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Scanned Using Book Scancenter 5022 Also by Brian Fagan Floods, The Great Warming Fish on Friday Famines, Chaco Canyon The Long Summer and The Little Ice Age From Black Land to Fifth Sun Emperors Eyewitness to Discovery (editor) Oxford Companion to Archaeology (editor) El Nino and the Time Detectives Kingdoms of Jade, Kingdoms of Gold Fate of Civilizations Ancient North America The Journey from Eden The Great Journey The Adventure of Archaeology Revised Edition The Aztecs Clash of Cultures Return to Babylon Elusive Treasure Brian Fagan The Rape of the Nile BASIC BBOOKS A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York Copyright © 1999, 2009 by Brian Fagan Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group For Lesley All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written When I see you coming my heart beats permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810. harder and I reach for your hand. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk Or if you prefer: light blue touch paper—and stand clear purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other or ganizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fagan, Brian M. Floods, famines, and emperors : El Nifio and the late of civilizations / Brian Fagan. — Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-00530-7 (alk. paper) 1. El Nino Current. 2. Qimatic changes—Social aspects—History. 3. CUmate and civilization. 4. Human beings—Effect of climate on— History. I. Title. GC296.8.E4F34 2008 363.34'92—dc22. 2008035558 10 98765432 1 I Contents 9 , Authors Note he Preface xi 31 ! 4 Acknowledgments xxi i PART ONE l! 1 THE CHRISTMAS CHILD Ii 3 1. The Great Visitation 3 i 2. Guano Happens 27 i 3. ENSO 45 S ' 4. The North Atlantic Oscillation 65 I I PART TWO ANCIENT EL Nl5lOS I 5. A Time of Warming 89 6. Pharaohs in Crisis 119 i 7. The Moche Lords 143 8. The Classic Maya Collapse 169 9. The Ancient Ones 195 II vii viii CONTENTS PART THREE CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE STREAM OF TIME Author’s Note 10. The Catastrophe of 1877-1878 221 11. “Drought Follows the Plow” 245 All measurements in this book are given in metric units. 12. El Ninos That Shook the World 269 Dates are given in years before the present or in years A.D./B.C., following the most commonly used convention. 13. The Fate of Civilizations 291 All radiocarbon dates after 6000 B.C. have been calibrated with tree-ring chronologies. Notes and Sources 313 Nonsailors should note that wind directions are de Index 331 scribed, following common maritime convention, by the di rection they are coming from. A westerly or west wind blows from the west, and northeast trade winds from the northeast. It is surprising how many people are unaware of this com mon usage! Ocean currents, however, are described by the direction they are flowing toward. Thus, a westerly wind and a westerly current flow in opposite directions. Place-names are spelled according to the most common usages. Archaeological sites are spelled as they appear most commonly in the academic literature. PART ONE The Christmas Child Olympus, where, they say, the gods’ eternal mansion stands unmoved, never rocked by gdlewinds, never drenched by rains, nor do the drifting snows assail it, no, the clear air stretches away without a cloud, and a great radiance plays across that world where the blithe gods live all their days in bliss. —Homer, The Odyssey i i i CHAPTER ONE t' The Great Visitation This planet’s different climatic zones are all related by the winds. These invisible threads of the climate tapestry weave the deserts and jungles, the steppes and tundra, into a cohesive whole. —George S. Philander, Is the Temperature Rising! Come late February, the Indian sun becomes hotter with the advent of spring. First, garden flowers wither. Then wild flowering trees—the silk cotton and the coral and flame trees—burst forth in scarlet and orange. Brilliandy flowering flamboyants line the sides of dirt roads, defying the ever hot ter sun. By late March, theTiardiest-species have shed their flowers and leaves, even the golden yellow-flowered labur num that adorns so many Punjab gardens. The sun heats and scorches as. the days grow longer, drying the dew before it settles. Tinder-dry brush and woodland burst into flame, fill ing the dusty air with thick wood ash. The dry earth cracks 3 4 FLOODS, FAMINES, AND EMPERORS THE GREAT VISITATION 5 and fissures as shimmering heat creates quicksilver mirages plains and