Tel Aviv
University: Dramatic Discovery in Sea of Galilee – Ancient Near
East Empires
Collapsed as a Result of Climate Crisis
Spokesperson’s
Office
Tel Aviv, 22
October 2013
TEL AVIV
UNIVERSITY DRAMATIC DISCOVERY IN SEA OF GALILEE:
ANCIENT NEAR
EAST EMPIRES COLLAPSED AS RESULT OF CLIMATE CRISIS
A study of
fossil pollen particles in sediments extracted from the bottom of
the Sea of
Galilee has revealed evidence of a climate crisis that
traumatized
the Near East from the middle of the 13th to the late 12th
century BCE.
The crisis brought about the collapse of the great empires of
the Bronze
Age. The results of this study will be published in the coming
days by Dr.
Dafna Langgut and Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of
Archaeology at
Tel Aviv University and Prof. Thomas Litt of the Institute of
Geology,
Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn, Germany. The
results
appeared today (October 22nd 2013 ) in Tel Aviv: Journal of the
Institute of
Archaeology of Tel Aviv University
http://maneypublishing.com/index.php/journals/tav/
and can be
read online at IngentaConnect.com
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/tav
Prof.
Mordechai Stein of the Hebrew University also participated in the
research.
“In a short
period of time the entire world of the Bronze Age crumbled,”
explains Prof.
Finkelstein. “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.
The
researchers drilled through 300 meters of water in the heart of the Sea
of Galilee and
retrieved a core of sediments 20 meters long from the bottom
of the lake.
The goal was to extract from the sediments fossil pollen
grains.
“Pollen is the most enduring organic material in nature,” explains
palynologist
Dr. Dafna Langgut, who carried out the actual work of sampling.
“Pollen was
driven to the Sea of Galilee by wind and river-streams, was
deposited in
the lake and was embedded in the under-water sediments. New
sediments that
are added annually create anaerobic conditions which help
preserve the
pollen particles. These particles tell us about the vegetation
that grew in
the vicinity of the lake in the past and therefore testify to
the climatic
conditions in the region.” The chronological framework of the
sediment core
was established by radiocarbon dating organic materials that
were preserved
in the sediments. The counting and the identification of the
pollen grains
revealed a period of severe droughts between ca. 1250 and 1100
BCE. A core of
sediments from the western shore of the Dead Sea – also
studied by the
research group – provided similar results.
“The advantage
of our study, compared to pollen investigations carried out
at other
locations in the Near East, is in the unprecedented resolution of a
sample about
every 40 years,” says Prof. Finkelstein. “Pollen is usually
sampled in a
resolution of several hundreds of years, and this is indeed
logical when
one is interested in prehistoric matters and glacial and
inter-glacial
cycles. Since we were interested in historical periods, we had
to sample in
denser resolution; otherwise a crisis such as the one at the
end of the
Bronze Age would have escaped our attention”.
Another
novelty in the current research is in the chronological correlation
between the
pollen results and two other records of the past. At the end of
the Bronze Age
many Eastern Mediterranean cities were assaulted and
destroyed by
fire. The dates of these events indeed fall between ca.
1250-1100 BCE.
The same holds true for ancient Near Eastern written
documents that
testify to severe droughts and famine in exactly the same
period. Such
documents are known from across the entire region – from the
Hittite
capital in Anatolia in the north, via Ugarit on the Syrian coast and
Aphek in
Israel to Egypt in the south.
Reduction in
precipitation in the “green” areas of the Near East should not
be expected to
cause the collapse of great empires. So what had happened?
Prof. Ronny
Ellenblum of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied written
documents that
describe similar conditions – of severe droughts and famine –
in the 10th‒11th
centuries CE. He showed that in the northern parts of the
Near East,
such as northern Iran and Anatolia, shrinkage in precipitation
was
accompanied by devastating cold spells that destroyed crops. Langgut,
Finkelstein
and Litt propose a similar process for the end of the Bronze
Age: severe
cold spells destroyed the crops in the northern parts of the
ancient Near
East and shrinkage in precipitation damaged agricultural output
in the eastern
steppe parts of the region. This brought about the droughts
and famine so
well-described in the ancient texts, and motivated “large
groups of
people to start moving to the south in search of food,” says
Egyptologist
Shirly Ben-Dor Evian of the Department of Archaeology at Tel
Aviv
University. These groups, including the Sea Peoples known from the
texts of the
period, moved by land and sea, assaulted cities and disrupted
trade routes.
All this caused a severe economic crisis which developed from
north to south
and reached Canaan. “It was an all-out war on dwindling
resources,”
says Ben-Dor Evian.
The study
shows that the dry period ended around 1100 BCE and was followed
by a wet
period that helped many of the uprooted groups to settle down,
especially in
the hilly areas of Canaan and Syria. A century or two later
these groups
established the territorial kingdoms of the Iron Age, among
them Israel
and Judah.
The discovery
in the Sea of Galilee is one in many findings in a large-scale
project
directed by Prof. Israel Finkelstein, incumbent of the Jacob M.
Alkow Chair in
the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze and Iron Ages at Tel
Aviv
University and Prof. Steve Weiner of the Kimmel Center for
Archaeological
Science at the Weizmann Institute. The project deploys exact
and life
science methods in the study of the Iron Age – the biblical
period – in
Israel. The project consists of ten tracks, including ancient
DNA and the
study of molecular residues in ancient ceramic vessels. The
project was
made possible thanks to a lavish research grant from the
prestigious
European Research Council (ERC) – the largest ever single grant
in the field
of humanities in Israel.
For further
details please contact Prof. Israel Finkelstein:
fink2@post.tau.ac.il
054-5290207
Regards,
Orna Cohen
Tel-Aviv
University Spokesperson’s Office
03-6405050
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