From Wiley-Blackwell via Eurekalert
Ancient Arabic writings help scientists piece together past climate
Iraqi sources from 9th and 10th centuries give new meteorological insights – The team believes the sources show Iraq to have experienced a greater frequency of significant climate events and severe cold weather than today.
Ancient manuscripts written by Arabic scholars can provide valuable meteorological information to help modern scientists reconstruct the climate of the past, a new study has revealed. The research, published in Weather, analyses the writings of scholars, historians and diarists in Iraq during the Islamic Golden Age between 816-1009 AD for evidence of abnormal weather patterns.
Reconstructing climates from the past provides historical comparison to modern weather events and valuable context for climate change. In the natural world trees, ice cores and coral provide evidence of past weather, but from human sources scientists are limited by the historical information available. Until now researchers have relied on official records detailing weather patterns including air force reports during WW2 and 18th century ship’s logs.
Now a team of Spanish scientists from the Universidad de Extremadura have turned to Arabic documentary sources from the 9th and 10th centuries (3rd and 4th in the Islamic calendar). The sources, from historians and political commentators of the era, focus on the social and religious events of the time, but do refer to abnormal weather events.
“Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,” said lead author Dr Fernando Domínguez-Castro. “However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow.”
Baghdad was a centre for trade, commerce and science in the ancient Islamic world. In 891 AD Berber geographer al-Ya’qubi wrote that the city had no rival in the world, with hot summers and cold winters, climatic conditions which favored strong agriculture.
While Baghdad was a cultural and scientific hub many ancient documents have been lost to a history of invasions and civil strife. However, from the surviving works of writers including al-Tabari (913 AD), Ibn al-Athir (1233 AD) and al-Suyuti (1505 AD) some meteorological information can be rescued.
When collated and analysed the manuscripts revealed an increase of cold events in the first half of the 10th century. This included a significant drop of temperatures during July 920 AD and three separate recordings of snowfall in 908, 944 and 1007. In comparison the only record of snow in modern Baghdad was in 2008, a unique experience in the living memories of Iraqis.
“These signs of a sudden cold period confirm suggestions of a temperature drop during the tenth century, immediately before the Medieval Warm Period,” said Domínguez-Castro. “We believe the drop in July 920 AD may have been linked to a great volcanic eruption but more work would be necessary to confirm this idea.”
The team believes the sources show Iraq to have experienced a greater frequency of significant climate events and severe cold weather than today. While this study focused on Iraq it demonstrates the wider potential for reconstructing the climate from an era before meteorological instruments and formal records.
“Ancient Arabic documentary sources are a very useful tool for finding eye witness descriptions which support the theories made by climate models,” said Domínguez-Castro. “The ability to reconstruct past climates provides us with useful historical context for understanding our own climate. We hope this potential will encourage Arabic historians and climatologists to work together to increase the climate data rescued from across the Islamic world.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
alan said @ur momisugly February 27, 2012 at 9:01 pm
So presumably you have nothing to do with such “PC science fiction” as algebra, algorithms, quadratic equations, Arabic numerals, spectacles and so on. What a peculiar life you must lead!
Tom C;
Yes, gaps of 37 and 61 years would about do it for living memory!
IAC, it’s cooling that generates weather extremes. Pre-MWP swings were brutal.
I have often read that the Nile river froze in 829 AD but have never been able to find any primary historical source to confirm it. Can anyone enlighten me?
alan says:
February 27, 2012 at 9:01 pm
“Islamic Golden Age”, PC science fiction!
—————————————————
Sorry to have singled you out, but there are quite a few analogous comments on this thread along the lines of ‘what could these murderous, ignorant savages teach us.’
While your ancestors (if they were European) were living in wattle and daub huts, illiterate, short lived and infested with vermin, there were very advanced civilisations in other parts of the world.
Islamic scholarship regrettably started to go downhill for ideological and religious reasons about eight hundred years ago. But it is xenophobic and ignorant not to acknowledge the greatness of past civilisations just because you don’t like the people who currently live at those locations.
If you want real ancient records for that region then start with Genesis and the Scripture. Sumeria which was between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers was wiped out by floods….. Guess which cities now lie between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
The period mentioned is not all that ancient. It is relatively modern, as these are records from the Middle Ages.
It would be better if they were examining records from Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece and yes, even Ancient Israel. For example, was it really snowing when Jesus was born? For centuries it has always been depicted that way.
Jerusalem in the snow:
http://www.bibleplaces.com/jerusalemsnow.htm
Many of this strongs climatic changes, are relationed with different solar activity. An, is possible, with anothers cosmis events.
