you wish something to be true, doesn’t make it true. Just remember the archaeological saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We are talking about things that happened 3 to 4 thousand years ago in an area that has been continuously lived in during all of that time, making our ability to find much of anything difficult at best.
They said the same think about King David until evidence was found in one of the nearby kingdoms referring to him.
@MarkW
Many books about the ancient cultures in the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia take great pains to begin by saying,
“nothing, but nothing!, was known about
the Hittites…
the Assyrians…
the Elamites…until archaeologists in the 1800’s discovered…”
This happens a lot. However, these cultures (besides many others) are discussed in fair to wonderful detail in the Old Testament including their economies, gods, sayings, and leaders. It is amusing that this pattern of academic hubris continues.
Mark – David is mythical, too. he is a re-working of Tutmoses III. DVD in hebrew (no vowels) translates to TUT in Egyptian and yes, his steles and inscriptions are all over the place. DVD also means ‘peace’ so a reference to the house of DVD can just mean house of peace. Note that no other culture ever mentions David or Solomon, nor have any artifacts or archeological sites ever been found. The earliest bona fide real people of that time were Ahab and Jezebel.
Caz, it is clear that evidence for David and Solomon is mainly from word-of-mouth transmission of knowledge and not documents or physical remains extant from the time. As has been pointed out, lots of things are short of evidence from that long ago – but then the evidence is found. This may happen again in this case.
Troy was real, who’d have guessed?
More importantly, David and Solomon have as much influence on history as Antony and Cleopatra, as Alexander the Great and even as Napoleon. Even if they never lived, they are more important (more real in terms of effectiveness) than you or me will ever be.
Unless you’re a gung ho nuclear submarine captain. I may have underestimated you.
There was archaeological evidence of Troy. If Solomon’s palace and temple were anything even remotely as depicted in the Bible, then there would have to be remains of them, but none have been found despite centuries of exploration and excavation around Jerusalem, this despite uncovering plenty of Bronze/Iron Age transition sites in the area.
Catherine Ronconi , it is a big leap from saying “there is no chance of a King with a hundred wives in that time and place (e.g. the Israelites exaggerated the magnificence and stamina)” to saying “there was no King”.
The Temple lasted in Legend. The rebuilding of the Temple definitely happened and the documents show they thought it was a RE-building.
This subject is one on which people feel passionately and so make over strong statements. There is evidence that the area couldn’t support the wonders associated with Solomon. That doesn’t mean that Solomon was a fabrication with no achievements at all. Someone overwhelmed the Edomites.
And if Egypt or Babylon don’t record the area until they conquered it… well, they wouldn’t record a Kingdom they couldn’t conquer unless they were at war with it. Which the texts say was avoided.
I don’t feel strongly, but just look at the evidence.
I don’t know if there were some petty kings in the southern Levantine highlands around 1000 BC with names similar to those or not. My personal opinion is that the OT goes from mythical through legendary to more or less historical, the latter phase starting around 800 BC. So the stories of David and Solomon fall in the legendary phase, which has a few verifiable historical elements.
The earliest known apparent or possible Egyptian mention of the Israelites is the Merneptah or Victory Stele, from around 1200 BC, so there IMO should have been some mention in Egyptian records of David and Solomon, if they existed, but of course it might not have survived.
PS: The Edomites were overwhelmed both from north and south at various times, while also doing some overwhelming themselves. They were never completely wiped out however, and survived into Roman times, at least, as Idumaeans.
Catherine Ronconi, yeah – that makes sense. It seems we can agree on the certain facts (we don’t know about the minor powers in the region at the time and they weren’t an Empire) and accept that our uncertainties overlap.
I personally think that there probably was a basis to the legend. The legend has had so many who accept it. And the legend is important. It has had more impact on the world than Tamburlaine – who was definitely real with an Empire.
But then, I am a Christian (following a King of Kingdom not of this world) and so am inclined towards an obvious bias.
As you know better than most, that a lot of people have believed something for a long time isn’t a substitute for evidence.
IMO science can be pretty sure that the empire of David as detailed in the Bible didn’t exist. Whether there were local kings possibly even named David and Solomon is of course harder to determine. No reason why there might not have been.
By the time the books of the OT were written down, those petty kings would already have been legendary, however. This allowed the scribes to inflate the importance of ancestral Hebrew and especially Judean might and glory, but borrowing from the real power of their Egyptian contemporaries.
