My name is Allegra LeGrande. And, I am a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research in New York City. Investigating climates of the past have been my passionate research topic for 20 years now.

At GISS, I am working on this project with two researchers, Kostas Tsigaridis – a specialist in aerosols and a research scientist like me, and Ram Singh, a post-doctoral research scholar who came to GISS especially to work on this project.

I started writing this blog post in April of 2020. I live in New York City, several miles north of Columbia University’s campus. As I write, their are 1000’s New Yorkers who have lost their lives to the SARS-CoV-2 virus (most in hospitals, but many at home). The soccer stadium next to my home has a pneumatic dome being converted into a 250-bed field hospital. It is a challenging time to do climate research as first responders and essential workers put their own lives at risk on a daily basis. Now, in July 2020, just as NYC seems to have gotten our crisis under control (losing upwards of 25,000 people along the way), the rest of the country is suffering.

I am writing about my research because the privilege afforded to me by their sacrifice. Thank you to all first responders and delivery and retail and hospital workers. Thank you.

From the perspective of a young scholar in the field of ancient history, the implications of this paper are thrilling due to their explanatory potential. The climatological teleconnections established in this paper enrich our narrative of a notoriously unstable and poorly understood period in the history of the Mediterranean and Near East. Specific instances of political opportunism such Sextus Pompey’s Sicilian revolt and blockade can be better understood within a broader framework of resource scarcity throughout Eurasia. Within this framework, formerly disjointed elements of the traditional narrative begin to fall into place. The pattern revealed by this new framework is one in which localized manifestations of resource scarcity and competition catalyze a breakdown in pan-Mediterranean political and economic networks and a resurgence of regional networks of mutual dependence in crisis conditions. Local opportunists profited from this breakdown by establishing control over regional networks by various means (by formal agreements, such as the partitioning of the empire under the Second Triumvirate, or by active sedition by force of arms, such as Sextus Pompey and Quintus Labienus). Ultimately, these regional power brokers fell one by one to a resurgent central power helmed by a coalition whose strategy correctly identified the conditions necessary for a new geopolitical equilibrium and succeeded in establishing these new conditions in the form of the Roman principate, the first phase of the Roman Empire.

The decade between 50 and 40 BC was one of the more remarkable decades in Mediterranean history. In 50 BC, the young Cleopatra, on the throne less than a year, issued a decree that required all grain ships to sail to Alexandria and to no other destination under pain of death. Less than two years later, the Nile river was at its lowest level ever recorded. Something was happening to the critical annual flood of the river, the lifeblood of the country and the force by which, in years of good flood, Egypt was the wealthiest grain bearing land in the world. In the same year (48 BC), two encounters would alter the political landscape forever. The Roman general Pompey, seeking refuge and a friendly welcome in Egypt after the disastrous Battle of Pharsalus, was murdered within sight of Alexandria. Soon after this drama, Caesar met Cleopatra in the Ptolemaic capital and formed an alliance with the last great monarch of antiquity. Cleopatra needed a Roman ally. The royal treasury was running as low as the Nile was flooding in these years. And then came the Ides of March in 44 BC - a political shocker to both Rome and to Egypt. Cleopatra, and her dream of reinvigorating the great Ptolemaic empire, turned to another Roman general, Marc Antony. But the dream would turn into a nightmare.

Hello all! I am Jeremy Sontchi, one of the research assistants for the Nile History Initiative.

As a part of the historical research team based at Yale under Professor Joseph Manning, along with Joe Morgan and Nazim Can Serbest, I was involved with the preparatory work for the major historical studies that we intend to complete through the project. Our goal for the first year, from the historical side, was to create the database framework and begin collecting data for our historical archives and to compile our “paleo proxy records,” material that can be analyzed as indicators of the Nile flood. I worked towards both of these goals in a variety of ways.

The process of sifting through the historical record for evidence of Nile flood conditions requires a delicate balance of attention to detail and sensitivity to the particulars of geographical and temporal context. This entry in our ongoing blog walks you through the process of identifying and interpreting the evidence of a single document in our record.

My work as a researcher on this grant has consisted of combing through the corpus of papyrus documents for direct evidence of Nile flood conditions throughout Egypt during the Ptolemaic period. My specific task on the historical team is the identification of these documents in specific ancient archives, that is, collections of documents kept together in antiquity by an individual, family, or administrative office and reconstructed in the modern editing process. By limiting my survey to the archive, I narrow the range of documents under examination to a large but manageable corpus with a distinctive advantage: historical context. As a rule, documents that survive in archival contexts are more useful than historical isolates because I can situate their content in a historical circumstance based on a preponderance of internal evidence rather than speculation.

We have been thinking a lot in recent months about situating our project in the context of the broader fields of Historical Climatology, Paleoclimatology and environmental history. All three fields are large ones with considerable literature. Part of the work of the project is to read through the literature in these fields to make sure we are both up-to-date and not in the habit of re-inventing various wheels that already exist. In reading through the literature, one of the astonishing things that emerges is that research that works at the intersection of Paleoclimate and history has not only exploded in the last decade, but it is also using more highly resolved data, along with powerful climate models, and thinking a lot harder about how best to integrate climate data and historical analysis.