This particularly domestication of olive and fig trees in the Copper Age in the Jordan Valley isn't very surprising (in contrast, for example, to the belated and complicated domestication of the almond tree or the long distance migration involved in banana domestication). But, it is still notable and helps piece together the overall chronology and story of plant and animal domestication over time.
A new study has unraveled the earliest evidence for domestication of a fruit tree, researchers report. The researchers analyzed remnants of charcoal from the Chalcolithic site of Tel Zaf in the Jordan Valley and determined that they came from olive trees. Since the olive did not grow naturally in the Jordan Valley, this means that the inhabitants planted the tree intentionally about 7,000 years ago.
This study provides one of the earliest examples of fruit tree cultivation worldwide, demonstrating that olive (Olea europaea) and fig (Ficus carica) horticulture was practiced as early as 7000 years ago in the Central Jordan Valley, Israel.
It is based on the anatomical identification of a charcoal assemblage recovered from the Chalcolithic (7200–6700 cal. BP) site of Tel Tsaf. Given the site’s location outside the wild olive’s natural habitat, the substantial presence of charred olive wood remains at the site constitutes a strong case for horticulture.
Furthermore, the occurrence of young charred fig branches (most probably from pruning) may indicate that figs were cultivated too. One such branch was 14C dated, yielding an age of ca. 7000 cal. BP.
We hypothesize that established horticulture contributed to more elaborate social contracts and institutions since olive oil, table olives, and dry figs were highly suitable for long-distance trade and taxation.
Dafna Langgut, Yosef Garfinkel. 7000-year-old evidence of fruit tree cultivation in the Jordan Valley, Israel. 12(1) Scientific Reports (2022) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-10743-6
The reconstructed sky in the place where the Syriac text was written on May 25, 760 at 2:40 a.m.
Scientists have analyzed ancient historical accounts from Syria, China, the Mediterranean and West Asia (most critically, the detailed accounts in the hand written Syrian Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın, part of which ended up in the Vatican Library and part of which ended up in the British Museum) to confirm that all of these accounts viewed key parts of the appearance of a particular comet in their skies in late May and early June of the year 760 CE.
The scientists matched these observations with calculations of where the comet 1P/Halley would have been in the sky at that time based upon its current observed trajectory with key dates pinned down to a margin of error of one to two days for particular events.
This 760 CE fly-by was the comet's last return before a close encounter with Earth in 837 CE. The 760 CE perihelion of the comet that was observed is particularly important for extrapolation further back in time. This study provides one of the longest time frames of confirmed continued observations of the same celestial object. This helps to confirm the accuracy and robustness of astronomy's current gravitational calculations of solar system orbits, and to remind us just how long quite accurate scientistic astronomy observations have been collected and recorded by people.
Historical Context
This was near the end of the period known as the "dark ages" in the former western Roman Empire in Europe, during the life of Charlemagne, eight years before he began his reign as the King of the Franks in what is now France, and forty years after the remarkably wet summer of 720 CE in Europe.
Decisive battles on land and at sea with the Byzantine Empire ended the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate into the territory of the former Roman Empire fourteen years earlier (746 CE). The Eastern Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire was the last remnant of the Roman Empire, in what is now most of Turkey, Greece and Italy, and would persist in a gradually diminished form over about three more centuries. The West Asian accounts were written by Byzantine subjects.
As the body text of the new paper explains:
The author of the chronicle was probably the stylite monk Joshua; a stylite is an early Byzantine or Syrian Christian ascetic living and preaching on a pillar in the open air, so that many celestial observations can be expected in his work. The author of the Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın may have lived on a pillar for some time. During the time of writing of the Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın [ed. completed in 775/776 CE], the area was outside the border of the Byzantine empire and already under 푐Abbasid rule.
Thus, the Syrian chronicle entries were written by a Christian monkunder the jurisdiction of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate (750-1517 CE) in areas recently reclaimed by the Caliphate after a brief Byzantine expansion into the territory of the Umayyad Caliphate which preceded it. The Abbasid Caliphate had been formed ten years earlier in the Abbasid Revolution and replaced the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE). The Umayyad Caliphate had been led by an ethnically Arab elite that treated even non-Arab Muslim converts as second class citizens, while the Abbasid Caliphate was led by a multi-ethnic, mostly non-Arab, and eastern oriented Abbasid Caliphate that ruled in a more inclusive manner, whose Caliphs claimed to have descended from an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad (who died about four decades before the comet appeared).
The provenance of the Chronicle was somewhat involved. As the body text explains:
The Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın is not known to be copied and disseminated; sometime during the 9th century it was transferred to the Monastery of the Syrians in the Egyptian desert . . . Shortly after the manuscript was found and bought for the Vatican, it was considered to be written by the ¯ West Syrian patriarch Dionysius I of Tell-Mah. re, so that this chronicle was long known as Chronicle of Dionysius of ¯ Tell-Mah. re. Dionysius did write an otherwise lost world chronicle, but lived later (died AD ca. 845). Since this mistake was noticed, the chronicle has been called the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mah. re or, better, the Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın, because the text mentions the monastery of Zuqn¯ın as the living place of the author; Zuqn¯ın was located near Amida, now Diyarbakır in Turkey near the border to Syria.
