The Akkadian Empire, the first unified Sumerian state, suddenly collapsed and ceased to exist 4,200 years ago due to a powerful drought and dust storms that deprived its city of all water supplies. This is the conclusion reached by climatologists who published an article in the journal PNAS.
Sumerian Mesopotamia, along with Ancient Egypt and the city-states in the Indus Valley, claims to be one of the three oldest civilizations on Earth. It appeared about six thousand years ago in the form of a large community of city-states that traded and feuded with each other.
Around the middle of the third millennium BC, the legendary Sargon the Great conquered all the Sumerian "policies" and united them into the Akkadian Empire, creating a set of laws, general rules of trade and other integral features of modern civilization. Despite the fact that it was considered one of the most powerful "superpowers" of its time, it fell apart less than 200 years after its formation, and its capital, Akkad, disappeared without a trace.
The reasons for this breakdown have remained a matter of debate among historians. Some researchers believed that the old nobility of the city-states of Mesopotamia was unhappy with the centralization of power and actively fought against Sargon and his descendants. Others associate its fall with the invasion of the Guti nomads, whose raids ravaged the country and undermined the king's authority.
Recently, some historians, as well as climatologists and geologists, began to say that it was not humans that were to blame for the collapse of the Sumerian civilization, but the climate. The fact is that excavations in neighboring Syria show that around 2200 BC, a severe drought began in the Middle East, virtually destroying all major cities in the region.
Carolyn and her colleagues found the first consistent evidence that this was the case by studying stalactites that have formed over the past five thousand years in the Gol-i-Zard Cave, located near the city of Demavend in northern Iran.
These stone outgrowths are composed of a kind of "growth rings", whose thickness, chemical and isotopic composition directly reflect how much water entered the cave at different times of their formation. Accordingly, they can be used as a kind of climatic "chronicle" reflecting fluctuations in temperature and precipitation over a very long time.
Gol-i-Zard, in turn, was located near the northern regions of the Akkadian Empire, and received approximately the same level of precipitation as the possessions of the heirs of Sargon. This allowed scientists to very accurately reconstruct the climate of the era of its fall.
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As it turned out, the first superpower of Mesopotamia was really destroyed by the climate - about 4.26 thousand years ago, the growth of stalactites sharply slowed down, which indicates a sudden and sharp decrease in precipitation. This drought lasted more than three hundred years, which coincides with the beginning of the era of the rebirth of Mesopotamia and the emergence of Babylonia.
In parallel, scientists have recorded a similar increase in the proportion of magnesium and calcium in the "annual rings". This indicates the beginning of the most powerful dust storms that brought huge masses of sand into the cave. Such cataclysms were supposed to hasten the death of the Akkadian civilization, depriving its farmers of the opportunity to grow crops normally, even with water reservoirs and irrigation systems.
Interestingly, a similar drought and dust storms occurred in the history of Mesopotamia earlier, about 4.5 thousand years ago. They did not last long, only about a century, but they could weaken the city-states and pave the way for the Sargon empire, which will perish under their blows in the next "season of dust storms," climatologists conclude.