Dr. Joseph Manning, Ohio State University alumnus, Professor of Classics, History, and Law at Yale University, and author of "The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome" will be joining the Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change lecture series with his talk “Climate and Society from Egypt to India to China: A Regional Crisis at 160BCE?”
Abstract: The 160’s BCE was the critical decade in Ptolemaic history. Environmental factors have never been considered until now in the understanding of social dynamics, or in the economic, military and fiscal history of the dynasty. The decade has often been marked as the beginning of serious state decline. The causes of this decline have often been identified: internal problems (ethnic tension between Greeks and Egyptians; over-extraction of resources leading to unrest, sometimes serious and sustained,, currency inflation), depravity of the kings themselves, and the increasing political and military domination of the Mediterranean by Rome. Polybius adds political neglect, moral decay, and Ptolemy IV’s love of opulence and a succession of young kings after Ptolemy IV. A new chronology of volcanic eruptions from polar ice core analysis affords us an opportunity to reevaluate historical dynamics within Egypt, to examine more critically how shocks to the annual Nile flood may or may not have played a role in “decline” and social unrest. Ice cores also allow us to tie events in Egypt to those across the Indian Ocean in the same years.
Followed by a comment by James Stagge, Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, Ohio State University.
Event co-sponsored by the Center of Historical Research, Departments of Classics and Anthropology, the College of Earth Sciences, and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.