Did the Queen of Sheba really visit Solomon to test his wisdom (as in the practically identical Books of Kings and Chronicles), or is it more likely that she journeyed down the Nile or Red Sea to Egypt, the empire which so dominated her region of Africa?
Although I really don’t think it matters…
The Queen of Sheba’s visit to Egypt would have been recorded. It wasn’t.
Her visit to Jerusalem was a big deal. No other state visits were recorded – legendary or real.
That implies to me that there was such a visit and it was remembered bwecause it validated the importance of Israel (scale of the visit, not important. It happened and was remembered and hyped. I doubt she had a bird’s foot either).
But the important thing is the story. It was the role models and the ideas that made and make David and Solomon important. That isn’t a question for history or archaeology.
But it is quite possible that the strength of the story comes from a reality that could be supported by archaeology
The stories in Judges, Kings and Chronicles, as elsewhere in the OT, are indeed good stories. I meant to say that before, but now get to agree with you.
As for Sheba, you’re right that as far as I know, no Egyptian record of such a visit survives, although of course embassies and tribute trains from throughout the region regularly visited Egypt.
If, as some think, she came from Yemen rather than Africa, then it’s certainly possible that some elevated female figure traveled on a caravan route from southern Arabia to the Levant, whether to seek wisdom from a local potentate or not. It doesn’t take much to start a legend going.
For example, there’s probably some actual figure behind the Robin Hood legend, which was first written down just centuries after the supposed events. However it’s unlikely that any source thief actually lived during the reign of Richard I, when archery was not common among the English. Indeed the Norman and early Plantagenet overlords probably would have discouraged it among their subjects if it had been.
Had the yew wood longbow been known among the Anglo-Saxons over a century before King Richard, his ancestor William probably wouldn’t have been able to conquer them. The English already had one of the best heavy infantries in Europe. Had the best missile-armed light infantry been combined with the shield wall and the Dane ax-wielding Huscarls, the Norman heavy cavalry and light infantry would almost certainly gone down to defeat, as they almost did anyway. But I digress far afield.
There are really two human histories: that of monumental empires, and that of all of the non-monumental cultures. The non-monumental cultures did not prefer grandiose building materials or forced labor, etc.. and David belonged to the non-monumental strand of human history. (In fact, his legacy is musical.) These histories leave behind great ideas, not stone structures. My shorthand for these two strands of history is the “Ambo versus the Temple.” The power is in the words lived out faithfully, not in fancy structures.
Ambo:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Ancient_Ambon_outside_Hagia_Sophia.png
It is well to keep Solomon and the Temple in perspective.
First, the desire for a king was considered a great failure for the Israelites. After 400 years in the land without one, they wanted a king “like the rest of the nations.” They were strictly warned by the prophets about the abusive behavior of royalty and the undesirability of a king. But because they persisted, their wish was granted (called the permissive will of God). It was an enormous lapse of faith. Likewise, they were reminded that God had never asked for vainglorious buildings, and instead, the Ark rested in a mere tent at Shiloh.
Second, Solomon’s overtaxation, forced labor, and redistricting of the land to support his vainglorious building project resulted in the immediate collapse of the kingdom after he died.
Third, Jeremiah brought the lonely message that the people should not trust in the building and say “the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” He told them if they did not amend their their hearts, and the way they actually lived their lives, God would remove the temple; – and it would become like the tent at Shiloh. So if you can’t find a trace of the tent at Shiloh, according to Jeremiah, you should not be able to find much left of Solomon’s temple. It is sincere and honest lives that He seeks. Some people can build and live in opulent palaces, but they cannot change their lives.
ref: Jeremiah chapter 7
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jeremiah+7&version=NKJV
Except, Zeke, that the Bible goes to great lengths to extoll the grandeur of the supposed monumental architecture raised by David and Solomon, if not Saul. It also claims that they ruled far more territory than they could possibly have done. At least Kings doesn’t claim “from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates”, which clearly would have been too much of an exaggeration, to say the least. Sway over this Promised Land was supposed to be a fulfillment of God’s gift from Genesis, so it’s easy to see why a later writer would assert that David achieved much of the divine grant. Menachem Begin took this biblical hyperbole over Eretz Israel seriously, but in the event peace with some Arab states resulted.
Yes ma’am, well the Babylonians made short work of the cities they captured, and took people out of the land so that they would not rise up again.
The Media-Persians, some of whom were Zarathustrians, sent them back to their homelands.
