The fall of Cleopatra’s Egypt to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, is usually told as a melodramatic power struggle between elites on the world stage.
Cleopatra famously forged a doomed political alliance with the Roman general Mark Antony, who was also her lover, but when their combined forces were defeated at the battle of Actium, the pair killed themselves and Egypt became a province of the newly formed Roman empire.
However, a new analysis suggests the seeds of Cleopatra’s defeat might have been sown a decade earlier by environmental forces beyond her control.
It links a massive volcanic eruption — which probably happened somewhere in the tropics, although the team is not sure — with severe disruption to the seasonal flooding of the Nile and devastating consequences for Egyptian agriculture.
The study, based on evidence from ice-core records of eruption dates, the Islamic Nilometer (an ancient history of Nile water levels) and ancient Egyptian documentation of social unrest, suggests that a giant volcanic eruption in 44 BC might have suppressed rainfall, leading to famines, plague and social unrest.
Ultimately, the authors argue, this might have weakened Cleopatra’s hold on power a decade before her defeat in 30 BC, changing the course of world history.
The team found a strong correlation between more recent volcanic eruptions and severe dips in Nile flooding, said Francis Ludlow, a climate historian at Trinity College Dublin and coauthor of the study.
“We’ve shown evidence that the failure of these floodwaters are connected to things like revolt and sales of land, and these are triggering social stresses,” Ludlow said.
Previously historians have focused on the downward spiral of the 300-year Ptolemaic dynasty, of which Cleopatra was the final ruler, driven by infighting, decadence and incest, with siblings routinely married for political reasons.
“They are portrayed as these horrible, drunken, womanizing despots, literally drunken idiots who can’t run the country,” said Joe Manning, a historian at Yale University and also a coauthor. “The Romans took a really grim view of these guys. Probably unfairly.”
“We have a more complex story,” Manning added. “We’re saying that the environment and Nile behavior was important for understanding the economy.”
Egyptian agriculture was critically dependent on the annual flood of the Nile, due to the almost total absence of rainfall inland.
“If the flood doesn’t rise high enough, you just don’t grow anything,” Ludlow said. “It can be catastrophic.”
Ptolemaic rulers developed extensive grain stores to buffer against annual variation in flooding, but extreme water shortage remained a vulnerability.
The paper shows that the biggest volcanic eruption in 2,500 years, marked by a spike in the sulfate content in ice-core records, occurred somewhere in the world in 44 BC.
Separately, the team found a strong correlation between more recent volcanic eruptions and severe dips in Nile flooding, as shown in data from the Islamic Nilometer, the longest-known annually recorded hydrological record, which started in 622 AD.
Giant eruptions inject vast quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which form aerosols that block sunlight. This reduces the amount of water evaporating from oceans and lowers rainfall.
The team also found references to famines, revolts and the desertion of land in numerous papyrus records, linked to other eruptions seen in ice-core data in 209 BC and 238 BC, while Cleopatra’s doctor wrote a treatise on the plague following the 44 BC eruption, which could have been triggered by mass migration to cities during a famine.
The paper comes as a growing number of academics are turning to climate records, genetic and disease data to reinterpret some of the most significant events in history — although the conclusions are not universally accepted.
“There’s a distrust among historians of attributing big historical events to an environmental influence,” Ludlow said. “People don’t like to feel that what’s happening in society is beyond their control. They have preferred to explain history through what the great men of history were doing. We’re not saying ‘throw out the history books’ — we’re just saying here’s a new angle.”
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