Famines

There was famine in the Hittite Empire and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age.17

They have also correctly noted that the occurrence of famine in this region was not unique to the final years of the Late Bronze Age.

For example, decades earlier, during the mid-thirteenth century BC, a Hittite queen wrote to the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, stating, “I have no grain in my lands.”

Soon thereafter, probably in a related move, the Hittites sent a trade embassy to Egypt in order to procure barley and wheat for shipment back to Anatolia.18

An inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, in which he states that he had “caused grain to be taken in ships, to keep alive this land of Hatti,” further confirms famine in the land of the Hittites toward the end of the thirteenth century BC.19

Additional correspondence sent from the Hittite capital city attests to the ongoing crisis during the following decades, including one letter in which the writer rhetorically asks, “Do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands?”20

Some of the letters found at Ugarit are concerned with the immediate shipment of large quantities of grain to the Hittites. One missive sent from the Hittite king to the king of Ugarit is concerned specifically with a shipment of two thousand units of barley (or simply grain).

The Hittite king ends his letter dramatically, stating, “It is a matter of life or death!”21 Another letter is similarly concerned with the shipment of grain, but it also requests that many boats be sent as well. This led the original excavators to hypothesize that it was a reaction to the incursions of the Sea Peoples, which it may or may not be.

Even the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, received several letters from the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II in the early twelfth century BC, including one chastising him for being late in sending a muchneeded shipment of food to the Hittite homeland sometime in the years just before the final destructions.23

Itamar Singer of Tel Aviv University was convinced that the extent of famine during the last years of the thirteenth and the early decades of the twelfth century BC was unprecedented, and that it affected far more areas than simply Anatolia. In his estimation, the evidence, both textual and archaeological, indicates that “climatological cataclysms affected the entire eastern Mediterranean region towards the end of the second millennium BCE.”24 He may well have been correct, for one of the letters found in the House of Urtenu at Ugarit in northern Syria refers to a famine ravaging the city of Emar in inland Syria at the time that it was destroyed in 1185 BC. The relevant lines in this letter, apparently sent by someone from Urtenu’s commercial firm stationed in that city, read: “There is famine in your [i.e., our] house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.”25

Even Ugarit itself seems not to have been immune, for a letter from Merneptah found in the House of Urtenu specifically mentions “consignments of grain sent from Egypt to relieve the famine in Ugarit,”26 and one king of Ugarit wrote to an unidentified, but probably royal and senior, correspondent, saying, “(Here) with me, plenty (has become) famine.”27 There is also a text from the king of Tyre, located in the coastal area of what is now Lebanon, to the king of Ugarit. It informs the Ugaritic king that his ship, which was returning from Egypt loaded with grain, had been caught in a storm: “Your ship that you sent to Egypt, died [was wrecked] in a mighty storm close to Tyre. It was recovered and the salvage master [or captain] took all the grain from their jars. But I have taken all their grain, all their people, and all their belongings from the salvage master [or captain], and I have returned (it all) to them.

(now) your ship is being taken care of in Akko, stripped.” In other words, the ship had either sought refuge or been successfully salvaged. Either way, the crew and the grain it carried were safe and awaiting the command of the Ugaritic king.28 The ship itself, it seems, was berthed in the port city of Akko, where today one can sit in a pleasant seaside restaurant and imagine the bustle of activities that took place there more than three thousand years ago.

But what factor, or combinations of factors, may have caused the famine(s) in the Eastern Mediterranean during these decades remains uncertain. Elements that might be considered include war and plagues of insects, but climate change accompanied by drought is more likely to have turned a once-verdant land into an arid semidesert. However, until recently, the Ugaritic and other Eastern Mediterranean textual documents containing reports of famine provided the only potential evidence for climate change or drought, and even that was indirect. As a result, the issue has been debated on and off by scholars for decades.

The topic has recently been given new impetus, though, as a result of findings published by an international team of scholars, including David Kaniewski and Elise Van Campo of the Université de Toulouse in France and Harvey Weiss of Yale University, who suggest that they may have direct scientific evidence for climate change and drought in the Mediterranean region at the end of the thirteenth and into the beginning of the twelfth century BC.

