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Did a Krakatoa Eruption in 535 A.D. Help Precipitate the Decline of Antiquity and the Spread of Islam?
David Keys*, in a 1999 British television documentary** based on his book “Catastrophe,”*** suggested that an eruption of Krakatoa in 535 A.D. was the primary cause of a global climatic catastrophe that caused widespread famine, pestilence, and extinction of many civilizations around the globe. Keys reasons that a huge volcanic eruption, somewhere near the equator sent volcanic emissions high into the stratosphere where air currents distributed them around the globe, creating a veil through which sunlight could not penetrate. As a result, the earth sustained flooding and cooling over the next century, which caused the failure of crops. People and animals scattered and either starved to death or died from a pandemic that swept the civilized world in the sixth century (or both).
What evidence does Keys provide for the sixth century climatic catastrophe and a Krakatoa eruption as its cause? Keys provides many lines of evidence, five of which are reviewed here: tree rings, building of crannogs, writings from people living at the time, volcanic sulphates in 1,000-meter-deep columns of ice from Greenland in the north and from the Antarctic in the south, and carbon-dated charcoal in layers surrounding a buried layer of Krakatoa lava. a. Tree rings The study of tree rings (dendrochronology) can provide evidence for climate changes. “Every year trees put on a new layer of growth within the bark and these layers show up as tree rings. Each ring varies in width. A wide ring indicates favorable growing conditions, a narrow ring--harder times…Trees have always had the potential to become silent witnesses to thousands of years of climatic change.”** Irish dendrochronologist (tree ring expert) Mike Baillie fed specific tree measurements into a database. Each ring sequence could be matched with rings of previously felled trees and precisely dated. A bigger climatic picture began to emerge…It was ten years ago that Baillie noticed his mid-6th century AD oak rings went abnormally narrow--a sign that something very powerful was slowing the trees' growth. Baillie said: years “539 540 541, 542 [show] extremely narrow” rings indicative of cold conditions. Dendrochronogists in Finland, California, Chile, Sweden and Siberia noted the same slow growth pattern, which fingers the summers of these years as the coldest in 2,000 years. b. Building of crannogs Irish crannogs (wooden forts built over water) are archaeological evidence to support Keys’ and Baillie’s theory of a severely cold period in the sixth century. In fact, much of the wood that Baillie dated came from crannogs in which people sought refuge during times of trouble and clan warfare. The mid-sixth century marks the beginning of the construction of crannogs. Baillie sees a strong connection between the need for such forts and the deteriorating climate. He said in the BBC documentary, “When you look at the overall picture there seems to be about a decade of really bad conditions starting 536 and running on into the mid 540s at least. The implication from lots of bits of evidence is that it was extremely cold and that this reduced sunlight and cold caused crop failure. So basically people in an area like this would be forced back onto non-agricultural produce. They would be forced to fish, they would be forced to hunt and that would put a lot of strain on a population which was used to having agricultural produce to see them through the winters for example. So I think things would have been very bleak here.”** c. Writings from people living in the sixth century Keys contacted classical scholars to determine whether historical accounts of bad weather exist. Many accounts of bizarre weather exist in Roman accounts. For example, one eyewitness, a Syrian bishop named John of Ephesus, describes the extraordinary events during the years 535 and 536 AD as follows: “There was a sign from the sun, the like of which had never been seen or reported before. The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months. Each day it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again.”* Another historian remarked: “Historians of the 6th century empire do not usually record climatic events unless they are something really stupendous, a natural event like a comet will get mentioned, now in the 530s the fact that John mentions a two year dimming of the sun indicates that it was significant, Cassiodorus writing in Italy, he too refers to a dimming of the sun: “We have had a spring without mildness and a summer without heat ... The months which should have been maturing the crops have been chilled by north winds. Rain is denied and the reaper fears new frosts.”** There are similar accounts from Japan (“Food is the basis of the Empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving of cold.”) and China (“Yellow dust rained down like snow. It could be scooped up in handfuls.”)** d.Volcanic sulphates in 1,000-meter-deep columns of ice from Greenland in the north and from the Antarctic in the south The polar ice caps can provide information about the ancient climates. “For the past decade multi-national teams of scientists have been extracting 1,000-meter-deep columns of ice from Greenland in the north and from the Antarctic in the south. While somewhat less stable than the information from tree rings, ice cores reveal yearly layers of fresh snow that provide a record of what was in the atmosphere at that time. The ice caps contains information on what happened in the atmosphere like volcanic eruptions, asteroids coming in how much dust was in the air, a lot of information, the chemistry of the old atmosphere is in there and even the chemistry today is changing in our atmosphere if we combine this we can have a record which we can compare with other records from the deep sea sediments, from tree rings, from lakes but the fantastic thing about the ice caps is that they are directly related to the atmosphere itself.”