FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR A “LATE ASSYRIAN DRY PHASE” IN THE NEAR EAST DURING THE MID-TO-LATE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C.?

Abstract

In a recent paper published in the journal Climatic Change, we put forward the hypothesis that drought and overpopulation played an important, if indirect, role in shaping the sudden decline of the Assyrian Empire during the mid-to-late seventh century b.c. This argument was partly predicated on five paleoclimatic proxy records for conditions in different parts of the northern Near East during the first millennium b.c., each of which indicates that relatively arid conditions affected much of the region during the seventh century b.c., especially during its middle decades. Here, we revisit the textual and paleoclimatic proxy evidence for a period of drought in more depth to examine whether this evidence does in fact support the climatic component of our hypothesis. In this paper, we show that the available proxy evidence supports the notion that there was some kind of regional climatic perturbation that affected much of the Near East during the latter half of the seventh century b.c., which caused conditions in many parts of the region to become more arid. The strongest signal for this short-term episode of aridification, which we have termed the “Late Assyrian Dry Phase,” is observed at approximately 650–600 b.c. These proxies thus corroborate and provide the background for the Neo-Assyrian textual evidence for drought during the mid-seventh century b.c.