The Chronicle of Zuqn¯ın is made of four parts: Part I runs from the creation to Emperor Constantine (AD 272-337), Part II from Constantine to Emperor Theodosius II (AD 401-450) plus a copy of the so-called Chronicle of PseudoJoshua the Stylite (AD 497 to 506/7), Part III from Theodosius to Emperor Justinian (AD 481-565), and Part IV to the time of writing, AD 775/776. The Chronicler used a variety of sources, some of them otherwise lost. The author knew that some of his sources did not provide a perfect chronology; for him, it is more important to convey his message (to learn from history) than to give perfect datings.
The events reported in the text are dated using the Seleucid calendar; the Seleucid Era (SE) started on October 7, BC 312 (= Dios 1). There are several versions of the Seleucid calendar, including the Babylonian (Jewish), Macedonian, and West Syrian (Christian) ones. The author of our chronicle systematically used the latter version for reports during his lifetime – a solar calendar, in which the year ran from Tishri/October 1 to Elul/September 30, applied since at least the fifth century AD.
This was also two years before the city of Baghdad was founded within the Abbasid Caliphate, near the ancient city of Seleucia, which had been the capitol of the Nestorian Christian Church of the East from 410 CE, until it had to be abandoned to the desert sands when the Tigris River that made it possible to live there shifted, a few decades after Baghdad was founded.
In China, this comet's appearance coincided with the unsuccessful seven year long An Lushan Rebellion against the Tang Dynasty. This rebellion ended with a pair of stunning betrays, first when An Lushan, the leader of the rebellion, was killed by one of his own eunuchs in 757, and then when his successor as leader of the rebellion, Shi Siming, was killed by his own son in 763, which ended the rebellion.
The video below (about 11 minutes long) is delightful and packed full of historic linguistic facts and conjectures about a lost Romance language, often known as African Latin that persisted for about seven hundred years after the fall of the Roman empire before becoming extinct. It pieces together the clues we have about this lost language and demonstrates its likely influence, during the Moorish era in Spain, on the modern Iberian languages.
In the 400s CE, the Western Roman Empire fell to East Germanic barbarian tribes such as the Vandals.
Prior to its fall, the Mediterranean Sea was basically a Roman lake, ruled by the Roman empire and with elites at least, and realistically, pretty much everyone, speaking some form of Latin. This included not just the Southern European coast, but the islands of the Aegean sea, Anatolia, the Levant and the North African coast. At its greatest extent, the Roman Empire also extended to include much of Southern Europe (as far north of Southern Britain). The North African province of the Roman Empire was called Africa and that is where the continent got its modern English name.
Prior to the Roman conquest of North Africa, which was a bread belt of the Roman Empire in antiquity, North Africa was inhabited by city states established and ruled by the pre-Hebrew, Semitic maritime peoples known as the Phoenicians and the closely related Punic people of Carthage (roughly speaking in modern Tunisia). Prior to that, and further inland, in lands that the Romans never conquered and weren't really bothered to because it wasn't suitable for Roman style agriculture, were the Berber peoples.
We know from the journal entries of Saint Augustine of Hippo, who died in his 70s in the immediate wake of the Vandal conquest of his North African city, that even before the Vandals conquered this Roman territory, a North African dialect of Latin had been developing.
We also know that while the Vandals took political control of the Northwest African coast of the Mediterranean, that post-conquest the Vandals came to speak the African Latin dialect of the people they conquered, even in official legal documents, rather than converting the people that they ruled to the East Germanic language of the Vandals.
But in the post-Roman Empire era of barbarian rule, North Africa's dialect of African Latin, like that of the other regions of Rome, in which Latin derived Romance languages arose, developed its own regional distinctiveness. The distinction between the letters b and v broke down in favor of using b across the board. The distinction between long and short vowels present in Roman Latin broke down. Consonants at the end of Roman suffix inflections and sometimes the suffixes entirely were dropped. African Latin remained distinct even after a brief reconquest by the Byzantines. The Byzantines were the successors to the Eastern Roman Empire who also failed to replace the local language of North Africa with the Greek language spoken in the Eastern Roman Empire continuously since the Roman Empire conquered it.
While this conclusion is more speculative, African Latin's distinctive features may owe something to a Phoenician/Punic substrate in first generation North African language learners as they began to speak Latin, and from language contact with Berber peoples.
Roughly four hundred years after the fall of the Roman empire in North Africa, Rome's successors were displaced by an expanding Islamic Empire, with lower Egypt and the Northeast Africa falling to it under the the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), and Northwest Africa and Iberia falling to it completely by 711 CE, under the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), commencing the Moorish Spain era. Islamic rulers would continue to rule parts of Iberian until 1492 when the Reconquista of Christian Europeans that pushed relentlessly to the South was finally completed and went no further.
