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The Middle East Crisis - 2200 BC @ the London Catastrophes conference

August 17, 2002

Around 2200 BC, something strange happened in the Middle East. An abrupt change in climate caused the sudden collapse of rain-fed agricultural societies in Egypt, the Aegean, the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Indus valley of India. According to Professor Harvey Weiss, people returned to pastoral nomadism or swamped adjacent areas where agriculture was fed by artificial irrigation. In turn, the irrigation agriculture societies constructed walls to keep the immigrants out.

A detailed portrait of the devastating effects of this sudden dry period comes from Professor Fekri Hassan. A drastic drop in the Nile flood levels for a few decades around 2200 BC appears to have triggered a series of calamitous famines, which plunged the Old Kingdom of Egypt into terror, anarchy and then collapse. Hassan presents the archaeological evidence and textual accounts of the catastrophe, but there is also physical evidence for the failure of the Nile floodwaters at this time. Professor Michael Krom reports on a new study of sediments from cores collected in the central Nile delta that reveals how sediments dated to around the time of 2200 BC show evidence of severe drying out consistent with a long period of dry conditions.

Several of the talks at Brunel University`s `Environmental Catastrophes` conference will try to uncover what triggered this regional climatic shift. Dr Fabienne Marret, who chairs a special session on `Climatic events during the last 10,000 years, will review both lake and marine sediment records from time of the `4100 year climatic event` to look at how the landscape and its vegetation was changing. Strangely, the new marine records suggest that whilst drier conditions took hold of eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, equatorial Africa saw an expansion of its rainforests, pointing to a complex environmental disturbance. The cause of the climatic event remains elusive, though most research points the finger at weak monsoons induced by changes to the North Atlantic ocean circulation system.

Abstracts on: http://atlas-conferences.com/cgi-bin/abstract/caiq-01

Geological Society of London, The