Around 3,200 years ago, a number of flourishing civilizations on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, virtually the entire world of the Bronze Age, collapsed and crumbled in a very short period of time.
The reasons for this collapse have baffled scientists and historians for many years. Recently though, a study of fossilised pollen particles retrieved from sediment at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee may have solved this mystery that has been intriguing archaeologists for decades. The study was published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.
According to Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and one of the lead scientists of the study, “The Hittite Empire, Egypt of the pharaohs, the Mycenaean culture in Greece, the copper-producing kingdom located on the island of Cyprus, the great trade emporium of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, and the Canaanite city—states under Egyptian hegemony—all disappeared and only after a while were replaced by the territorial kingdoms of the Iron Age, including Israel and Judah.”
While it was thought for many years that sudden natural disasters, pestilence or wars were the cause, Finkelstein and his colleagues believe that their study has at last found the real culprit; a succession of severe droughts spread over 150-years from around 1250 BCE to about 1100 BCE, dates they believe to be fairly accurate as indicated by the sampling of sediment deposited over the past 9,000 years that were taken from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee.
Dafna Langgut, a University of Tel Aviv palynologist (one who studies ancient pollens), stated that by studying pollen samples taken at 40-year intervals between 3200 BCE and 500 BCE, they were able to monitor changes in the vegetation as “Pollen grains are the ‘fingerprints’ of plants.”
The study revealed a sharp decline in pines, oaks and carob trees, traditionally found in the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, around 1250 BCE. Around the same time there was a marked increase in plants usually found in semi-arid desert regions. A drop in the number of olive trees also indicated that horticulture was on the wane at this time. All of these signs point to regular and sustained droughts in the area at the time.
The study reveals “… that climate change can be seen as a sort of a ‘prime mover’ that initiated other processes,” according to Finkelstein who believes that “groups of people in the northern regions were uprooted from their homes because of destruction of the agricultural output, and [they] started moving in search of food. They could have pushed other groups to move by land and sea. And this in turn caused destructions and disruption of the delicate trade system of the eastern Mediterranean.”
We should pay heed to this study, seeing that the world is currently facing similar climate changes that are creating many arid regions where nature flourished previously.
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