Droughts ended the Hittite Empire in the Bronze Age – 02/18/2023 – Science

A succession of devastating droughts may have been behind the collapse of one of the Bronze Age superpowers, the Hittite Empire, which dominated much of present-day 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 that time, registering the fluctuations in rainfall practically year by year.

The new data on the Hittite demise are important for 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 the Greeks called Troy on the Turkish coast (as far as we know, an area independent of the Hittite Empire), and several city-states in present-day territories. of Israel and Palestine. Several factors seem to have contributed to this widespread collapse, but weather may have been a major factor in several places.

The new study on the Hittites has just been published in the specialized journal Nature. In it, the team coordinated by Sturt Manning, from Cornell University (USA), proposes that the entire 13th century BC was affected by increasingly arid conditions in the so-called central Anatolia, a region of Turkey that was the heart of the Hittite Empire.

This phase of unfavorable climatic conditions would have culminated in three years of very severe drought, which, according to the researchers, probably correspond to the period between 1198 BC and 1196 BC in our calendar. The dates are very close to the estimate for the time when the Hittite capital, the mighty city of Hattusa, seems to have been evacuated and abandoned by what was left of the empire’s administration. Some time later, the buildings were set on fire.

“Three consecutive years of droughts [dessa magnitude] are very unusual—nothing like this has happened before or since for more than a century,” Manning told the Sheet.

“We are talking about a very specific episode that the people, and especially 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 like the last straw (or lack thereof) for an imperial system already relatively fragile in the long term.

“A year of intense drought affecting a large area can destroy lives, even in the modern world. Two continuous years often destroy long-term resilience strategies, making it, for example, no longer possible to feed domestic animals on farms. third consecutive year is very rare and very serious,” argues Manning. “In the pre-modern world, it would end up undermining the authority [do rei]both from the inability to collect taxes and feed the Army and also from a symbolic point of view: clearly the gods abandoned and rejected the rulers.”

Prior to this final crisis, the Hittites had enjoyed a prominent place among the great powers of the Mediterranean and Middle East for centuries. They warred and had diplomatic links with Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. Against this last kingdom, they fought one of the most important battles of the ancient world in 1274 BC in the locality of Kadesh, close to the current border between Syria and Lebanon. The combat, led by Pharaoh Ramses 2nd on the Egyptian side and King Muwatalli 2nd on the Hittite side, involved thousands of soldiers mounted on chariots drawn by horses and ended in a kind of tie.

To establish a precise chronology for climate variations in the region, the researchers analyzed the wood used in a gigantic funerary monument built in the ancient locality of Górdion, which is 230 km from the Hittite capital. Although it was erected centuries after the end of the empire, the monument used wood from centuries-old junipers, whose structure corresponds to a calendar that begins around 1800 BC

Making this inference is possible because trees develop by forming growth rings inside their trunks, each corresponding to one year of the plant’s life. In periods of favorable weather, such rings are thick, while the lack of water causes them to thin – in the worst case scenarios, becoming less than a millimeter wide.

In addition, experts used methods to date the wood precisely and also to investigate the presence of different forms of the chemical element carbon in its composition, which also bring clues about times of more or less drought. All of this led to estimation of the dates, which match other late Bronze Age records.

Manning, however, says that care must be taken when attributing the drop in other states at the time to the same dry period. “Each 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 is possible that Greece, the adjacent regions of the Aegean Sea and perhaps also Italy were suffering 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 so-called Peoples of the Sea, groups that perhaps came from Sardinia, Sicily and Greece itself and arrived, for example , Egypt and the coast of the Middle East. These groups may have been a mixture of pirates and refugees. “Overall, the portrait of the late Bronze Age is complicated,” summarizes Manning.