mountains, bringing shower after shower through on the parched fields. August and September as the monsoon spends its last force Everyone waits and waits for rain. Menacing banks of against the distant Himalayas before retreating southward in dark clouds form every May afternoon on the southern hori autumn. The earth turns from a desert into a sea of muddy zon as the temperature falls slightly. Solid masses of locusts puddles. Wells and lakes fill up. Rivers overflow their banks. cover the sun. Fine dust falls from the heavens. The clouds Mud-hut walls melt as houses collapse. The land comes alive. dissipate in violent winds that fell trees and blow off roofs. Almost overnight the landscape turns green ^ grass sprouts, The winds die down as rapidly as they came, and the heat crops grow, and trees acquire new foliage. Frogs croak day builds relentlessly. Poet Rudyard Kipling wrote in “Two and night, animals breed, farmers plant their crops, and life Months”: begins anew. The summer monsoon is the epitome of Indian life, an ^ff> the Thunder bellows her despair experience both intensely personal and deeply spiritual, the To echoing earth, thrice parched. The lightnings fly source of human existence itself. Each year the monsoon not In vain. No help the heaped-up clouds ajford. only brings the fullness of harvest but also creates life from But wearier weight of burdened, burning air. desolation, hope from despair. The monsoon is the smell of What truce with Dawn? Look, from the aching sky. freshly watered earth, the sound of thunder, the season when Day stalks, a tyrant with a flaming sword!'^ peacocks strut their magnificent plumage, the time for mer riment and lovemaking. The dark clouds of the southwest The aching sky—Kipling’s description is an apt one. The monsoon are symbols of hope, their coming commemorated still heat is furnacelike, bringing prickly heat and a lifeless, by Indian writers for centuries. In the late sixth century A.D., hazy sky of leached-out blue. Then suddenly, in May or Subandhu wrote: “Peacocks danced at eventide. The rain I June, the black-and-white bulbuls appear, pied crested cuck quelled the expanse of dust as a great ascetic quells the tide of oos with long tails (Clamator jacobinus), newly arrived from passion.”^ Eight centuries later, poet Vidyapati wrote: Africa on the vanguard of the monsoon. Black clouds build s again on the horizon, flashes of lightning in their midst. Roaring the clouds break Thunderclaps sound. Large raindrops spatter the waiting And rain falls earth, drying as they hit the ground. Then a giant thunder The earth becomes a sedN ing erupts as torrential rain cascades onto people’s upturned faces. They run around wildly in the open, waving their For thousands of years Indian farmers sweated through hands, welcoming the cool and the rain. spring and early summer, watching for that climatic moment Monsoon rains are no ordinary storms, over in a few when the monsoon rains broke. An enormous folk litera hours. Instead, it rains and rains. Dark clouds pass over the ture surrounds the unpredictable monsoon, doggerel and 1 6 FLOODS, FAMINES, AND EMPERORS THE GREAT VISITATION 7 proverbs about the formation of nimbus clouds, the arrival apprehension. With the monsoon came a different country, of migrant birds, and subtle changes in vegetation. The pied which my father once described to me by quoting E. M. crested cuckoo is said to arrive on the west coast a day or two Forster’s Hill of Devi: “Now there is a new India—damp and before the rains, fly inland at a Msurely pace, and then ap grey, and but for the unusual animals I might think myself in pear in Delhi about two weeks after the monsoon breaks England.”^ over the Western Ghats, inshore from the coast. Even in his old age, my grandfather remembered the tense Proverbs from one end of the monsoon belt to the other weeks of waiting, the crushing heat, the shrill cries of cuck offer folk signs of impending rain and hope of bounty. Ac oos, the massing clouds on the far horizon. Like the village cording to Ghagh, a seventeenth-century Brahmin poet, farmers in the countryside, he watched for the coming of the “When clouds appear like partridge feathers and are spread monsoon and waited—for abundance or hunger. He admin across the sky, they will not go without shedding rain.” He istered the lives of thousands of villagers, but he could not also tells us, “If clouds appear on Friday and stay till Satur control or predict the natural engine of their existence.
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