A study of dark dark circles, published Thursday, February 9 in the journal “Nature”, shows that a sudden aridity of the climate could have played a major role in the disappearance of the power that dominated Anatolia and the North du Levant.
by Stéphane Foucart
The abrupt collapse of the political and economic systems of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, at the beginning of the 13th e century BC, is one The most fascinating and commented events in ancient history. A study of dark dark circles, published Thursday, February 9 in the journal Nature, confirms and specifies the role that exceptional droughts have played in the fall of one of the superpowers of the time, the Hittite Empire .
The work carried out by Sturt Manning (Cornell University, Cyprus Institute) and its co -authors, from the growth dark circles of juniper trunchers, exhumed from an archaeological site of the center of current Turkey, indicate that the conditions of ‘aridity have been strengthened in the region throughout the second half of the 13th e century BC but, above all, that between 1198 and 1196 BC, three Consecreen years of unpublished droughts fell on Anatolia.
Little time before, in 1207 BC, Suppiluliuma II rises on the throne of Hattua, the capital of the Hittite Empire, but the royal archives interrup during its reign. Hattua, the Hittite world political and religious center (some 150 km from Ankara), is deserted. For Sturt Manning and his colleagues, three consecutive years without precipitation or almost could have given the grace of the Empire, putting an end to five centuries of Hittite domination over Anatolia and the north of the Levant.
Dry conditions for 150 years
“Manning and his colleagues focused on the fall of the Hittite Empire, but the crisis was much longer”, commented the archeobotanist Dafna Langutt (University of Tel Aviv) and the Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein ( University of Haifa), which welcome the quality and precision of these new results. A dozen years ago, the two researchers have analyzed sediments of the Galileo Sea, and concluded that dry conditions had lasted around 150 years, between 1250 and 1100 BCE. Concordant results, they recall, have been obtained in Syria and Cyprus by the team of Daniel Kaniewski (University of Toulouse).
The textual sources available – clay tablets stamped with cuneiforms transcribing a diversity of missing languages (Hittite, Akkadian, etc.) – indicate that the period is marked by incessant disorders. Many diplomatic correspondence and private letters seem to attest to famines, food shortages, military raids led by the fleets of attackers from the Aegean world, which Egyptologist Gaston Maspero had baptized the “peoples of the sea”. They seem to terrorize the entire region. The archaeological excavations conducted in the eastern Mediterranean and up to high Mesopotamia highlight destruction levels in most large cities, which seem to have been delivered to fire and abandoned around 1200 BC.
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