Great Drying
Description
Barry Rodriguez:
1.
"Then another period of aridification began 8000 years ago—the Great Drying. In North Africa, wetlands evaporated as grazing herds compounded the climate problem. Prairies degraded into Sahara dunes. Some adapted to desert life, such as the Bedouin, but others relocated to new areas of water: the Mediterranean, Lake Chad, and the Niger and Nile rivers."
(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)
2.
"As the last glacial advance began to wind down twenty millennia ago, sea levels and fresh water tables rose, which contributed to new abundances along with the development of horticulture and pastoralism. But then another period of aridification began 8000 years ago – the ‘Great Drying.’ In North Africa, wetlands evaporated as grazing herds compounded the climate problem. Prairies degraded into Sahara dunes. Some adapted to desert life, such as the Bedouin, but others relocated to new areas of water: the Mediterranean, Lake Chad, and the Niger and Nile rivers. One of these transitional sites was Nabta in southern Egypt, where cattle remains and climate change are seen in archaeological sites, including celestial-oriented stones. Their later migration to the Nile is thought to have contributed to the Egyptian cult of the sky-goddess, Hathor (Tierney et al. 2017; Brookfield 2010; Brooks 2010; Haas and Creamer 2006; Hassan 1988; Barnard and Duistermaat 2012; Malville, Wendorf and Mazar 1998).
Other peoples around the world moved to the Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze, Norte Chico and Barka, as well as smaller wetlands (Hritz 2010; Kathayat et al. 2017; Mostern 2021; Wu et al. 2021; Haas and Creamer 2006). This inter-ethnic clustering required them to share resources and led to new social dynamics. Complex agriculture arose, along with centralized religions, new craft specializations, wider communication skills (writing in dominant languages), and stratified society. Today, we call this survival strategy: civilization.
Such links between climate, resources and civil society were noted by the Islamic scholar Abū Zayd Ibn Khaldun in his مقدّمة ابن خلدون [Muqaddimah / Prologue] almost 800 years ago.
This [lack of water] can be observed in countries where springs existed in the days of their civilization. Then, they fell into ruins, and the water of the springs disappeared completely in the ground, as if it had never existed (Khaldun 1958: 481).
While we think in terms of the steady advance of civilization, its establishment and spread was a fractured process. Many societies continued traditional foraging lifestyles, while others adopted a few attributes of civilization but not others. Some abandoned civil life when circumstances changed, while others took it on when events suited them. An example is the Oxus Civilization in the Aral Sea watershed, which shifted with climatic changes 4000 years ago, before finally succumbing to aridification and its people taking on the nomadic and farming lifestyle of the surrounding steppe peoples (Dubova 2019; Gannon 2021). Civil society was a mixed global pattern of human adaptation.
With these adaptations, worldviews also changed, as seen when Yorùbá Babalawo in West Africa, Pre-Socratic philosophers in the Eastern Mediterranean, Mauryan sages in South Asia, Zhou scholars in East Asia, and Mayan astronomer-priests in Central America codified holistic cosmologies. Rational answers slowly replaced myth to become fact-based understandings. This process accelerated as peoples began to more and more connect via trade routes. Besides an exchange of precious commodities, they shared ideas."