The Assyrians were the main population relocators. They carried away the 10.5 northern tribes of Israel in 722 BC. The Neo-Babylonians or Chaldeans took the 1.5 southern tribes of Judea into captivity much later, in deportations carried out in 597 BC, c. 587 BC and c. 582 BC. During the Babylonian Captivity, much of the OT was written or collected, plus a lot of Mesopotamian myth was picked up that found its way into the OT. Then in 539 BC the conquering Persians under Cyrus the Great freed the captive Judeans, perhaps because as Zoroastrians, they found some shared beliefs with the Jews.
Zarathustrians arrive later too. (:
http://planetwaves.net/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/640+web-52_Matt2_1a_JourneyOfTheMagi_Tissot.jpg
Thank you and best holidays to you.
Thanks.
You can say Blessed Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It’s OK.
Blessed Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
And all while staying on the Bronze Age topic. Cheers
Catherine, MCourtney – just have to make a comment re Sheba. Yes, there IS an Egyptian record of a Princess from Sheba going to Egypt to become the wife of Amenhotep III. His aunt (Hapshetsut) sent a trade delegation there, and the royal families remained in touch for several generations,. Like Solomon, Amenhotep had a big harem, and stable for 1000 horse. Like Solomon, he never went to war, instead presiding over an empire built by his father, Tut III. Like Solomon, Amenhotep had a big wooden palace built from Lebanese cedar.
For a myth, David sure wrote some fine poetry.
Anyone else read “Bronze Age America” by Barry Fell, 1982. He was a Harvard prof. that wrote about the Europeans trading with the American Indians for copper centuries prior to Columbus et al. He documented many cases of inscribed stones here on US soil with ancient European languages.
Danged If I can get through any thread here without learning something new. So King Suleman’s mines probably were tin mines, and not diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. Deborah Kerr was a tin digger; not a gold digger. So was Alain Quartermain.
Thanx Zeke and Caz
“””””…..Tamburlaine – who was definitely real with an Empire….”””””
Not so, and never seen it spelled that way. It was Tamerlane, a bastardization of “Timor the lame.” who hung out around Tashkent and Sammarkand. Probably the meanest sob who ever lived. But Ghengis Khan eventually burned Sammarkand to the ground. I’m told that Sammarkand is a totally beautiful place.
The 19 year old Boston Marathon bomber that got his comeuppance was named by his mother after that sob. Well she called him Tammerlan.
Interesting that the lucky prince in Puccini’s Turandot, was Prince Timor. She was also fond of putting peoples heads on top of stakes.
It was Timor who spread Islam at the edge of a sword, until he outrode his supply chain.
You could control just so much territory as you could ride a horse across in about 14 days. After that, you lost control over what the locals were up to on your property that you didn’t know about.
So when the Ottomans cut him off at the knees, he was far too spread from Tashkent to Morocco.
Cedars of Lebanon perhaps? None there now, just waring tribes. Come on climate change> Smite them.
Lions don’t live in forests. They’re social plains hunters, while the solitary tiger prowls woodlands. The Caspian tiger was extirpated by the Romans, who caught them for their circus games, to fight or eat prisoners in the arena.
“We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods.”
This date is remarkably close to the dating of an earth mini-catastrophe as postulated by Immanuel Velikovsky. He dates this as -747 = 748 BC. (Being a very devout, perhaps even orthodox Jew, he refused to use AD or BC in his dating.)
Apart from this, there is a problem reconciling dates. I recall a “Scientific American” article of many years ago (when it was still a reputable magazine) which drew attention to discrepancies between radio carbon dates and calendric dates prior to about AD 1. No relevance to certain events said to occur then, that was just the date after which the two dating methods coincided.
Before then, on the occasions when it had been possible to assess both a radio carbon date and a calendric one by counting tree rings back from known dates, there was always a consistent discrepancy, increasing in proportion as the samples were earlier and earlier. Radio carbon dates are based on a known rate of decay of carbon 14, in terms of current years (365 days and a bit). Tree rings are based on seasonal factors, and hence count the number of years. The discrepancy can be explained by supposing that either in those earlier ages the solar year was not the same length as it is now, or there had been a massive influx of carbon 14, so that the supposition in radio carbon dating that the amount of c14 ingested by a plant was constant throughout time, and hence time could be measured by its decay, was wrong.
I cannot remember the solution that the article came too. However, it is possible that the researchers have been caught by this discrepancy. R Shearer may have got it right – but the discrepancy between radio carbon and calendric dates may be the reason the researchers put the cart before the horse, so to speak.
