Vox Populi:

By Ashish Sinha,Gayatri Kathayat

Ancient Mesopotamia, the fabled land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the command and control center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This ancient superpower was the largest empire of its time, lasting from 912 BC to 609 BC in what is now modern Iraq and Syria. At its height, the Assyrian state stretched from the Mediterranean and Egypt in the west to the Persian Gulf and western Iran in the east.

Then, in an astonishing reversal of fortune, the Neo-Assyrian Empire plummeted from its zenith (circa 650 BC) to complete political collapse within the span of just a few decades. What happened?

Numerous theories attempt to explain the Assyrian collapse. Most researchers attribute it to imperial overexpansion, civil wars, political unrest and Assyrian military defeat by a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces in 612 BC. But exactly how these two small armies were able to annihilate what was then the most powerful military force in the world has mystified historians and archaeologists for more than a hundred years.

Our new research published in the journal Science Advances sheds light on these mysteries. We show that climate change was the proverbial double-edged sword that first contributed to the meteoric rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and then to its precipitous collapse.

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