Hervé Reculeau | How Did Ancient Mesopotamians Deal with Climate Change

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

Пікірлер: 15

  • @Calyrekt
    @Calyrekt2 жыл бұрын

    Thank you OI for hosting these free on KZread ♥️

  • @CadaverSplatter
    @CadaverSplatter2 жыл бұрын

    Excellent. Thank you for this. You don't know how much it helps is working class scholars who only have their BAs.

  • @Calyrekt

    @Calyrekt

    2 жыл бұрын

    If you would indulge me, what was your BA in? I’d love to know what knowledge you can spare about your experience.

  • @CadaverSplatter

    @CadaverSplatter

    2 жыл бұрын

    @@Calyrekt Linguistics and History.

  • @Calyrekt

    @Calyrekt

    2 жыл бұрын

    @@CadaverSplatter that’s cool! What languages have you studied?

  • @CadaverSplatter

    @CadaverSplatter

    2 жыл бұрын

    @@Calyrekt Bublical Hebrew and Tyro-Sidonean Phoenician, Ugaritic, Akkadian in several dialects, and Sumerian.

  • @ansfridaeyowulfsdottir8095
    @ansfridaeyowulfsdottir80952 жыл бұрын

    Wasn't this already uploaded somewhere else? {:-:-:}

  • @ISAC_UChicago

    @ISAC_UChicago

    2 жыл бұрын

    This talk went live on KZread on March 2. The unedited feed remained up through the weekend. This version has dead space and questions edited out, but the lecture content is the same.

  • @jamessheffield4173
    @jamessheffield41732 жыл бұрын

    Not well, they had trouble eliminating salt build up coming in from irrigation canals.

  • @beauregardduquesne3831
    @beauregardduquesne3831 Жыл бұрын

    These Change every 12 k years to 10500.00 years right? As taken from North Pole Core samples.

  • @sunroad7228
    @sunroad72288 ай бұрын

    Mesopotamia is calling today humans to start reckoning, mourning and wailing what they have done to themselves - destroying all fossil fuel reserves in 300 years when they needed to keep them for 3 thousand years and more. Mesopotamia is calling today humanity to write Gilgamesh-Revisited - mourning, wailing and seeking wisdom; "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).

  • @mliittsc63

    @mliittsc63

    7 ай бұрын

    The problem isn't that we will run out fossil fuel reserves. New reserves are being discovered constantly. And there are other sources which we are only starting to develop. We haven't put much effort into developing non-fossil energy sources, relatively speaking. The problem is the CO2 in the atmosphere.

  • @sunroad7228

    @sunroad7228

    7 ай бұрын

    @@mliittsc63Humans cannot fight fossil fuels - powered by fossil fuels. Today, at the end of the oil age, massive naval war machines are sailing and used to primarily depopulate civilians - an effect of - the-peak-oil-musical-chairs™-calculator . The Magna Carta requires now overhauling - adding to it the right for humans to understand what Energy really is; "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).

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