Isn’t it odd how we view the past through the lens of current perceptions. Climate change dominates where perhaps it shouldn’t.
I’m old enough to remember ‘Chariots of the Gods’ in which 1960s era space capsules and astronauts were seen in ancient images. No person born in last 30 years would perceive the same things looking at these exact same things.
Good work to them, although I await Willis’ analysis of their “statistical techniques”. Wish there were a link to the paper. If the transition to cold wet is truly at 750BC over the broad area of Europe, the near East, and India, whose bronze age collapses are thought to be roughly contemporaneous at about 1200 BC, then collapse would precede climate by more like a couple dozen generations.
I can completely believe that cultural hegemony from a technological advance could have lead to the collapse. History is all about hegemony. When the Halstatt civilization in the Balkans (Roman Thrace) first developed Iron swords that could hack through bronze swords, they would have shown no mercy. Nobody was mellow back then…even now.
People I am a college dropout, major military history. I see statements of population drop but no proof. I don’t care about bronze age or iron age, people will continue to make babies. A population drop is not going to occur because a trade wagon does not show up. Anything trade would bring at this point would mainly be luxury items NOT a thousand suits of armor. Ask instead about the population decline of established villages and towns. To put it simply there must be an outside source for the collapse of a stable society At this point climate is still the most likely culprit. Also when looking at any paper remember the threat of publish or perish. .
My gut feeling would be disease rather than climate change. People adapt to circumstance but loss of labour is much more damaging to a group of humans.
C/W Black Death for example.
Regarding my comment here, maybe I should have added “always assuming the paper is correct, of course.”
People continue to have babies, but more of them die.
Old people die earlier and even the healthy can be struck down by conflict or disease.
MarkW
November 18, 2014 at 5:46 am
+1
It i s the survival rate that matters.
See the 19th & 20th centuries, I suggest. Auto
What? A paper that concludes that economic woes trump climate change when it comes to civilization collapse? Wow, how’d they get this past peer review? But hey, its published now, perhaps some politicians might pay attention to this when considering combating climate change with economy strangling regulations…
On the other hand…. how long is “two generations”? Back then, 40 was an old person. “Within two generations” is a meaningless measure of time. Then they pin point the climate swing to wetter conditions down to a single year…. 750 BC. Really? The resolution of a peat bog down to a single year? But it gets worse. They conclude that climate change could not have collapsed an economy that stretched from Ireland to India. So a single peat bog in Ireland is a proxy for the climate of most of Europe and Asia? I find that one hard to believe. For this paper to be credible they would have to have climate data from all the critical trading points of the entire system. A climate disaster in one part of the chain could easily collapse the entire chain, without showing up in a peat bog in Ireland.
Maybe they ran out of bronze.
Perhaps it was taxed and regulated to such an extent that it became too expensive to use. Oh wait, that is the solution for coal, sorry.
Well, as the saying goes, the Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones…
You misread it.
Funny at first they thought the problematic bronze age climate was colder/wetter but now the danger is due to warming. Hilarious.
The reality is colder/wetter even in our “modern” time would still be a disaster.
Abstract here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1408028111.abstract
The paper is paywalled, but there is a link to their supporting graphs and tables.
Even a small reduction in the seasonal growing period will have a marked effect on a purely agricultural society. Do these small effects show up in the geological record?
I wonder what Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, knows about rising temperatures globally? Is he that out of touch with the hiatus?
When you’re holding a hammer everything looks like a nail.
When you’re holding a hockeystick everything looks like climate change.
We can see from the remarkable Bronze age remains on upland Dartmoor that climate deteriorated over a number of years only gradually turning windier and wetter and thereby compromising the growth of crops from germination to harvest and the keeping of livestock.
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/grimspound/history-and-research/
This deterioration likely caused famine which would be a natural check on population and combine that with less fuel available as more is burned to create more agricultural land to compensate for reduced crop yield, animal husbandry expansion and to keep warm, and many of the ingredients for a population drop are in place.
The numbers of people were small anyway and some of the battles involved large numbers of men. Combine this with the gradual introduction of the superior technology of iron and a population drop involving a number of inter-related factors over an extended period can be hypothesised.
tonyb
What time in the afternoon was it in 750 BC that they were able to ‘precisely pinpoint’ all the climate change to?
P.S. I’m British – so assume sarcasm.
A viral epidemic perhaps?