** Professor Claus Hammer tested a new Greenland core from the 530's AD. “If pieces of a comet or asteroid had exploded in the atmosphere the team would expect to find traces of rare chemical elements like iridium. If there had been a massive volcanic eruption, however, they would expect an excess of sulphuric acid - the telltale signature of a volcano. The sulphates would have been hurled into the atmosphere and scattered by the winds. They would have returned to earth in rain and snow, then finally been stored at the poles in ice.”** Hammer determined by chromatogram a huge sulphate peak at 535 AD which “must come from sulphuric acid in the atmosphere and that's an indication that there has been a major volcanic eruption…We have a volcanic signal which lasts several years. We have from an Antarctic core similar evidence as in Greenland but not as good, not as well dated but indicating that this volcanic eruption could have taken place.”** e. Carbon-dated charcoal from buried lava deposits Earth has at least 200 active volcanoes. But “to create a dust veil that envelopes the world, the eruption has to happen near the equator as only equatorial winds can spread dust over both hemispheres.”** Likely culprit volcanoes would lie near or on the equator, such as the volcanoes forming an arc straddling Southeast Asia. He located in Javanese writings (Book of Kings) history of a large bang in the middle of the sixth century AD: “A mighty thunder which was answered by a furious shaking of the earth, pitch darkness, thunder and lightning and then came forth a furious gale together with a hard rain, a deadly storm darkening the entire world, in no time there came a great flood. When the water subsided it could be seen that the island of Java had been split in two, thus creating the island of Sumatra.” A vulcanologist named Professor Siggurdson volunteered to try to find bits of charcoal to carbon date in a huge buried deposit of Krakatoa’s volcanic lava revealed in a cliff. He could find charcoal only in the layers below and above the layer of interest. However, these bits were dated before and after 535 AD. What are some of the implications of a climatic catastrophe in the sixth century AD? There are many implications and the reader is referred to Keys’ book to learn about them. But one of the most fascinating is the conflation of the birth of the prophet Mohammed and the spread of Islam at exactly the time that earth’s population of humans is being killed off by severe climate changes. Keys notes that the prophet Muhammad preached a “creed ideally suited to its time—a new religion which emerged directly out of the apocalyptic atmosphere of the period” until his death in 632 AD. Furthermore, “[t]he Muslim advance was one of the most rapid in human history.” (p. 100) The Islamic armies in 150 years subjugated most of the Roman Empire (excluding what is today Turkey) and the Persian Empire. Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, in his book “What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response”****, traces Islam’s current problems directly to its explosive origins when it vanquished starving and diseased peoples (along with their belief systems) and, as a result, never had to learn to deal with competing creeds as it spread like fire across the African, European, and Asian continents. Editor’s Note: David Keys’ theory is plausible and persuasive. His work stimulates thought about the possibility of another major volcanic eruption, particularly in the volatile Southeastern Asia arc of volcanoes, which could cause a similar global climate change. The map below shows the number of Indonesian volcanoes there that have erupted in the twentieth century. Krakatoa and Tambora have the most violent history and are therefore in a larger font.
Sources: * “David Keys has worked in journalism for more than 30 years. He has personally visited several thousand archaeological and historical sites in more than sixty countries during this time and written on archaeology and history for the major national daily newspapers and magazines of twenty nations. He has been Archaeology Correspondent of the Independent for the last twelve years. He also acts as a consultant on archaeology for television, including co-presenting the 1990-1 Channel Four archaeology series Down to Earth, on-screen contributing to America’s NBC, and is a regular contributor to BBC radio. He also worked as series consultant for the six-part BBC series Ancient Voices and on a Channel Four documentary of the same name.” (http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/author.htm?authorID=1280) ** Documentary transcript available at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/flash/catastrophe1_script.html. *** David Keys: “Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World.” Arrow Books, 1999. ****Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response,” Oxford Press, 2002. Simon Winchester: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Perennial 2003. |
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