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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

From everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.)

Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.

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I believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.

the last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

But how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?

This was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.

I agree with the chronology. But what is your claim on the fertility of the region in classical antiquity? Remember that Egypt was considered a "breadbasket", and the eastern portion was the richer one in general.

I'm not an expert on the matter. I just read about the fertile crescent & how at its peak it wasn't a desert like it is today and that temperatures and sea-level were both lower than today. For example the persian gulf (today underwater) "was an extensive region of river valley and wetlands" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf#History when the ancient civilisation of Sumar developed there.

I have no knowledge about the eastern portion of Egypt (Sinai?) being richer than the western one, afaik the wealth of Egypt was always centered around the nile and nile delta (even today). That's probably what the breadbasket refers to.

That's the version told in the "Fall of Civilisations" podcast <https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/> (highly recommended).

I first heard it in Short History of Progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsPMaGdg_38

Wheat yields progressively fell as salt accumulated in the ground. They switched to barley until that crop failed too.

According to the book, almost all ancient agriculture was unsustainable. If not because of the irrigation, it was because plowing caused too much soil erosion. The only places that could get away with it long-term were Egypt and China, because of the flooding and lime replenished the soil.

I don't think middle-east climate change was man made, as there is evidence that the same thing happened in North Africa.

There is evidence of lush farms in what is now the Sahara desert and civilizations that existed there had significantly more resources.

Early Egyptians documented this as well. ...and the Carthaginians were likely the last holders of that fertile land before civilization moved north in the Roman Empire.

Global temperatures rose causing desertification along that entire latitude.

Yes Arabia was once a jungle and lush, not a dry desert like today. Same for much of the Sahara. There was a dramatic climate shift over the last few thousand years.

As an aside, I find it fascinating how we apparently randomly changed prepositions. "By accident" somehow became "on accident" and "wait for" someone became "wait on" someone (which used to be what waiters do).

Language is great.

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