Natural disasters have always played a role in geopolitics, given their ability to utterly destroy anything in their path, governments included. International researchers from Yale, Berkley, Ireland and Switzerland believe they’ve found yet another historic example of nature’s ability to control the destiny of man. It seems volcanoes were at least partially responsible for the demise of Cleopatra’s Egypt, the Ptolemaic Kingdom.
Using ice-core-based volcanic records or eruption dates and cross-referencing them with the Islamic Nilometer (an ancient device which was used to measured the rising water of the Nile) and Egyptian records of social unrest researchers were able to study the effect volcanoes had on society.
“Ancient Egyptians depended almost exclusively on Nile summer flooding brought by the summer monsoon in east Africa to grow their crops. In years influenced by volcanic eruptions, Nile flooding was generally diminished, leading to social stress that could trigger unrest and have other political and economic consequences,” says Joseph Manning, lead author of the resulting paper and historian at Yale, in a press release.
Volcano eruptions all around the globe would be able to affect African monsoon formation, as proven by the reach of a massive eruption out of Alaska in 1912. Looking at Ptolemic history, there are 96 years during which Nile flood quality evaluations can be made from written record. Manning and his team found that “Eight of these years correspond to eruption years and 88 years do not.”
These volcano eruptions and their soot’s dampening of monsoon generation might help explain why, according to Roman historians, time and again Ptolemic leaders were “recalled to Egypt by disturbances at home.”
The complexity of an empire’s fall can rarely be placed on a single event. Rome’s increasing militarism, as well as the romantic entanglements of Cleopatra VII, no doubt played a role. But “it is very rare in science and history to have such strong and detailed evidence documenting how societies responded to climatic shocks in the past,” says Jennifer Marlon, an environmental researcher at Yale and a co-author on the study, in a press release.
Climate change undoubtedly has the power to alter civilizations, the study says. Scientists are warning that nature still has that same power today.
Source: The Guardian
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