With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

Mesopotamia. Its rule extended all the way from the headwaters of the two
rivers, in Turkey, across much of Syria and as far south as the Persian Gulf.
But Sargon's empire had been in business for only a century or so when it
suddenly collapsed. Archaeologists initially put this down to an invasion of
barbarian hordes from the surrounding mountains. But an energetic field
archaeologist called Harvey Weiss, of Yale, changed that rather lazy
assumption—and with it changed much else about our perceptions of the
rise and fall of past civilizations.
In the late 1970s, while working in Syria, Weiss discovered a "lost city"
beneath the desert sands, close to the Iraqi border. Over more than a decade
he excavated the remains of the settlement, named Tell Leilan. He pieced
together the story of a highly organized city that had grown over several
thousand years from a small village to a prosperous outpost of the Akkadian
empire. But there was a mystery. It appeared that for some 300 years, the
city had been abandoned and its streets had filled with wind-blown dust.
Weiss tied the events at Tell Leilan to a contemporary cuneiform text
titled "The Curse of Akkad," which recorded a great drought in which the
fields of most of northern Mesopotamia were abruptly abandoned. The
granaries emptied, the fruit trees died in the orchards, and even the fish
departed as the great rivers dried up. Refugees flooded south. The people of
southern Mesopotamia built a hundred-mile wall to keep them out. Archaeologists
had previously dismissed "The Curse of Akkad" as mythology.
The idea that climatic and other environmental change determined the
progress of societies had been hugely out of fashion. The prevailing view was
that politics, economics, wars, and dynasties made and broke empires, and
that climate was just a more or less benign backdrop.