WVR, cali, colombia
The Pompous Git says:
February 27, 2012 at 11:42 pm
Much of that was “borrowed” from cultures the Arabs conquered.
Well, I found both 829 and 1010 AD as freeze dates, but this s a pointer to what you want, I think, even if it is just an inline citation:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/tilmari/some200.htm
So it looks like a search on “Cambridge CCNet 1998” ought to get you the source.
Wonder if the freezing of the Euphrates and Nile would convince the Warmers that it got colder… This 200 ish year cycle would have another cold spell about now ( LIA in about 1800 to now in 2000 being 200 years spread…)
lots of other interesting history in that link, BTW….
Bloke down the pub says:
February 27, 2012 at 10:54 am
Did they find any mention of WMD?
Is that Weather of Mass Disruption?
SandyInDerby says:
February 27, 2012 at 11:20 am
“Do any of the dates match with those in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (not the only simultaneous record I’m sure)?”
1047?
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1000_1099.htm
1115
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1100_1199.htm
more on Syria:
http://www.bethmardutho.org/index.php/hugoye/volume-index/120.html
“We believe the drop in July 920 AD may have been linked to a great volcanic eruption but more work would be necessary to confirm this idea.”
After examining the best heliocentric analogue within the range of CET (1692), I am quite satisfied it was due to a short term change in solar activity. The next analogue at 1871 also shows such sharp short term drops: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar
There’s a lot of records in an old book (first published in French in 1967, the first English edition was in 1973) by the French historial Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, “Time of feast, time of famine. History of climate since AD 1000”. Allways a suggested reading.
Of course, “time of feast” were the warmer periods, “time of famine” the colder…
MarkW said @ur momisugly February 28, 2012 at 4:43 am
And what was Christendom doing when it took the Islamic invention of clear glass to make optical instruments, test tubes, retorts, barometers, thermometers etc? Don’t forget either that the Caliphate encompassed far more than the Arabs. It exceeded Europe in size.
As johanna points out, my Western European ancestors were largely ignorant savages when the Caliphate was at its peak. I must point out though that there was one holdout of scholarship in Western Europe: Ireland. For every Johannes Scotus Eriugena there were at least a dozen of his calibre in the Caliphate though.
Myrrh: thanks for the Jerusalem snow link. Unfortunately it provides no dates.
Mishnah Mikvaoth (c.100 CE) tells how snow could be had at will in the wintertime to partially fill the bathing pools. And this is in Jordan, near Amman where however, it still commonly snows a little in the winter. It seems that compressed air from the Jordan Valley, at 1300 feet below sea level, decompresses at 2600 feet in Amman, leading to snow at low latitude and moderate elevation. My guess is that east winds do the same to Jerusalem, maybe with a little lake effect from the Dead Sea.
Without Arabic and Syriac scholarship much of the Classical science history would have been lost. Some Latin MSS were translated from Arabic and Hebrew, not directly from Greek. And don’t forget the zero. Of course the Islamic conquerors assimilated science from the converted nations, and they left a lingua franca south and east of the Mediterranean as a counterpart to Latin. The same could be said of the Greek conquerors. Many of the Classical thinkers haled from the Maghreb and the Fertile Crescent. Same for Christian theologians: where did Augustine come from? North Africa.
In Utah we see CA plates all over. In CA you almost never see Utah plates. The incidence ratio is the ratio squared of the respective populations: (10:1)^2 = 100:1. Through such circumstantial data we get some idea about the relative population of North Africa. We also learn from archaeology. The decline of Islam coincided with the decline of Oriental Jewry, and was due to climate change more than any other factor–Africa and the Middle East dried up. The Moors were cut off from Baghdad while the European population was growing.
And the history: Pliny said Alexandria had an average of 3 thunderstorms every summer. Not any more.
Genesis? Composed of 3 sources, J, E, and P; J: c.900BCE, E: c.800, and P: c.450. Hardly as ancient as Akkadian, and who knows when Jacob’s sons and daughter escaped the famine for Egypt? George Washington had 13 children too, but more daughters: Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, etc. –AGF
“time of feast” were the warmer periods & “Islamic Golden Age”
The Medieval Warm Period was on balance a boon so great as to foster this great flowering of civilization. That warming is more beneficial than cooling undercuts the whole AGW case Eugenie Scott!
johanna says (to alan)
February 28, 2012 at 1:50 am
…there are quite a few analogous comments on this thread along the lines of ‘what could these murderous, ignorant savages teach us.’….While your ancestors (if they were European) were living in wattle and daub huts, illiterate, short lived and infested with vermin, there were very advanced civilisations in other parts of the world…..Islamic scholarship regrettably started to go downhill for ideological and religious reasons about eight hundred years ago. But it is xenophobic and ignorant not to acknowledge the greatness of past civilisations just because you don’t like the people who currently live at those locations.
