Drought and the Fall of the Hittite Empire

Famous Hittite Standard

The most dramatic thing that happened during the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" was the fall of the Hittite Empire. In 1200 BC it was a very powerful state; by 1177 BC it was gone. As we have discussed here before, one of the main theories about the whole regional collapse has to do with drought. It is well-established that the 12th century BC was a drier period than the 13th, and evidence of a major drought around 1200-1190 BC has been found in pollen cores from the Sea of Galilee. 

Now along come some American scientists who threw a powerful combination of radiocarbon dating, tree-ring dating, and stable isotope analysis at the very large sample of wood from the Anatolian mound known as the Tomb of Midas. (Article, popular summary)

Here is the wooden structure in question, a remarkably rich collection of very old juniper trees, giving us a paleoclimate record for Anatolia that stretches from 1775 to 748 BC.

The new study confirms earlier findings about a general drying in the Middle East between 1220 and 1150 BC. It also pinpoints a severe Anatolian drought that they date precisely to 1198 to 1196 BC. That certainly looks like a bad drought. The date may or may not be exactly right, but their science is very impressive, so let's assume they nailed it. 

But if we're going to put dates on the Hittite collapse, we have to consider that the archive of Ugarit in Syria includes letters sent by Hittite officials in 1190 BC, which make no mention of their own empire having collapsed or being threatened in any way. The Egyptian written record has the Hittites being destroyed in either – depending how you count some obscure reigns – 1188 or 1177 BC. 

So while it remains true that a period of severe drought was part of the background to the political events we call the Bronze Age Collapse – the fall of the Hittite Empire, the withdrawl of Egypt from Canaan and the resulting conquest by the Hebrews, the fall of Troy, the sack of Ugarit, the invasion of Egypt by the "Sea Peoples" – the exact mechanisms of the politics remain complex and obscure. You can certainly imagine that a terrible, three-year drought, coming in the middle of a generally dry period, would have severely stressed the Hittite homeland in Anatolia. This might have led, say, to a collapse in tax revenue leading to the king not being able to pay his soldiers or even feed them properly, leading to revolts, etc., leading to the fall of the state a decade later. One of the famous Ugarit letters says that Ugarit was under attack by its own soldiers and sailors, providing some evidence for the "revolt of unpaid armies" theory. But Assyria, which experienced the same climate disaster, did not fall, and in fact emerged a few decades later as a dynamic and expanding empire. How does a drought that impacted both explain why one Middle Eastern empire fell and the other did not? Some other factor is needed.

The authors of the new article say themselves that their data records six severe three-year droughts in the 1775 to 748 period, and nobody has claimed that any of the other five had any political impact.

And the reason this matters is that the authors of this article, with, one has to assume, the blessing of the editors of Nature, come right out in their introduction and say this is relevant to our times because

The potential of climate change to substantially alter human history is a pressing concern, but the specific effects of different types of climate change remain unknown. This question can be addressed using palaeoclimatic and archaeological data.

To which I respond, I can tell you exactly and precisely how climate shocks impact state-level societies: in every way you can imagine. Sometimes droughts cause war and rebellion; sometimes they cause an intensification of elite control. Somtimes they cause societies to collapse; sometimes they inspire a burst of technical creativity in irrigation and allied sciences, followed by a population boom. Sometimes you can't tell that anything happened at all.

The worst climate event to impact Europe in the past 10,000 years was the Little Ice Age, which was at its most dire in the 17th century and the 19th, when Europe was conquering the world and creating modern civilization. 

Obviously climate impacts civilization. Nobody lived in northern Europe during the Ice Age. When the glaciers melted, huge areas were flooded by rising seas, driving the people out. When the Sahara dried up, hundreds of towns and villages disappeared. But civilizations have existed and continue exist in diverse regions with very different climates. People are clever and adaptable. If some society or state falls because of a climate catastrophe, that probably means it was in some way highly vulnerable or unstable, and if it fails to come back when good weather returns, that must surely mean that the people decided some other arrangement would suit them better. There is nothing at all inevitable about the impacts of modest climate change like the drought of 1200 to 1190 BC. To be fair to the authors of the article in question, they say this in their conclusion, but only after making a lot of far-reaching claims about the importance of climate in history.