Further Evidence for a “Late Assyrian Dry Phase” in the Near East During the Mid-to-Late Seventh Century b.c.?

Datos Bibliográficos

ID24075224
AutoresAdam W Schneider (0000-0001-5106-1207), Selim Ferruh Adalı (0000-0002-3398-892X)
Año2016
Volumen78
Páginas159-174
Fecha de publicación2016-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaIraq (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-0889 • E-ISSN: 2053-4744
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/irq.2016.5
OpenAlexW2546368602
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas39

In a recent paper published in the journal Climatic Change , we put forward the hypothesis that drought and overpopulation played an important, if indirect, role in shaping the sudden decline of the Assyrian Empire during the mid-to-late seventh century b.c . This argument was partly predicated on five paleoclimatic proxy records for conditions in different parts of the northern Near East during the first millennium b.c ., each of which indicates that relatively arid conditions affected much of the region during the seventh century b.c ., especially during its middle decades. Here, we revisit the textual and paleoclimatic proxy evidence for a period of drought in more depth to examine whether this evidence does in fact support the climatic component of our hypothesis. In this paper, we show that the available proxy evidence supports the notion that there was some kind of regional climatic perturbation that affected much of the Near East during the latter half of the seventh century b.c ., which caused conditions in many parts of the region to become more arid. The strongest signal for this short-term episode of aridification, which we have termed the “Late Assyrian Dry Phase,” is observed at approximately 650–600 b.c . These proxies thus corroborate and provide the background for the Neo-Assyrian textual evidence for drought during the mid-seventh century b.c .

Ancient history · Arid · Aridification · Climatology · Geography · Physical geography · Proxy (statistics) · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Geology · History · Paleontology