First of all, johanna, many people living in those great past civilizations also lived in wattle-and-daub huts if they were lucky, as that’s a pretty efficient and sophisticated building system. Stone and brick were used not because they were better, they were not (fragile, inflexible, poorly insulated), but because there wasn’t enough wood to go around and also because they provided for better fortification and security…which tells us about the stability of those societies which relied on masonry in architecture. I’ve worked as a brick and stone mason, and even taught in the trade, and have also build with and repaired wattle and daub, and I found the latter far more exacting, difficult and technologically advanced than old-style brick and stone, i.e., before steel reinforced masonry, cavity walls, moisture-resistant membranes, modern insulation materials and Portland cement based mortars.
As for literacy, the vast majority of people everywhere were illiterate, and literacy is a function of centralized, usually despotic regimes which cannot work without record keeping. It wasn’t for being stupid that Europeans, with good annual rainfalls and rich and deep soils enjoyed autonomy from despots and didn’t need to, for a long time, bother with permanent record keeping. As for being “short-lived and infested with vermin,” that applied to everone everywhere, especially in civilized societies, which had great masses of poor, serfs and slaves. Furthermore, lot of the “great wisdom” of the classical civilizations is little more than universal vernacular knowledge written down and gilded with the puffery of scholarship. Humans everywhere have the same capacity for intelligence, the same ability to imagine and philosophise, and if you have travelled the backwoods of many places, you would find that many a “simple” shepherd would put a Plato to shame. It is writing…an “external information storage system”… that will eventually, but not always, make a difference, as it allows for better transmission, accummulation and building up on what was done before.
Another view on the Arab civilization holds that the Arabs were a religious warrior culture which conquered many of the advanced civilizations, looted, used up what they found and once the bureacrats and scholars died off or were converted, slunk back to the default position of warfare and banditry, where they are largely to be found today. There wasn’t much more to Islamic scholarship than looted libraries and artifacts and captured or Islamicized Indian, Syriac, Nestorianm Jewish, Chinese and Persian scholars.The “arabic” numerals are actually Indian, and most of the scientific and wisdom lit in Arabic…like astronomy, medicine and alchymy, was Classical Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese in origin, much of it translated into Arabic and Latin and spread around by Jews. There was a brief burp in Al-Andalus/Spain, with a heavy input by Jews and Chrisians, but “religious reasons,” i.e., Islamic fundamentalism, stamped that out pretty quickly.
There are a number of points being raised, and some of them seem to be based upon what can only be described as revisionism.
First of all, Islam did not exist until the 7th century AD. Second, one of the most advanced civilizations of the ancient world was Persia (now known as Iran). There are other civilizations mentioned in the Scripture for example which are easily recognizable from the location e.g. Babylon, Ninevah. Those ancient civilizations had nothing to do with Islam – no caliphate, nothing, nada, zilch. Third, two of the other most advanced civilizations were Rome and Greece but note it was Philip and Alexander of the ancient (not modern) Macedonia who had advanced across the Middle East, and who conquered Jerusalem (read the books of the Maccabees to get an idea of the impact of the Greeks on life in ancient Judea). Each of these civilizations brought their skills with them.
The Caliphate did not invent glass. Perhaps some of the peoples conquered by the Arabs had skills in glassmaking, but the caliphate and the Arabs did not necessarily have those skills. So again we must not ascribe to them that which belonged to other ancient and conquered races.
Another point raised concerned St. Augustine of Hippo (North Africa). This region was controlled by the Romans at the point in time when St. Augustine existed. It was an early point in Christendom that was just emerging from persecution under a variety of Roman emperors. At that time North Africa had been converting to Christianity but paganism (not Islam) was still rife in the region.
Then there is the issue with regard to the dating of the texts for the Scriptures. That information is almost correct, but the person left out a vital detail. Before it was written down, it was passed down in oral form. The authors of the texts were careful to pass on the various “stories” including at least two versions of the Creation story. People should not get bogged down with the notion that these texts are historical and that they can be dated in some way. Some of the stories relate to the various regions where those ancient peoples had lived. I find it interesting that most of the stories involved a very small region that includes the ancient city of Ninevah (Iraq) and that there is constant mention of Egypt in those early chapters. The point that I raised about the Scripture as any form historical record is that they recorded floods and famine. The story about the Noahine flood is probably the story of the flood that wiped out the ancient Sumerian civilization.
