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 12e century BC, is one of the most fascinating and commented on events in ancient history. A study of tree rings, published Thursday, February 9 in the journal Natureconfirms and clarifies the role that recurrences of exceptional droughts may 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 his co-authors, based on the growth rings of juniper trunks, exhumed from an archaeological site in the center of present-day Turkey, indicate that the arid conditions were reinforced in the region throughout the second half of the 13the century BC but, above all, that between 1198 and 1196 BC, three consecutive years of unprecedented droughts hit Anatolia.
Shortly before, in 1207 BC, Suppiluliuma II ascended the throne of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire, but the royal records were interrupted during his reign. Hattusa, the political and religious center of the Hittite world (some 150 km from Ankara), is deserted. For Sturt Manning and his colleagues, three consecutive years with little or no rainfall could thus have delivered the final blow to the empire, ending five centuries of Hittite domination over Anatolia and the northern Levant.
Dry conditions for 150 years
“Manning and his colleagues focused on the fall of the Hittite Empire, but the crisis was much longer”, comment archaeobotanist Dafna Langutt (Tel-Aviv University) and archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (Haifa University), who praise the quality and precision of these new results. About ten years ago, the two researchers analyzed sediments from the Sea of Galilee, and concluded that dry conditions had lasted about 150 years, between 1250 and 1100 before our era. Concordant results, they recall, were obtained in Syria and Cyprus by the team of Daniel Kaniewski (University of Toulouse).
The available textual sources – clay tablets stamped with cuneiforms transcribing a variety of extinct languages (Hittite, Akkadian, etc.) – indicate that the period was marked by incessant turmoil. Many diplomatic correspondence and private letters seem to attest to famines, food shortages, military raids led by fleets of enigmatic attackers from the Aegean world, whom the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero had called the “peoples of the sea”. They seem to be terrorizing the whole region. Archaeological excavations carried out in the eastern Mediterranean and as far as upper Mesopotamia reveal levels of destruction in most of the large cities, which seem to have been set on fire and abandoned around 1200 BC.
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