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Demographic and Climatic Factors in the Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

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Demographic and Climatic Factors in the Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-014-1269-y “No harvest was reaped”: demographic and climatic factors in the decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Adam W. Schneider & Selim F. Adalı Received: 20 May 2014 /Accepted: 28 September 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract In the 9th century BC, Assyrians based in northern Iraq started a relentless process of expansion that within two centuries would see them controlling most of the ancient Near East. Traditional explanations for the decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 7th century BC have emphasized the role of military conflict, and especially the destruction of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, by a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces in 612 BC. However, it remains unclear how the Assyrian state, the most powerful military machine of its age and the largest empire the Old World had ever seen up to that time, declined so quickly. In this paper, we highlight two potential factors which may have had some influence upon the Assyrian decline that have not been previously explored. The first is a major increase in the population of the Assyrian heartland area at the dawn of the 7th century BC, which substan- tially reduced the drought resilience of the region. The second factor is an episode of severe drought affecting large portions of the Near East during the mid-7th century BC. We propose a series of testable hypotheses which detail how the combination of these two factors may have contributed to the development of considerable economic and political instability within the Assyrian Empire, and argue that these demographic and climatic factors played a significant role in its demise. 1 Introduction The Neo-Assyrian Empire (or simply the Assyrian Empire) dominated the Near East from the early 9th to the late 7th century BC (Radner 2014). In the space of a few decades during the latter half of the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire declined from being the greatest military power of the age to meeting its destruction at the hands of Babylon and the Medes, an ancient Iranian people. How and why this mighty empire collapsed so suddenly continues to puzzle archaeologists and ancient historians. Clearly, the process by which the Assyrian Empire Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-014-1269-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. W. Schneider (*) Department of Anthropology, University of California-San Diego, Social Sciences Building Room 210, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. W. Schneider : S. F. Adalı Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, İstanbul, Turkey Climatic Change declined and ultimately met its demise was complex, and many economic, political, and social factors were involved. In this paper, we seek to highlight two such factors which have not previously been given much consideration: the dramatic and ultimately unsustainable demo- graphic expansion of the Assyrian heartland in the early decades of the 7th century BC, and a regional episode of increased aridity in the Near East during the mid-to-late 7th century, which produced at least one episode of severe drought. We will also propose a series of testable hypotheses which integrate these two framing factors into the historical record, and provide some suggestions about their potential impacts upon the Assyrian economy and political structure during the latter half of the 7th century BC. 2 The regional setting 2.1 Modern climate and geography of the Assyrian heartland The traditional Assyrian heartland was the Tigris floodplain of northern Iraq, which consisted of a triangle defined by the cities of Assur in the south, Nineveh (modern Mosul) in the north and Arbela (modern Erbil) in the east (Radner 2011). Most of the Assyrian heartland lies in steppe-deserts known as the jazirah, which is a transitional ecological zone between the oak- pistachio forests of the Taurus piedmont in southeastern Turkey and the deserts of central and southern Iraq and Syria (Reculeau 2011). The climate of the region can be broadly classified as hot and semi-arid. Precipitation is highly seasonal, with the majority falling as a result of mid-latitude cyclones that form over the Mediterranean during the winter months. There is a strong north–south precipitation gradient throughout the Near East, with conditions being comparatively humid in the north and drier in the south (Wilkinson 1994). The northern parts of the region receive between 350 and 400 mm/year of precipitation, and are generally (though not always) capable of supporting rain-fed agriculture, while in the southernmost parts of the region mean annual rainfall is generally insufficient (i.e., less than c. 250 mm/year) without irrigation (Wilkinson 2000). The Assyrian heartland area is a climatically sensitive region, and there is a high degree of interannual variability in the amount of precipitation that it receives each year. Droughts are a frequent occurrence; these typically take the form of multi-year dry periods of 4 or 5 years (Reculeau 2011), which in modern Iraq often include at least one moderate-to-severe dry year (Al-Timimi and Al-Jiboori 2013). Because the Tigris and its eastern tributaries are fed mainly by precipitation in the highlands of its drainage basin, interannual variability of precipitation strongly influences their dis- charge rates, as well as the timing of peak river flow (Reculeau 2011). 