Presented by Hervé Reculeau, OI

Present-day anxiety about anthropogenic climate change and its dramatic impact on our own civilization, combined with increasingly precise datasets available to reconstruct past climates, have led to a renewed interest in how ancient societies coped with climate change, specifically with episodes of Rapid Climate Change (RCC) that had the potential to disrupt the basis of their subsistence and alter their perception of their environment. In recent years, such studies have overwhelmingly been driven by simplistic narratives of climate-induced civilizational collapse. By placing in dialogue paleo-climatic science, archaeological data and textual evidence, it is however possible to offer a more nuanced and balanced approach to the interactions between climate and social change (or lack thereof), one that gives back their voice and agency to the members of the ancient societies. This lecture proposes such an approach for various Mesopotamian societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages (mid-third to mid-first millennium BCE).

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2022, OI
Music credit: bensound.com