Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World's Changing Weather

1. A Drought in Ancient Greece

CHAPTER I A Drought in Ancient Greece CUMATESOF HUNGER are cbanged climates, climates that no longer support the crops and herds, berries, fruits, and game they once did. Climates change: a culture closely tied to a particular climate fmds itselfin danger. Where agriculture is hard pressed to support a population, that population is in jeopardy-for climate does change, rapidly and significantly enough to alter the productivity of the land. Favorable climates that aid agriculture allow populations to grow beyond what later, less advantageous climates will toleratel. We know climate can change, because climates have changed. Over millions of years, ice ages have come and gone-seven of them in the last million years alone. Even in the 10,000 years since the last ice age, climates have set boundariels for human activities. Human technology affects these boundaries, but so does changing climate. Cultures have developed and expanded, then withered and sometimes disappeared as new climates modified the potential of the land. 3 4 /. Two Tales ofFamine In our world today, as in the past, there are climates of hunger. As climate changes there will be both regions of improvement and regions of deterioration. Will lands now highly productive become too arid or too cold? This question is not fully answerable, but neither is it academic. Attempts to find answers, and to prepare for the climatic changes ahead, are vital to millions of people in the world. In this book we will consider a number of past climatic changes, for the past is the key to the future. On a sunny plain 60 miles southwest of Athens lie the ruins of the city of Mycenae. Twelve hundred years and more before the birth of Christ, Mycenae was the hub of a great civilization. Its massive main gate, with two stone lions on guard, its main walls, half a mile long and up to 30 feet thick, testify to the power it held. Its excavated tombs have revealed a wealthy and sophisticated warrior civilization with a farflung trade that dominated the Aegean and much of the Mediterranean seas for centuries. Quite abruptly, before 1200 B.C., Mycenaean power began to decline. In 1230 B.C., the main palaces and granaries of Mycenae itself were attacked and burned. Other Mycenaean centers, including Pylos and Tiryns, also show signs of decay and destruction, but it is not known whether they were victims of their ties to a weakening Mycenae. The decline and fall of Mycenaean civilization was so sudden and so complete that its memory survived only in the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles, of the fall of Troy and the voyages of Odysseus, given expression some 600 years later in the poems of Homer. And they remained legends until a stubborn amateur archaeologist with a love of Homer, Heinrich Schliemann, began to dig in the 1870s. Neither then, nor now, has anyone fully explained the downfall of this vital culture. Invaders? Perhaps the most widely held current theory is that Dorian Greeks from the north overran Mycenaean Greece. In such a rapid fall of a major civilization, invasion is an obvious possibility. And the A Drought in Ancient Greece 5 Dorian dialect predominated in that part of Greece-the Peloponnesus -in classical times hundreds of years later. That explanation, however, has some problems. In a brief but incisively argued book, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (1968), the distinguished classical scholar Rhys Carpenter considered the arguments for an invasion and found them wanting. Dorians, he poi.nts out, did not occupy Mycenae until at least two or three generations after the Mycenaean decline. In fact, the few people who continued there until Dorian times seem to have been of Mycenaean culture. But the most difficult problem appears to be the question. of what route invaders could have taken. Invasion from the c~astern Mediterranean is unlikely, since the islands of the South Aegean Sea, right in that line of approach, remained unmolested. The same holds true for invasion from the west (from Italy), or from the Adriatic coast to the north. Indeed, the island of Cephalonia, straddling any such invasion route, became a refuge for people from Greek regions to the east. To the northeast, Athens remained uninvaded; the region north of Mycenae became another refuge for Greeks of the Peloponnesus. The population increased there as well as on Cephalonia (see figure 1.1). In short, Mycenae was ringed by routes invaders...