Ancient Egypt may have been brought down by volcanoes and climate change, researchers say

If volcanic ash fell on Egypt, then there would be records in the strata, and since there is/was a lot of digging going on there, where is that evidence? I think the fall of civilization around the pyramids was caused by the shifting Nile. There was a port there, and now the Nile is miles away. That was the source of all of their commerce and food, and probably the key to what the pyramids were used for.

a reply to: charlyv

it has nothing to do with ash falls per se, but more how dust loading and volcanic gasses affect wide spread regional weather patterns. The disruption of rainfall patterns will set socio-political turmoil in motion.
Rain doesnt fall, so people have to move where it does. In the case of egypt this rainfall change occured thousands of miles from egypt proper, in dry farmed mesopotamia and persia or in the mountain high lands of ethiopia or the african lakes region, where the nile waters start.

I tend to think they died out because their ideas died out. Their concept of reality no longer fit in with more reasonable and rational concepts brought to them by other societies as long-distance travel became more commonplace. Their world shrank.

Honestly it serves the Egyptians right. They should have seen it coming with the way they were all driving their SUV's to the pyramid building site. They could have car pooled or took public transit.

originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: charlyv

it has nothing to do with ash falls per se, but more how dust loading and volcanic gasses affect wide spread regional weather patterns. The disruption of rainfall patterns will set socio-political turmoil in motion.
Rain doesnt fall, so people have to move where it does. In the case of egypt this rainfall change occured thousands of miles from egypt proper, in dry farmed mesopotamia and persia or in the mountain high lands of ethiopia or the african lakes region, where the nile waters start.

I was talking about a line in the strata that would represent just that. A soot, ash, carbon layer, albeit thin, would be like the black mat and other geologic records of wide spread calamity. I have not heard that they have discovered anything like that in Egypt as yet, but could certainly be wrong.

but they weren`t using fossil fuels in ancient Egypt so this is proof that the use of fossil fuels doesn`t cause climate change, climate change is a natural occurrence.

a reply to: Tardacus

Don't be a tard Tardacus

a reply to: charlyv

They didnt look for any physical evidence for eruptions in region at all, they are comparing dates of sulfate spikes in Greenland and Antartic ice core samples with records of Nile flood levels and dates for battles, revolts ,what not and property sales.
There is a correlation between foreign campaigns being abandoned and troops being recalled to quell rebellion at home, and increase in sales of familial property and low seasonal nile flood levels, 1-2 years after an eruption signal in the ice core.
We know from modern observation that eruptions disrupt rainfall in parts of africa due to the interuption of the monsoon cycle.
In the modern data we know which volcano erupted, but knowing which volcano it was or identifing any particular deposit of volcanic materials is not really needed for this study.
Whats really exciting for me personally, is that I have already been following along with the revision of the ice core chronologys by Mike Baillie.
There was a 7 year discrepancy after some date, due to an error at some point in processing that was never caught.
So, the various dating systems didnt always correspond, tree rings and ash layers somewhere said there was an eruption in a particular year, but one ice core says no but another says yes, while the historic record might mention a famine or invasion some years after an eruption.
So the revised timeline and models based on modern observation have shown that even modest eruptions, in far away places, have an effect on the east african monsoon.
So they are not talking about catastrophic worldwide events, like super volcanoes or impact events, though their work does give tacit support to the idea that even small inputs of aerosols into the atmosphere can have decisive infulences on climate and weather.

The paper is interesting, and their idea is very nuanced in its linkage of cause and effect.
I stand by my earlier statement, that Egyptian culture survived much worse, actual catastrophes but the authors never make that claim.
The use of economic data to correlate natural phenomena and large scale social dynamics is pretty cool.

Volcanic suppression of Nile summer flooding triggers revolt and constrains interstate conflict in ancient Egypt

Abstract
Volcanic eruptions provide tests of human and natural system sensitivity to abrupt shocks because their repeated occurrence allows the identification of systematic relationships in the presence of random variability. Here we show a suppression of Nile summer flooding via the radiative and dynamical impacts of explosive volcanism on the African monsoon, using climate model output, ice-core-based volcanic forcing data, Nilometer measurements, and ancient Egyptian writings. We then examine the response of Ptolemaic Egypt (305–30 BCE), one of the best-documented ancient superpowers, to volcanically induced Nile suppression. Eruptions are associated with revolt onset against elite rule, and the cessation of Ptolemaic state warfare with their great rival, the Seleukid Empire. Eruptions are also followed by socioeconomic stress with increased hereditary land sales, and the issuance of priestly decrees to reinforce elite authority. Ptolemaic vulnerability to volcanic eruptions offers a caution for all monsoon-dependent agricultural regions, presently including 70% of world population.