Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Page A

flailing at themselves from hunger.
    For many years, the events described in “The Curse of Akkad” were thought, like the details of Sargon’s birth, to be purely fictional.
    In 1978, after scanning a set of maps at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a university archaeologist named Harvey Weiss spotted a promising-looking mound at the confluence of two dry riverbeds in the Khabur plains, near the Iraqi border. He approached the Syrian government for permission to excavate the mound, and, somewhat to his surprise, it was almost immediately granted. Soon, he had uncovered a lost city, which in ancient times was known as Shekhna and today is called Tell Leilan.
    Over the next ten years, Weiss, working with a team of students and local laborers, proceeded to uncover an acropolis, a crowded residential neighborhood reached by a paved road, and a large block of grain-storage rooms. He found that the residents of Tell Leilan had raised barley and several varieties of wheat, that they had used carts to transport their crops, and that in their writing they had imitated the style of their more sophisticated neighbors to the south. Like most cities in the region at the time, Tell Leilan had a rigidly organized, state-run economy: people received rations—so many liters of barley and so many of oil—based on how old they were and what kind of work they performed. From the time of the Akkadian empire, thousands of similar potsherds were discovered, indicating that residents had received their rations in mass-produced, one-liter vessels. After examining these and other artifacts, Weiss constructed a time line of the city’s history, from its origins as a small farming village (around 5000 B.C.), to its growth into an independent city of some thirty thousand people (2600 B.C.), and on to its reorganization under imperial rule (2300 B.C.).
    Wherever Weiss and his team dug, they also encountered a layer of dirt that contained no signs of human habitation. This layer, which was more than three feet deep, corresponded to the years 2200 to 1900 B.C., and it indicated that, around the time of Akkad’s fall, Tell Leilan had been completely abandoned. In 1991, Weiss sent soil samples from Tell Leilan to a lab for analysis. The results showed that, around the year 2200 B.C., even the city’s earthworms had died out. Eventually, Weiss came to believe that the lifeless soil of Tell Leilan and the end of the Akkadian empire were products of the same phenomenon—a drought so prolonged and so severe that it represented, in his words, an example of “climate change.”
    Weiss first published his theory, in the journal Science , in August 1993. Since then, the list of cultures whose demise has been linked to climate change has continued to grow. They include the Classic Mayan civilization, which collapsed at the height of its development, around A.D. 800; the Tiwanaku civilization, which thrived near Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, for more than a millennium, then disintegrated around A.D. 1100; and the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which collapsed around the same time as the Akkadian empire. (In an account eerily reminiscent of “The Curse of Akkad,” the Egyptian sage Ipuwer described the anguish of the period: “Lo, the desert claims the land. Towns are ravaged … Food is lacking … Ladies suffer like maidservants. Lo, those who were entombed are cast on high grounds.”) In each of these cases, what began as a provocative hypothesis has, as new information has emerged, come to seem more and more compelling. For example, the notion that Mayan civilization had been undermined by climate change was first proposed in the late 1980s, at which point there was little climatological evidence to support it. Then, in the mid-1990s, American scientists studying sediment cores from Lake Chichancanab, in north-central Yucatán, reported that precipitation patterns in the region had indeed shifted during the ninth and tenth centuries, and that this shift had