In the eighth year of his reign, ca. 1177 B.C., Pharaoh Ramses III recorded the fact that Egypt had been invaded: “The foreign countries made a conspiracy … No land could stand before their arms … They were coming forward toward Egypt … ”

He also triumphantly reported his subsequent victory:

Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river-­mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore. They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed and made into heaps from tail to head.

Just a few years before that, and farther north along the coast of what is now modern Syria, the king of Ugarit similarly also recorded the presence of invaders: “now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land.” He was not as successful as Ramses III, however, for Ugarit was violently destroyed, with evidence of devastation and fire throughout the site, according to the French archaeologists who excavated the ancient city.

In the normal course of things, only ancient historians and archaeologists would be interested in the fact that both kings had fought against armies of people on the move just a few years apart. However, some additional facts make this of larger interest, and of potential relevance to us today as we look at current disruptions due to climate change.

First and foremost, Egypt and all of the other major powers of the day in that region abruptly met their end at approximately this time. This is the so-called Catastrophe that ended the Late Bronze Age 3,200 years ago. This occurred just after 1200 B.C. and ended several centuries of wildly successful commercial, political, and diplomatic interactions between the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Trojans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites, who had been flourishing in what is now Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Second, other ancient texts dating to approximately the same time at Ugarit record another misfortune: famine. One king wrote, “(Here) with me, plenty (has become) famine.” Another letter, sent from an inland city to a merchant in Ugarit reads, “There is famine in your [i.e., our] house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.”

Northern Syria was not alone; the Hittites up in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) also reported grain shortages and famine at this time as well. One Hittite queen wrote to Pharaoh Ramses II: “I have no grain in my lands.” Another Hittite ruler asked plaintively, “Do you not know that there was a famine in the midst of my lands?” Yet another declared, “It is a matter of life or death!”

Egypt tried to come to their aid, sending ships filled with grain. “[I] caused grain to be taken in ships, to keep alive this land of Hatti,” reported Pharaoh Merneptah. However, it was too little and too late.

The third relevant point is that recent publications — since 2010 — by archaeologists working in what is now northern Syria, as well as in nearby Cyprus and Israel, and across the Mediterranean in Greece, have presented evidence that a “mega drought” affected these areas for at least 150 years (Israel) and perhaps as much as 300 years (Syria; Cyprus; Greece).

It stands to reason that the famine recorded in the ancient texts is probably linked to the evidence for drought found by the archaeologists, since the time periods overlap — the texts date to near the beginning of the mega drought. It is also not a far leap to suggest that the armies of people on the move, against whom both the king of Ugarit and the king of Egypt fought and whom we now call the Sea Peoples, are to be linked to this period of drought and famine.

Today we would attribute all of this to “climate change” and indeed we should, although back then, more than 3,000 years ago, it was caused by Mother Nature rather than by humans. Regardless of the underlying cause, the climate change back then contributed to the migrations, war, upheaval, and — sooner rather than later — societal collapse.

Other factors seem to have contributed to the collapse as well, including what may have been a disastrous series of earthquakes over several decades. In fact, the situation appears to have been rather complicated, with one catastrophe followed by another and then another in quick succession, but it is clear that the mega drought was the primary culprit — the main “stressor” or “driver” which ultimately led to the collapse of all these societies.

History does not repeat itself exactly, but as Mark Twain reportedly said, it does rhyme. Today, we are seeing climate change again, this time hastened by human activities, with droughts contributing to recent mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa as well as the civil war in Syria.

Since it seems that climate change and migrations contributed to the collapse of the Bronze Age world, one might reasonably ask whether the same will happen again to our world? It is by no means clear, of course, that we will go the way of the Hittites, Trojans, Mycenaeans, Canaanites and New Kingdom Egyptians, but there are more similarities than one might expect between our world today and theirs back then.

As George Santayana once said, those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it; more recent pundits have said that those who do study history are forced to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it. However, it doesn’t have to be that way; we can take control of our own destiny.

Today we have the technology and the know-how to address the situation in ways that the Bronze Age people could not. It is too late for them, but not for us.

Published September 7, 2018