The destruction of the Old Kingdom was followed by a period of a violent economic and social upheaval. From Admonitions of Ipuwer:
"The fruitful water of Nile is flooding,
The fields are not cultivated,
Robbers and tramps wander about and
Foreign people invade the country from everywhere.
Diseases rage and women are barren.
All social order has ceased,
Taxes are not paid and
Temples and palaces are being insulted.
Those who once were veiled by splendid garments, are now ragged.
Noble women wander around the country and lament:
"If only we would have something to eat."
Men throw themselves in the jaws of crocodiles -
So out of one's senses are people in their horror.
Laughter has ceased everywhere.
Mourning and lament are in its place.
Both old and young wish they are dead."
"Men don't any more sail to north, to Byblos.
"Where do we now get our cedar for our mummy coffins and oil to balm?"" Translated, collected and commented by TN.
The Curse of Akkad
Circa 2100 B.C.
"The large fields and acres produced no grain
The flooded fields produced no fish
The watered gardens produced no honey and wine
The heavy clouds did not rain
On its plains where grew fine plants
'lamentation reeds' now grow."
Quotations from H. Weiss, The Sciences, May/June 1996
"First of the world's empires, Akkad was not the last to blame
its fall on sacrilege. In a fit of pique, the author of the curse
believed, the Akkadian emperor had destroyed a temple to the sky god
Enlil, bringing on a century of drought, famine, and barbarian
invasions. How else to explain the empire's sudden, calamitous
decline?
"Only a hundred years before the collapse, Sargon of Akkad had
wrested the Sumerian city-states from Lugalzaggesi of Umma, then
stormed across the plains of Mesopotamia. When it was done the
Akkadian Empire controlled trade from the silver mines of Anatolia
to the lapis lazuli mines of Badakhshan, from the cedar forests of
Lebanon to the Gulf of Oman. In northern Mesopotamia, meanwhile,
fortresses were built to control imperial wheat production. To the
south, irrigation canals were extended, a new bureaucracy
established and palaces and temples built from imperial taxes.
"Then, abruptly, things fell apart. Sometime around
2200 BC seasonal rains became scarce, and withering storms replaced
them. The winds cut through northern wheat fields and blanketed them
in dust. They emptied out towns and villages, sending people
stumbling south with pastoral nomads, to seek forage along rivers
and streams. For more than a hundred years the desertification
continued, disrupting societies from southwestern Europe to central
Asia. Egypt's Old Kingdom, the towns of Palestine and the great
cities of the Indus Valley also were among the casualties.
"The Akkadian occupation of Tell Leilan, in any case, was to last
less than a hundred years. Only decades after the city's massive
walls were raised, its religious quarter renovated and its grain
production reorganized, Tell Leilan was suddenly abandoned. In our
excavations the collapsed remains of Akkadian buildings are covered
with erosion deposits that show no trace of human activity. Only
above them, in strata from 1900 BC, do ash, trash, and the
monumental remains of a new imperial capital appear.
"Striking as it is, the site's occupational hiatus came as no
surprise to us. Archaeologists first documented it in the late 1930s
at other sites in the region, relegating it to a footnote. Fifty
years later, when our team rediscovered the odd hiatus, we went one
step further. By determining radiocarbon dates for materials from
before and after the hiatus, we refined its chronology. By comparing
ceramics from our site with ceramics from the same strata at other
sites, we tracked the hiatus throughout the area. Whether at Tell
Leilan or Tell Taya, Chagar Bazar or Tell-al-Hawa, the results told
the same story: between 2200 and 1900 BC, people fled the Habur and
Assyrian plains en masse.
"Little by little, evidence of previously unrecorded climatic
events emerged. A thin layer of volcanic ash covers the last
Akkadian mud bricks. Just above that a layer of fine sand eight
inches thick testifies to centuries of flailing wind and relentless
drought. A volcanic eruption probably could not have caused the
disaster, but whether one did so may be unimportant. No matter what
caused them, dust storms and drought made rain-fed farming difficult
if not impossible. Year after year crops failed in northern
cities.
"Periods of drying climate are nothing new to Near Eastern
archaeologists. What is new are the data showing sudden, severe,
long-term climatic change. Add to these findings the simultaneous
social collapses documented in the Aegean, Egypt, Palestine, Iran,
and the Indus Valley, and you have a provocative picture indeed. The
problem, oddly enough, is that archaeologists have been ignoring it
for decades.
"In 1948 the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer cast his eye
over the urban collapses of the third millennium and concluded that
regionwide earthquakes were to blame. A decade later the British
archaeologist James Mellaart fingered drought and migrations as the
culprit. Schaeffer's hypothesis seemed too fantastic for serious
study; Mellaart's, though less improbable, still depended on a deus ex
machina.
"Civilization on Crete and mainland Greece, like its neighbors,
collapsed in 2200 BC. The great cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa
in the Indus Valley collapsed between 2200 and 2100 BC. The
archaeologist Rafique Mughal of the Pakistan Department of
Archaeology blames shifting river courses, citing evidence that the
Indus River channels moved eastward, away from Harappan urban
centers.
"Could the collapses be coincidental? No.
There is no pattern of collapse in 2700 BC or in 2500 BC, only in 2200 BC.
Dry spells and drops in lake levels (occur) in the Sahel, the Sahara,
northwestern India, and western Tibet roughly between 2600 and 2200
BC. Lake Turkana in Kenya abruptly changed from an open to a closed
basin around 2000 BC. And around 2250 BC the level of the Dead Sea
reached a nadir. Sediments between Greenland and Iceland show a cold
peak around 2200 BC. Gulf of Oman: around 2300 BC dust suddenly
increased fivefold, the record during (the) Holocene. The dust peak
contains shards of volcanic glass." (The population of Finland
dropped to 1/3 somewhere between 2400 and 2000 BC. - TN)
Epilogue by TN
The Third Dynasty of Ur was the last attempt to revive
Sumer, after a chaos of 100 years
beginning with the destruction of Akkadian Sumer around 2200 BC.
During the Akkadian period wheat was the most important cereal and
its share of the harvest was about 20 %. During the years 2200-2100
BC the saltiness of the soil rose markedly, possibly because of salty
sea floods and, and after them, because of the following dryness that
evaporated the water leaving the salt behind. In the northern
Mesopotamia the wheat share dropped to 2 % and in the southern part
to zero. This change seems to coincide with the period when there
was no central authority.
Mesopotamia and other above-mentioned places were not the only victims of the 2200 BC event. As far away as in China, the Hongsan culture fell in pieces at this same time. This, if not anything else, is an indication of the mighty character of the event, and bolsters us to consider it as global.