Sociopolitical Discontinuity in the Near East C. 2200 B.C.E.: Scenarios from Palestine and Egypt

Abstract

Between about 2300 and 2000 B.C.E. there was widespread sociopolitical devolution in the Near East. Tell Leilan, the particular case in point, was abandoned after deposition of volcanic tephra. Analogs from the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption of 1980 suggest that a volcanic dust mantle would have serious biological repercussions, but that recovery would take only years, at most decades. There is no case for a global event, let alone for a “volcanic winter.” The local evidence for an incisive and protracted “dry” anomaly is inconclusive, and examination of a wide range of paleoclimatic proxy records fails to support an abrupt climatic shift to greater aridity affecting the Near East and Aegean world between 2400 and 1900 B.C.E. Settlement records to the east, west, and northwest of Leilan are inconsistent; in two cases the settlement network expanded rapidly after the Leilan collapse, in another, sites were abandoned at about the same time. This is incompatible with a major climatic shift and demands exploration of more complex, alternative hypotheses to explain sociopolitical devolution.

The main thrust of this paper is an in-depth examination of devolution in Old Kingdom Egypt and Early Bronze Palestine, regions closely linked by a contentious complementarity. New evidence from Egypt and East Africa shows that the Nile floods were relatively low after 2900 B.C.E., with a brief minimum around 2200 B.C.E.; thereafter floods were exceptionally high 2150–1900 B.C.E. Examination of the historical record suggests that Old Kingdom collapse was unrelated to Nile failure, but preconditioned by decentralization, dynastic weakness, and a shift of wealth and power to several provincial centers during Dynasty 6 (c. 2380–2230 B.C.E.); royal power, anchored in part on the trade monopoly with Syria (e.g., timber, wine, olive oil imports), was devastatingly undercut c. 2300 B.C.E. by Akkadian conquest of the Egyptian entrepot Byblos, with anarchy and then civil wars prevailing in Egypt for almost two centuries after c. 2240 B.C.E.

In Palestine, Early Bronze developments saw a string of prosperous, fortified towns emerge along the hilly margins of the coastal plain. Their wealth was based on wine and oil production, much of it exported to Egypt. Parts of the coastal plain began to be abandoned c. 2700 B.C.E., compensated by clusters of larger towns elsewhere; general depopulation was underway two centuries later, and the last towns fell about 2400 B.C.E., some of them patently destroyed. Two Egyptian military campaigns against this part of Palestine are actually recorded c. 2370–2340 B.C.E., the second specifying large-scale destruction. About 2300 B.C.E. parts of Syria were also ravaged, perhaps by Sargon of Akkad. The ensuing Early Bronze IV of Palestine (c. 2300–2000 B.C.E.) was marked by de-urbanization and agricultural dis-intensification, but contrary to older assumptions, there is little or no evidence for a shift to pastoralism, let alone for settlement by invading pastoralists. Analogs from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region show how transhumant pastoralism was traditionally practiced from farming villages, as a complementary strategy; when villagers were forced to seek refuge in defensible hill sites, they continued to cultivate vineyards and olive groves on a smaller scale, despite a lack of urban demand. The Early Bronze IV bioarchaeological evidence now accumulating shows that household pig-raising and plow-oxen remained as prominent as before, that sheep/goat-herding did not increase, and that grapes and olives continued to be cultivated -- all demonstrating agronomic continuity in a ruralized setting, until the Middle Bronze urban revival.

In conclusion, it is argued that the Early Bronze Age represented a politico-economic network (“world-economy”) that functioned as a set of subsystems, the prosperity of the whole dependent on unimpeded flows of energy and information from Spain to the Indus Valley. Rampant militarism eventually weakened the whole, impoverishing its component parts, and allowing political simplification. As the system was restructured, renewed urbanization and intensification are evident. Climatic change can indeed be examined as on potential variable in such a multidimensional, systemic network. But climatic change cannot be treated in isolation, divorced from its historical, structural, and regional context.