Akkadian Empire: A History From Beginning to End (Mesopotamia History Book 2) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2018-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The 4.2 Kiloyear Event

“Don’t pick things ahead of time; some bear fruit later.”

—Sumerian proverb

In 1978, a group of archeologists from Yale University began excavating the site of the ancient city of Shekhna (known today as Tell Leilan). Over the next ten years, this team, under the leadership of Harvey Weiss, a lecturer from Yale, uncovered the remains of a large city. This city had started as a small village around 5000 BCE before growing into a city-state by 2500 BCE. In 2300 BCE, it was incorporated into the Akkadian Empire, and the archeologists found many remnants of Akkadian presence. However, they also discovered something entirely unexpected and very strange.

In approximately 2200 BCE (around 20 years after the death of Naram-Sin), the city of Shekhna was suddenly abandoned, and all traces of human habitation seemed to cease for roughly 2-300 years. It wasn’t just humans who abandoned this place—from around 2200 to 1900 BCE, the very earth in this place became lifeless. Digging revealed that for almost 200 years, there wasn’t even evidence of the presence of earthworms in the soil. Weiss published his findings in 1993, and a number of scientists began to look at what might have caused the complete abandonment of a once thriving city.

Subsequent investigations have shown that the events in Shekhna weren’t unique. In the early years of the twenty-second century BCE, many cities in northern Mesopotamia were also abandoned and all traces of farming and agriculture vanished. There were also accounts of a large-scale influx of people from northern Mesopotamia fleeing into southern regions. These changes weren’t confined to Mesopotamia.

In China, at around the same time, the advanced and sophisticated Longshan culture in the Yishu River Basin suddenly entered a decline and disappeared, being replaced by the Yueshi culture which was simpler and produced far fewer advanced artifacts. In Egypt, the Old Kingdom, which had lasted for more than 500 years and produced many of the pyramids and other structures of this area, was suddenly swept away in a wave of famine and social breakdown which led to the fragmentation of the kingdom. In south-central Asia, fixed, sedentary societies were suddenly replaced by a nomadic lifestyle where tribes moved from place to place with herds of domestic animals. In India, large urban centers created by the Indus Valley civilization were suddenly abandoned. On the Arabian Peninsula, the Umm al-Nar culture which had been in existence for hundreds of years suddenly vanished. Even in Europe, living patterns changed dramatically with a decline in agriculture in what had previously been fertile and productive lands.

For some time, historians puzzled over what could have led to the almost simultaneous collapse of several advanced civilizations. Recent research suggests that these things were caused by something now referred to as the 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event, a period of sudden climate change associated with a decrease in the temperature of the North Atlantic which occurs approximately every 1,500 years. The causes of these fluctuations (known as Bond events) are not understood, but their effect on the world’s climate is extreme and violent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.