2.2 Historical and paleoclimate proxy evidence for climatic conditions during the 8th-7th century BC Numerous recently-published paleoclimate proxy data from various parts of the Near East (Fig. 1; see also Figs. 3 and 4 in supplementary materials) indicate that conditions became more arid across much of the region during the latter half of the 7th century BC. At Tecer Lake in the central Anatolian plateau, the presence of a 6–7 cm thick calcite crust in sediment layers dated to c. 670–630 BC was interpreted as evidence of a short-term, intense episode of desiccation within an otherwise humid phase (Kuzucuoğlu et al. 2011). Stable oxygen isotope data obtained from the sediments of Eski Acıgöl, a former crater lake also located in the central Anatolian highlands, indicates that a gradual increase of aridity over two or three centuries Climatic Change reached its peak during the mid-7th century BC, which was one of the driest periods in the vicinity for the entire Holocene (Jones and Roberts 2008). At Lake Iznik in northwestern Anatolia, a shift towards drier conditions at c. 650 BC was inferred from numerous changes in the sediments, including an increase in total inorganic content (TIC) (Ülgen et al. 2012). From changes in the geochemical composition of alluvial sediments from the Rumailiah River in the coastal Jableh Plain of northwestern Syria, Kaniewski et al. (2008) inferred that a transition from humid to arid conditions took place at c. 600 BC. Finally, stable oxygen isotope data obtained from authigenic calcites of Lake Zeribar in the central Zagros Mountains of western Iran also indicate that a short-term arid phase, which began in approximately 750 BC, reached its peak intensity during the mid-7th century, after which conditions again became more humid into the following century (Stevens et al. 2006). Taken together, the proxy records appear to indicate that many parts of the Near East experienced a short but widespread dry phase during the mid-to-late 7th century, which probably reached its greatest intensity during the mid-7th century BC. While the synchronicity of these proxies is highly suggestive, they need to be interpreted with caution for two reasons. First, the temporal resolution of these paleoclimate records is relatively low (see Table 1 in supplementary materials) in comparison to that of the archae- ological and historical record, which in some cases can be dated at an annual or even a monthly scale. (This is particularly true in the case of Eski Acıgöl, which has a very large error range.) Thus, these proxies only permit the identification of broad climatic trends for the Near East at a decadal or centennial scale, and as a result cannot by precisely correlated with specific historical events. Second, so far as we are aware, there are no available proxy records for the 1st millennium BC within the Assyrian heartland. So while the proxies that we do have can give us a general picture of Near Eastern regional climate during the 7th century BC, the available proxy evidence does not reveal what conditions were like in different parts of northern Iraq, or for that matter, in northern Iraq as a whole. However, while we lack the paleoclimate proxy evidence needed to reconstruct 1st millennium conditions in the Assyrian heartland, ancient texts recovered from Assyrian royal archives can at least provide us with some glimpses of what conditions in this area were generally like during the final century of the Assyrian Empire. For example, judging from the few extant reports we have dating to the reign of Sargon II (see Table 2 in supplementary materials for a chronological list of the reigns of Assyrian kings discussed in the text), rainfall was relatively plentiful during the late 8th century BC, apart from two or three reports of localized drought (Parpola 1987; Lanfranchi and Parpola 1993; Radner 2000; Fuchs and Parpola 2001; Saggs 2001). We have no reports of climatic conditions from the reigns of Fig. 1 Map showing the locations of paleoclimate proxy data sources discussed in the text (E: Eski Acıgöl; I: Lake Iznik; R: Rumailiah River; T: Tecer Lake; Z: Lake Zeribar), and the Assyrian capital of Nineveh Climatic Change Sargon II’s immediate successors, Sennacherib or Esarhaddon.
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