Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?
The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region. The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down.