Three years of minimal rain could have forced the ancient civilization to abandon its capital — and perhaps triggered the empire’s ultimate collapse.
, found reduced tree growth in central Anatolia, which the authors attribute to a decrease in local rainfall during the twelfth century— rare but not unheard of in the central Anatolian climate — which synchronize with the abandonment of the Hittite capital and the fall of the empire.
Combining the tree-ring data and the climate records, the authors identified an abrupt drought that occurred in three consecutive years from 1198 to 1196“We're not saying the climate solely caused the collapse of the Hittites,” says Manning. The Hittite people could have weathered a drought by switching to different crops, for example. “Humans are incredibly good, if they want to be, at being resilient,” he says.
Dominik Fleitmann, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, finds the drought hypothesis plausible. “Even with a good system and good adaptation to drought, this was simply too much to cope with.” And the picture matches other sources of evidence, he adds. “We have all the documents saying that there are famines in the Hittite empire.”
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