The Secrets to Civilization

Historians and archaeologists worked long on various theories about the extinction of most Mediterranean states and cultures around the reign of Pharaon Rameses III (+1155 BC), except his own Egypt, from the Myceneans to the Hittites and Babylonians. The few Ancienr records, mainly his, confirm a dark age of famine and invasions form unidentified 'sea people'. Yet none of the advanced disasters and wars accounts for the synchronicity. Then climatic records made it all fit, as drought resulting from temperature drop explain all storms and famine-driven migrations while sedentary states and commerce collapses in a chain, only the fertile Nile banks remaining a prosperous sanctuary for the superpower to remain standing.

The first millennium BC saw in and around the Mediterranean an unprecedented growth in demography, economy, technology and politics, resulting in the first true superpower. A milder climate and the discovery of iron enabled a revolution in productivity, literally feeding urbanization and the establishment of stronger states. The dispersed Greeks lived in city states near (natural) sea ports and championed maritime trade and colonization, like Phoenicians. Only Athens managed to become the early metropolis, until Alexander the Great's Macedonian dynasty united Greece and conquered the Persian empire, only to fall apart after his early death into several empires, wealthy Egypt being the main, new capital Alexandria as new leading metropolis. Yet Rome, one of many tiny states in central Italy, thanks to superior collaboration and organization, started unifying them and annexing territories around, like grain producer Sicily and Iberian silver mines after its triumph over rival Carthage. A volcanic cloud in Alaska possibly sealed the fate of Egypt when Cleopatra, last 'Greek pharaoh' by Caesar's hand, allied with candidate-ruler Marc Anthony and followed him in suicide after Octavian's total victory. Rome grew by raising armies of citizens, but has just switched to mercenaries, who enabled their generals to overrule the political elite, yielding civil war. Climate worsening to the north and east caused massive migrations, which even the best organized empire ultimately couldn't resist, despite turning to allied tribes to ward off the new threats.

The Roman empire grew and prospered unprecedented by combining exemplary organization, technological advances and military skills with fortunate climate in its 'Golden Age', virtually unifying the Mediterranean world under its 'Pax Romana'. Then it even coped with a major pandemic, possible small pocks, wiping out several over its about 50 million inhabitants. Having stabilized its expanse towards Rhine and Danube, it suffered the effects of worse climate, causing major Germanic and other migrations from the east and north and weakening it as did the much worse pest pandemic, which lay demographic waste to whole cities and regions and kept reemerging all the feudal age, while political stability was shredded by rival generals engaging in coups and civil wars. Medical ignorance -even some counterproductive therapy, despite some progress, both record by physician Galen- causes some great achievements like the baths and sewer systems, to facilitate the spread of germs and diseases, especially in growing cities, most of all the capital, first in Europe to surpass a million people until Victorian London, dependent on huge food imports and unable to drain he marshes breeding malaria mosquitoes.