Scientific and written evidence proves there was severe drought and famine

The argument

A letter to Ramses II from the Hittite Queen in the mid-13th century BCE states that there is no grain in the Hittite lands and asks that grain be sent from Egypt. Later letters make similar claims. Inscriptions in Egypt confirm that Egypt sent relief shipments of grain to Anatolia. A later letter, found in Ugarit in Syria, from a Hittite King claims that it is urgent that barley is sent and that it is “a matter of life or death”. Ugarit itself was also affected, and there are records of grain sent from Egypt to relieve famine in Syria. A wealth of scientific evidence has backed up evidence of famine in this period. Pollen samples taken from Syria and Cyprus show unusually hot dry weather at the end of the Bronze Age. Oxygen-Isotope data taken from a cave in Israel shows a low level of annual precipitation at the end of the Bronze age. Sediment cores taken from the Mediterranean show low surface sea temperatures, which indicates that the air temperature got warmer. There is considerable data to suggest that a long period of high temperatures brought drought to the Aegean region. Contemporary texts confirm that harsh weather particularly affected Anatolia and the Levant, who experienced severe famine. The Sea People were likely migrating to escape famine.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Claims of widespread famine have been exaggerated. Some of the letters used as evidence of famine are most likely reporting normal trade. Some of the earlier letters do not explain the destruction which occurred almost a century later, the famine would have to have been very long. If the vast majority of the migrants were fleeing Anatolia because of famine, this does not explain the violent destruction in the region. Many of the cities which disappear in this period in the region have arrowheads in the walls and bodies in the streets and were evidentially destroyed by violent invasions. It is highly unlikely that fleeing migrants would have destroyed their own country. Rumors of famine are vastly exaggerated and do not explain the violence across Anatolia and the Levant.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The correspondence establishes grain shortages in particular places at particular times, which is not the same as a regional famine sustained across generations. The counter-argument on record argues that some of these letters are better read as routine trade in a system that regularly imported grain, and that the earliest of them precede the destructions by close to a century — so the famine would have to have been implausibly long to connect them. [Rejecting P2] The palaeoclimate proxies show a drier and warmer period across the region, which is a background condition rather than a cause of migration. Populations respond to drought in many ways — relocating short distances, changing crops, drawing on stores and trade — and the premise does not establish that any group left the region at all, let alone that a particular group did. [Rejecting C] The counter identifies the decisive gap: the archaeological signature is violent destruction, with arrowheads in walls and unburied bodies in the streets, which is difficult to attribute to people fleeing their own homelands. If the migrants originated in Anatolia and the Levant, the argument has them destroying the places they came from. The evidence assembled here supports drought and hardship as part of the wider collapse without identifying who attacked Egypt, which is the question the position must answer. (The premises are also malformed, carrying blank lines between markers and no [P3].)