Their research, which first suggested that the end of the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, toward the end of the third millennium BC, might have been caused by climate change, has now expanded to propose that the same thing may have occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age as well.

Using data from the site of Tell Tweini (ancient Gibala) in north Syria, the team noted that there may have been “climate instability and a severe drought episode” in the region at the end of the second millennium BC.31 In particular, they studied pollen retrieved from alluvial deposits near the site, which suggest that “drier climatic conditions occurred in the Mediterranean belt of Syria from the late 13th/early 12th centuries BC to the 9th century BC.”

Kaniewski’s team has now also published additional evidence of a probable drought on Cyprus at this same time, using pollen analysis from the lagoon system known as the Larnaca Salt Lake Complex, located by the site of Hala Sultan Tekke.33 Their data suggest that “major environmental changes” took place in this area during the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, that is, during the period from 1200 to 850 BC. At this time, the area around Hala Sultan Tekke, which had been a major Cypriot port earlier in the Late Bronze Age, “turned into a drier landscape [and] the precipitation and groundwater probably became insufficient to maintain sustainable agriculture in this place.”

If Kaniewski and his colleagues are correct, they have retrieved the direct scientific evidence that scholars have been seeking for a drought that may have contributed to the end of the Late Bronze Age. In fact, they conclude that the data from both coastal Syria and coastal Cyprus strongly suggest “that the LBA crisis coincided with the onset of a ca. 300-year drought event 3200 years ago. This climate shift caused crop failures, dearth and famine, which precipitated or hastened socio-economic crises and forced regional human migrations at the end of the LBA in the Eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia.”

Working independently, Brandon Drake of the University of New Mexico has provided additional scientific data to add to those of Kaniewski and his team. Publishing in the Journal of Archaeological Science, he cites three additional lines of evidence that all support the view that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. First, oxygen-isotope data from mineral deposits (speleothems) within Soreq Cave in northern Israel indicate that there was a low annual precipitation during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

Second, stable carbon isotope data in pollen cores from Lake Voulkaria in western Greece show that plants were adapting to arid environments at this time. Third, sediment cores from the Mediterranean reveal that there was a drop in the temperature of the surface of the sea, which in turn would have caused a reduction in precipitation on land (by reducing the temperature differential between land and sea).36 He notes that while it “is difficult to directly identify a point in time when the climate grew more arid,” the change most likely occurred before 1250–1197 BC,37 which is precisely the time period under discussion here.

He notes also not only that there was a sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures immediately before the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial centers, possibly causing droughts, but that there was a sharp decrease in temperature during the abandonment of these centers, meaning that it first got hotter and then suddenly colder, resulting in “cooler, more arid conditions during the Greek Dark Ages.” As Drake says, these climatic changes, including a decline in the surface temperature of the Mediterranean Sea before 1190 BC that resulted in less rainfall (or snow), could have dramatically affected the palatial centers, especially those that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity, such as in Mycenaean Greece.38

Israel Finkelstein and Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University, in conjunction with Thomas Litt at the University of Bonn in Germany, have now added additional data to the picture. They note that fossil pollen particles from a twenty-meter-long core drilled through sediments at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee also indicate a period of severe drought beginning ca. 1250 BC in the southern Levant. A second core drilled on the western shore of the Dead Sea provided similar results, but the two cores also indicate that the drought in this region may have ended already by ca. 1100 BC, thereby allowing life to resume in the region, albeit perhaps with new peoples settling down.

Nevertheless, exciting as these findings are, at this point we must also acknowledge that droughts have been frequent in this region throughout history, and that they have not always caused civilizations to collapse. Again it would seem that, on their own, climate change, drought, and famines, even if they “influenced social tensions, and eventually led to competition for limited resources,” are not enough to have caused the end of the Late Bronze Age without other mitigating factors having been involved, as Drake is careful to point out.40