In northern Mesopotamia, Iran, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, food production was based on agriculture dependent on rainfall. Even a small reduction in the normal amount of precipitation could significantly diminish the harvest; periods of drought would result in famine, leading to undernourishment, disease, and death. But along the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Nile, where rainfall was insufficient to sustain agriculture, great civilizations were based on irrigation through trapping the rivers’ waters. The rivers of Mesopotamia were notorious, however, for disastrous spring floods that wiped out a portion of the harvest. Sometimes one of the rivers left its banks and carved a new course, leaving settlements high and dry. On some occasions, a ruler upstream from a rival city diverted the river’s flow in order to harm that rival. In Egypt, on the other hand, the Nile was famous for the regularity and beneficence of its annual summer flood, whose life-giving water and silt sustained Egyptian civilization. A flood too high or too low could spell disaster, however, reducing the area that could be cultivated, diminishing the harvest, and threatening the population’s survival.
Except for mythological tales of great floods, ancient sources reflected little awareness that even short-term environmental change could cause major societal conflict. But modern scientists have reconstructed climatic shifts and changes in rivers’ courses that might have caused the famines and population movements reflected in the textual and archaeological record. For example, the period 2200 to 2000 bce witnessed a shift to a drier climate. These more arid conditions contributed to the decline and fall of the empire established by the Akkadian king Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin, and to a decline in urban settlement and population. In Palestine especially, most of the major urban communities of this time seem to have been abandoned, and their former inhabitants turned to seminomadic pastoral herding supplemented with small-scale farming. The social instability involved must have been severe.
This period of increased aridity coincided in Egypt with the transition from the highly organized Old Kingdom to the decentralized, chaotic conditions of the First Intermediate Period. Increased aridity and consequently diminished rainfall in central Africa probably produced a series of low Nile floods. The Egyptian state’s survival was linked to the efficacy of those floods. The literary composition known as the Admonitions of Ipuwer provided eloquent, if hyperbolic, testimony to the chaos of this calamitous time:
... A man looks upon his son as his enemy...
The virtuous man goes in mourning because of what has happened in the land...
Foreigners have become Egyptians everywhere...
The land is full of gangs, a man goes to plough with his shield. . .
Indeed, the ways are blocked, the roads are watched,
Men sit in the bushes, until the night traveler comes, in order to plunder his load.
What is upon him is taken away; he is thrashed with blows of a stick and criminally
Slain. . .
Indeed, the scribes of the land-register - their writings are destroyed, the grain of Egypt
Is common property.
Indeed, the laws of the council-chamber are thrown out,
Men walk on them in public places,
Beggars break them up in the streets. . .
Beggars come and go in the Great Houses [law courts].
Indeed, the children of princes are cast out in the streets. . .
The king has been disposed of by beggars. (Hallo and Younger 1997: 94-6)
This description might have been exaggerated for didactic effect or to add legitimacy to the ascension of a later new ruler. Nonetheless, it vividly recounts the chaos caused when society broke down and people’s survival was threatened.
World History
