SPECIAL FEATURE
“Rulers who enjoyed divine favor were blessed with predictable rains and golden sunshine... while those out of favor were punished with violent storms or no rainfall at all.”
Illustration: klyaksun/Shutterstock; yaron/Adobe Stock; Kudryavtsev/Adobe Stock; Robin Turton
religions. Yet it wasn’t a flood that led to the downfall of the Akkadian Empire. Despite its high level of development, it collapsed rather abruptly and without foreign influence. Scholars attribute the demise to a sudden change in climate patterns across the region, with rapidly increasing aridity and a once-in-a-century drought. The archaeologist Harvey Weiss writes: “After four centuries of urban life, this abrupt climatic change evidently caused abandonment, regional desertion and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. Synchronous collapse in adjacent regions suggests that the impact of the abrupt climatic change was extensive.” More climate and environmental seismic changes, both literal and figurative, fill the history books. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, when the Roman Empire was in its heyday, destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites and released so much ash “that some of it reached Africa and Syria and Egypt, filling the air overhead and darkening the sun,” as the writer and eyewitness Pliny the Younger reported. His uncle Pliny the Elder – who died at the scene while attempting a rescue mission – is the author of the 37-volume Natural History , testament to how much the interplay between civilization and nature already preoccupied the Romans. In later centuries, a deterioration of climatic conditions directly contributed to the fall of the superpower. As arguably the first global empire in
history, the Romans connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs capable of causing pandemic events moved freely and at an unprecedented speed. The Antonine Plague (165 to 180 CE), brought to Rome by armies returning from Asia, was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. Despite severe losses the empire
because of climate change. The Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica (comprising the modern day central to southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and parts of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua) lasted for some 3,000 years. Agriculture was the cornerstone, with great cities being built as the population grew. Religion was an important part of Mayan life, with sacrifice a regular ritual
Depictions of the deities Lamassu, which originate in the ancient text the Epic of Gilgamesh
Photo: Xxxxx
recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian (c. 249- 270) sent the empire into a tailspin. The historian Kyle Harper writes: “Humans shape nature – above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules.” Rome was not the only great civilization that fell (at least partly)
to appease and nourish the gods and keep the land fertile. However, sometime around 900 CE things started to go wrong. Overpopulation put a massive strain on resources. The consequence was increased competition, which led to violent conflict over scarce resources. An extensive period of drought that ruined crops and cut off water supplies led to the fall of this ancient civilization: Within a couple of generations, swaths of central Mayan lands were all but abandoned.
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