Historians and climate scientists have linked droughts and other climate turmoil with political turmoil in the Ptolemaic era in Egypt for more than 2000 years, using unusually well -reserved records of the Nile River to draw a line linking climate challenges with social disorders.
Research cannot be used to predict the fate of modern societies at a time when the global warming phenomenon is fighting, but it is a measure of risks as Egypt hosts the United Nations Climate Change Conference this year while Pakistan and Ethiopia have been subjected to fatal floods, and Somalia faces a devastating drought, and Europe witnessed the hottest summer ever while Modern societies face some challenges of adaptation themselves.
In the Ptolemaic era, which began around 300 BC, and ended with Cleopatra suicide and invaded by Rome on 30 BC, settlements and societies that discovered their founding more resistant to climate stress proved such The climate was very large for the Egyptians: the outbreak of a volcano in 43 BC, which is the Ocluk volcano in Alaska on the other side of the world of Egypt, which was so destroyed by the world’s climate systems to the point that it led to corruption of crops and diseases throughout the Mediterranean region, in The end, the challenges may have contributed to the fall of Cleopatra, the researchers say according to the American Washington Post.
“From a societal point of view, we know that it was really stressful,” said Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University, who led an effort to study the relationship between volcanic eruptions, Nile floods and historical societal response.
Ancient Egypt was not facing a man -made climate change in the way modern societies faced.
However, volcanic revolutions produced climate disorders similar to some aspects of contemporary climate change, and old societies challenged to respond in ways similar to modern efforts.
At that time, as is the case now, climate stress was often a factor of amplification of the crisis, which led to the erosion of social flexibility and made it difficult to deal with other challenges successfully even if climate issues were not the only reason for Egypt’s final defeat against Rome, it may erode Social cohesion and military power due to years of bad crops and diseases that followed volcanic explosions.
“What we see in a very clear way is the complications of societal response and this type of climate shocks and these types of short -term dehydration year after year, are one of the many aspects of societal stress. “.
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