The Ancient Hittite Empire May Have Been Brought Down by a Three-Year Drought

The Hittite Empire in the Middle East may have collapsed due to a three-year drought around the year 3000.

This was discovered by studying lumber used to construct the tomb of a later ruler, who may have been the legendary King Midas’s father.

An overnight drought “would have unquestionably caused mass problems with food provision,” as one author puts it. Sturt Manning, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, thinks this would have had “a pretty dramatic effect” on the empire’s revenue base.

During its nearly five-century reign, the Hittite kingdom was one of the most powerful in the ancient world, because to its advanced technology in ironwork and cuneiform writing and its formidable military force that could challenge Egypt.

According to historical records and archaeological finds, the empire’s towns began to be deserted around 1200 BC, and its constituent states soon became weak enough to be conquered by the invading Assyrians from the east.

Disease, starvation, a centuries-long transition to a drier environment, and even earlier incursions by mysterious tribes termed “Sea Peoples” in Egyptian writings are all hypothesised to have contributed to this decline.

Now, according to research conducted by Manning and colleagues, we know that a massive chamber tomb constructed in the city of Gordion in 748 BC preserved traces of a terrible drought. The tomb’s mound is far larger than those in the area, leading some archaeologists to speculate that it was constructed for the previous ruler, King Midas’s father, despite the fact that no identifying features of the tomb or its occupant survive.

Clues to the fall of the Hittites, centuries earlier, come from the juniper logs making up the burial chamber. The logs were taken from 18 trees, which were growing from the period 1775 to 748 BC.

Less rainfall means less tree growth, which shows up as narrower gaps between tree rings. The logs show there were 80 instances of two or more consecutive years with low rainfall, and one of these was the three years from 1198 to 1196 BC – just when Hittite cities started being abandoned.

This was supported by another kind of test, measuring the ratio of different forms of carbon from samples of the wood. This shows gradually increasing dryness of the atmosphere between 1300 and 1200 BC, then spikes of dryness from 1222 to 1195 BC.

“Most traditional societies had some storage that would have helped them through one bad harvest,” says Manning. “By the time you get to a third one in a row, it’s become a crisis.”

Alan Greaves at the University of Liverpool in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, says the results shed new light on the climate changes at the time and their economic impacts. “How do you pay for soldiers, how do you pay for artisans to make things?” he says. “A short, sharp drought would be enough to topple a very centralised state based heavily on grain and the gathering in and distribution of agricultural goods.”