EVEN ancient Egypt's mighty pyramid builders were powerless in the face of the famine that helped bring down their civilisation around 2180 BC. Now evidence gleaned from mud deposited by the River Nile suggests that a shift in climate thousands of kilometres to the south was ultimately to blame - and the same or worse could happen today.
The ancient Egyptians depended on the Nile's annual floods to irrigate their crops. But any change in climate that pushed the African monsoons southwards out of Ethiopia would have been diminished these floods.
Dwindling rains in the Ethiopian highlands would have meant fewer plants to stabilise the soil. When rain did fall it would have washed large amounts of soil into the Blue Nile and into Egypt, along with sediment from the White Nile.
Blue Nile mud has a different isotope signature from that of the White Nile. So by analysing isotope differences in mud deposited in the Nile Delta, Michael Krom of Leeds University worked out what proportion of sediment came from each branch of the river.
Krom reasons that during periods of drought, the amount of Blue Nile mud in the river would be relatively high. He found that one of these periods, from 4500 to 4200 years ago, immediately predates the fall of the Egypt's Old Kingdom.
The weakened waters would have been catastrophic for the Egyptians. "Changes that affect food supply don't have to be very large to have a ripple effect in societies," says Bill Ryan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
Similar events today could be even more devastating, says team member Daniel Stanley, a geoarchaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. "Anything humans do to shift the climate belts would have an even worse effect along the Nile system today because the populations have increased dramatically."
Journal reference: Geology, vol 30, p 71
- New Scientist
- Not just a website!
- Subscribe to New Scientist and get:
- New Scientist magazine delivered every week
- Unlimited online access to articles from over 500 back issues
- Subscribe Now and Save
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.