These conquests all happened very fast, as these things go, in an age where horses, camels and sail boats were the fastest available means of transportation. Northwest Africa and Iberia were conquered in period of less than fifty years, starting after 661 CE and concluding by 711 CE.
While the invading forces in the Umayyad conquests are conventionally described as Arab-Berber ethnically, North Africans greatly outnumbered Arab elites in these forces. At that time they defeated Hispania, for the most part, they spoke not Arabic, or Berber languages of the hinterlands, but the emerging Romance language of African Latin spoken by the people of much more densely populated Northwest African coastal people.
While it is impossible to say definitively, it appears likely that many or most of the very distinctive features of Spanish, relative to other Romance languages like Italian and French, owes a lot to the influence of African Spanish in Moorish Spain.
In the Middle East, in what is now Iran, in lower Egypt and in Northeast Africa, the Umayyad Caliphate was succeeded by the the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 CE whose capitol was Baghdad which endured in some form until 1258 CE, including the period of the Crusades, and was mostly succeeded by the Malmuk Caliphate based in Cairo commencing in 1261 CE, after a brief interregnum.
In the Northeast and Iberia, the rump Umayyads held on for a while, eventually reorganizing into the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171) based in Tunis in Northwest Africa and the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba (929–1031) in Iberia. African Latin continued to be spoken in this era, with even the most educated people of the day, like Isidore of Seville, a leading encyclopedist of the Middle Ages, writing in a form of Latin heavily influenced by the emerging African Latin Romance language.
Full language shift away from Latin in North Africa wasn't really achieved until these Caliphates were replaced with the rise of the Berber Muslim Almohad Caliphate (1147–1269) (which, of course, never fully replaced the languages of Spain and Portugal which were successors to Latin in Iberia).
Two hundred and sixty years after the fall of the Almohad empire, the last hurrahs of the Moorish Spain era end as the Reconquista runs its course in 1492.
This is a notable genre of historically expression that I've only encountered once before, an an inscription from the arid period of ca. 2200 BCE in Mesopotamia that toppled the Akkadian Empire.*
A lengthy drought in Europe has exposed carved boulders, known as "hunger stones," that have been used for centuries to commemorate historic droughts — and warn of their consequences.
The Associated Press reports that hunger stones are newly visible in the Elbe River, which begins in the Czech Republic and flows through Germany.
"Over a dozen of the hunger stones, chosen to record low water levels, can now be seen in and near the northern Czech town of Decin near the German border," the AP writes.
One of the stones on the banks of the Elbe is carved with the words "Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine": "If you see me, weep."
A team of Czech researchers described that stone in detail in a 2013 paper about the history of droughts in Czech lands.
The stone is also chiseled with "the years of hardship and the initials of authors lost to history," the researchers wrote:
"It expressed that drought had brought a bad harvest, lack of food, high prices and hunger for poor people. Before 1900, the following droughts are commemorated on the stone: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, and 1893."
And an article in Nature earlier this summer compared recent droughts in Europe to droughts over the last 250 years. The scientists found that the 21st century droughts were indeed extreme, but not as long-lasting or as massive as the worst of the historic ones.
However, the same study noted that the more recent droughts are also linked to record-breaking temperatures. That appears to be causing "unprecedented drying trends" for the soil, which hurts crops.
This trend "raises concerns about the consequences of extreme meteorological droughts" as the climate continues to warm, the researchers note.
The drought in northern and central Europe this year is "one of the most intense regional droughts in recent memory," The Guardian wrote in July, and it is paired with abnormally hot temperatures.
The same drought may also have been responsible for the demise of the Sarasvati River and collapse of Harappan civilization the opened the door for Indo-Europeans to advance into South Asia. The Old Kingdom in Egypt (2686 BCE – 2181 BCE) collapsed around the same time, giving rise to the First Intermediate Period in which the Egyptian empire collapsed into two kingdoms, each with declining central authority after having been united in one, that ended around 2080 BCE. And, this drought may have weakened the states in Anatolia, allowing the first Hittite city-state to establish itself there.
It may even had led to the demise of a civilization in China: "The drought may have caused the collapse of Neolithic Cultures around Central China during the late 3rd millennium BCE. At the same time, the middle reaches of the Yellow River saw a series of extraordinary floods related to the legendary figure of Yu the Great. In the Yishu River Basin, the flourishing Longshan culture was affected by a cooling that severely reduced rice output. This led to substantial decrease in population and fewer archaeological sites. In about 2000 BCE, Longshan was displaced by the Yueshi culture, which had fewer and less sophisticated artifacts of ceramic and bronze."
This drought may be responsible for the prohibitions on pig eating that survive today in Jewish Kosher rules and Islamic halal dietary restrictions according to William J. Burroughs, "Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Age of Chaos" (2005).
A volcanic eruption is one possible explanation for this drought also known as the 4.2 kiloyear climate event, although a 2013 paper fingered an asteroid impact. The 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event was one of the most severe climatic events of the Holocene period. It defines the beginning of the current Meghalayan age in the Holocene epoch.
