Climate change played an important causal role in the expansion and collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

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Abstract:The ‘Prostration Hemerology’, with its seemingly random selection of dates and plethora of unparalleled prescriptions – such as the towing of boats upstream, the kissing of ecstatics, and the impregnating of street women –, is one of the most peculiar hemerologies in Alasdair Livingstone’s recent anthology of the genre. This article attempts a new reconstruction of the text which differs from Livingstone’s in several respects. To this end it uses eight previously unpublished manuscripts, identified in the collections of the Ancient Orient Museum of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, the University Museum (Philadelphia), and the British Museum. Thanks to these and the collation of the other five tablets used by Livingstone, an almost complete reconstruction of the text is now possible. It reveals itself to be an influential hemerology: as well as being widely cited by scholars at the Assyrian court, it was extensively quoted in later hemerological compilations.

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.

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