All of these ancient peoples and tribes pre-dated Islam. There were wise men, probably astrologers and even astronomers amongst them, and they were knowledgeable but they were never a part of Islam because it did not exist in the ancient world.
Aussie says:
February 28, 2012 at 12:20 pm
“The story about the Noahine flood is probably the story of the flood that wiped out the ancient Sumerian civilization. ”
=======================================================================
Minor problem: the oldest known Mid-Eastern version of the flood myth was the Sumerian version. How then can the Noachian Flood recount the destruction of Sumeria when the J version clearly derives from the Sumerian version? Similarly 19th century archaeologists thought they had discovered Noah’s flood until they found Gilgamesh tablets beneath their flood layer.
Look people: in 830 AD you could not find a more advanced civilization than in Baghdad. Period. Al Mamun recalculated the size of the earth among his many achievements–he had a better idea of its size than Columbus or Eratosthenes. His calculation of the length of a degree would not be improved upon till nearly modern times. In the 19th century presidents of American universities claimed Europeans believed the earth was flat, so barbaric were they (the university presidents). Most moderns still believe this myth.
The point I make with Augustine is not to show Islamic superiority–I know very well how to convert AH to AD. I’m trying to show serious historical climate change. Like Augustine, like al-Ya’qubi (the Berber geographer), and like Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes–two anomalous flat earthers–all came from North Africa. This should give you an idea of how populous North Africa was. It was like America in 1492, except that it was depopulated by climate change rather than disease. This continued clear till at least the middle of the 20th century, and you might argue that it continues till the present.
But the truth is slightly more complicated: its climate is unstable; its populace lives a precarious existence. It goes through periods of drought and greening, feast and famine. But overall, it has dried up. Climate change is the rule, and as far as climate goes, we live in a benign age. –AGF
Aussie said @ur momisugly February 28, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Please note that I did not say that “The Caliphate” invented glass.
“Abbas ibn Firnas (810–887) was an Andalusian scientist, musician and inventor. He developed a clear glass used in drinking vessels, and lenses used for magnification and the improvement of vision. He had a room in his house where the sky was simulated, including the motion of planets, stars and weather complete with clouds, thunder and lightning. He is most well known for reportedly surviving an attempt at controlled flight.”
Abbas ibn Firnas certainly lived in the Caliphate during the Islamic Golden Age. And I wrote this contra the assertion that the Islamic Golden Age was politically correct nonsense. FWIW it is my opinion that it was the development of glass suitable for lenses and other scientific instruments that allowed modern science to develop. Glass objects from 4,000 years before Abbas Ibn Firnas’ time are known, but it was not until he developed clear glass vessels and lenses that it became technologically significant.
mkelly says:
“…At different periods in its history, Iraq was the center of the indigenous Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Abbasid empires. It was also part of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires, and under British control as a League of Nations mandate.[5][6]”
What we now now as Iraq, is indeed the birthplace of what we now call human civilisation.
However, as always, despite the brutal, murderous empires which have come and gone, over the last eight thousand years, the politically correct will always blame the British for whatever mess the country gets itself into.
It might be informative to realise that from the time of Alexander until us Brits loaded the tanks and aircraft onto transport ships and sailed away in the 1950s, Iraq was never a state in its own right, always a province in some empire or other.
The same applies to every modern state in the Mid East, including Israel.
The liberals always forget that the modern Mid east is a product of the later British Empire.
(OK, yeah, I suppose its our fault! Sorry about that)
AS regards glass and other innovations supposedly credited to Arab technology- the Arabs swept over the Roman and Persian empires in the 7th centuries, putting an end to them forever.
The Arabs simply discovered technologies which had been in use for thousands of years and being a pragmatic lot, were quite happy to put them to their own use. They may have made improvements, but the Arabs never really made any great discoveries in science or engineering. They just developed the discoveries and inventions of others and stagnated when they could take a basic idea no further. Hence why they have never really made the leap out of the Dark Ages..
Armagh Observatory says:
February 28, 2012 at 2:55 pm
“…but the Arabs never really made any great discoveries in science or engineering.”
=====================================================================
It doesn’t get much sillier than that. Algebra? The zero? “The Book of Ingenious Devices”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Ingenious_Devices
Their contributions to all fields of science were as vast as is AO’s ignorance. True, they did not anticipate the Copernican Revolution, but they did provide much of the data that Copernicus relied on. And they don’t need my cheering. AO had best hit the books. –AGF
Armagh Observatory said @ur momisugly February 28, 2012 at 2:55 pm
Conflating the Caliphate with the Arabs is akin to conflating Christendom with the Sicilians. It’s beyond silly…
Rumor is, the alarmists of the day burned witches to appease the weather gods.