In the year 1200 BC, human civilization suffered a terrible setback with the almost simultaneous decline or atrophy of a number of important empires in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, in what was known as the collapse of the Bronze Age.
The Hittite Empire was one of the most powerful empires to come to an end, and it was concentrated in modern Turkey and extended to parts of Syria and Iraq. Researchers presented a new vision of the collapse of the Hittite state, as a study of the trees that were present at the time showed that the region had gone through three consecutive years of severe drought, which may have destroyed crops and caused famine and political and social disintegration..
The Hittites, with their capital, Khatusha, located in central Anatolia, were one of the great powers in the ancient world for five centuries. They became the main geopolitical rivals of ancient Egypt during the period of the modern Egyptian states.
“In pre-modern times, with not the infrastructure and technology that we have, the Hittites controlled and ruled a vast region for centuries despite many challenges of scope and threats from Neighbors and entities that have been incorporated into their empire, despite being stationed in a semi-arid region“.
Scholars have long pondered the cause of the fall of the Hittites and the broader collapse that also destroyed the kingdoms of Greece, Crete and the Middle East, and weakened the Egyptians. Hypotheses included war, invasion and climate change. The new study provides some clarification about the Hittites.
Study summary
- The researchers examined the long-lived juniper trees that grew in the area at the time and were eventually cut down to build a wooden structure southwest of Ankara around 748 BC that may have been a burial chamber for a relative of King Midas, the king of Phrygia who, legend has it, transformed anything he touched. to gold.
- The trees provided a regional record of the ancient climate in two ways. The first was the growth patterns of the annual tree rings, as the narrow rings indicated drought conditions, and the rate of two forms or isotopes of carbon in the rings was revealing the trees’ response to the availability of water..
- They discovered a gradual shift to drier conditions from the thirteenth century BC to the twelfth century BC. More importantly, the two patterns of evidence point to three consecutive years of severe drought, 1198, 1197, and 1196 BC, coinciding with the known timing of the empire’s disintegration..
What do the researchers say?
- “There’s likely been a near-total crop failure three years in a row,” said Britta Lorentzen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia and a co-author of the study. “People most likely had food stocks to sustain them for one year of drought. But when they experienced three consecutive years, there was no food to support them“.
- This may have led to a collapse of tax revenues, an exodus of the large Hittite army, and possibly a movement of the populace seeking to survive. The Hittites were also challenged by the lack of a port or other easy ways to transport food into the area.“.
- And the city of Khatusha, surrounded by a huge stone wall with gates decorated with lions and sphinxes, was burned and abandoned. And the texts written on clay tablets using cuneiform writing common in the region, which explain the conditions of society, politics, religion, economics, and foreign affairs of the Hittites, did not tell anything.
- It was an abrupt end. Less than a century ago, the Hittites, led by King Muwatalli II, and the Egyptians under Ramesses II clashed in the famous, indecisive Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, in which thousands of chariots took part in Syria, and the two sides reached the first peace treaty in history..
“I think this study really shows the lessons we can learn from history,” said Jed Sparks, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University and co-author of the study. “The climate changes that we are likely to face in the next century will be much more severe than those experienced by the Hittites.”“.
This raises questions, he added, such as, “How resilient are we? How resilient can we be?”“.