Ancient Palmyra’s catastrophic fall is terrifying premonition of our future

The fall of ancient Palmyra has provided a bleak and frightening look into the future, with current political and climatic conditions mirroring those that preceded the catastrophic decline of the civilization almost 2,000 years ago.

In a study published in PLOS One on September 22, researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University and the University of Bergen in Norway examined the causes behind the downfall of the ancient city of Palmyra; an oasis in what is now the Syrian desert that was once one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world in the first and second centuries AD.

Palmyra is thought to have fallen when it was subject to a Roman invasion around 272 to 273 AD, giving rise to legends of its ruler, Queen Zenobia, who challenged the Roman Empire but was ultimately defeated.

However, modern research at the ancient site suggests one of the driving factors towards Palmyra’s collapse was not just the invasion by the Romans, but an increasingly severe lack of food.

According to archaeologist Iza Romanowska, co-author of the study, and her colleagues, there is a link between a deteriorating climate and growing population in Palmyra and social shifts, militarization, and the dramatic conflict that led to the city’s ultimate demise.

The researchers developed a model to estimate the maximum productivity of the land, running this against existing climate records, to see how much food could have been produced at different points. They noted a long-term climatic shift towards drier conditions and a gradual decrease in agricultural yields.

This growing food insecurity was a likely factor behind military expansion and a shift towards an autocratic regime, the team said. “The results point to increasingly precarious subsistence levels as a likely factor behind rapid militarization, shift towards an autocratic regime and military expansion of the city in the late third century,” they wrote.

There are concerns that these environmental and demographic conditions are arising in many countries today. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark study on global food insecurity. One of its many findings was that yields of some crops in lower-latitude regions have been harmed by climate change. It said climate change is affecting food security in drylands, particularly in Africa and high mountain regions of Asia and South America.

Meanwhile food security is threatened in China, the most populous nation on Earth, due to the COVID pandemic, climate change, and general global uncertainty, according to a World Economic Forum in March this year. The country faced a six percent drop in total arable land by the end of 2019 compared to the previous 10-year period.

In general, the global population is booming with around eight billion people on Earth, and there are concerns that this, coupled with claims that there could be as little as six decades’ worth of harvests left in the world’s top soil and climate change, could lead to issues with food.

Coupled with this is a rise in people living under autocratic governments. According to OurWorldInData, over two billion people live in closed autocracies with a further 3.5 billion living in electoral autocracies. Both figures have been increasing steadily over the past five decades.

An autocratic society is one in which power is controlled in the hands of one person whose decisions are not challenged or regulated. A determination of which modern societies are autocratic is subjective to an extent, but Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, Russia under Vladimir Putin, Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko, Hungary over Victor Orban, and Afghanistan under Hibatullah Akhundzada, are some examples today.

“What the [Palmyra] study shows is that there is a close coupling between the increase in food insecurity and regional conflict,” Romanowska told Newsweek. “Now, while there are no direct links between a city two thousand years ago and the modern situation, this combination of factors: food insecurity, societal shifts and regional/international conflict seems to be a strong pattern of correlation.

“This would not be a surprising combination for any modern historians or political scientists but seeing it popping out also in deep antiquity is really important to record as it may indicate a deeper relationship and one that may be universal to human groups across the world and through history.”

“It is difficult to say anything for sure based on one case study, but it most definitely warrants further research to see whether this is a recurrent pattern and, if so, what are the circumstances under which this sequence of events occurs.

Tobias Stone is a politics and history journalist who researches connections between past and present. He told Newsweek the link between food shortages and autocratic societies is complex, with both of them able to cause one another.

“Food shortages are partly a result of autocratic societies,” he said. “Autocracies and dictatorships are less efficient at managing a society because they tend to promote and hire people based on loyalty not ability. They also tend to replace market dynamics with centralised control, which is less effective.

“Does food insecurity lead to autocratic regimes? Arguably, shortages create vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of by autocratic leaders. They play well into both promises to save society, and blaming scapegoats, both of which are characteristics of autocracies.

“I personally foresee the war in Ukraine and associated food shortages around the world leading to riots and coups, wars over resources, and mass migration, which in turn tend to lead to autocracies or populism, as we saw in Europe over recent years. This leads to poorer resource management and distribution, which forms a downward spiral.”