Far-flung history

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, August 2014; written by Lisa Pearson.

For an historian, there seems to be a few general approaches to writing a book. One method is to be a specialist, drilling down to exact details and painstakingly poring over original source materials searching for previously overlooked facts. Another method is to take a giant step back in an attempt to discern patterns and threads of continuity between a variety of historical events. We have a few new books at the library that use this second approach.

“1177 B.C.: the year civilization collapsed” by Eric H. Cline is interesting just for its title alone. The civilization that Cline refers to is the Late Bronze Age, and the major players are the Hittites, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, Trojans, Assyrians and Ugarites. Cline examines the various theories about what caused the end of the Bronze Age - earthquakes, climate change, famine, war, rebellion, invasions - and explains the pros and cons of each argument before presenting his own favorite theory for the collapse of civilization.

If you can place the aforementioned groups on a map, then this is the perfect book for you and it’s a really nice example of the way archaeologists and historians sift through artifacts to reconstruct the past. If - like me - you have only a vague memory of learning about these groups at school (and I don’t remember the Ugarites at all), then you might want to brush up first with “Vanished Civilizations: the hidden secrets of lost cities and forgotten peoples”.

I’m more familiar with the time period William Rosen tackles in his latest book: “The Third Horseman: climate change and the great famine of the 14th century”. Between 1315 and 1317, it was a horrible time to be a peasant (not that there was ever a good time to be a medieval peasant). Ceaseless rain in the summer and bitter cold in the winter, epidemics of disease that wiped out most of the livestock, and bloody wars raging across Western Europe all contributed to a famine that decimated the population.

Rosen, whose first book “Justinian’s Flea” looked at the impact of plague on the dying Roman Empire, shows the reader how the medieval institutions of feudalism, manorial ownership of land, and the hierarchical Church all contributed to a fragile society unable to cope with dramatic climate change. There is so much going on, and Rosen is such an entertaining writer, that you are completely hooked until the end. It is interesting that he does not mention the eruption of Mount Tarawera (New Zealand) in 1315 as a possible cause of the torrential rains in Europe, but he seems to be focused more on long-ranging weather patterns rather than catastrophic events.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood draws a very clear line between a volcanic eruption in Indonesia and extreme weather across the globe. “Tambora: the eruption that changed the world” documents the effects of this giant ash cloud: a global cholera pandemic originating in India, famine in China, a flood in the French Alps, typhus in Ireland, and melting polar ice caps, as well as the last major European-wide famine. What is most interesting is the way he pulls in artistic references to the troubled times.

Chinese poet Li Yuyang, novelist Mary Shelley, painter John Constable and the poet Lord Byron all drew sad inspiration in the darkened skies and tragic deaths that came in the wake of the ash cloud. Contemporary letters and diaries also flesh out the human response to these natural events. Wood ends by arguing that the troubled events of 1815-1817 laid the foundations for the Opium Wars, the Great Irish Famine, the American financial Panic of 1819 and even the invention of the bicycle. Tambora was certainly an influential volcano.