A Study Of Catastrophes circa-3200bce and circa-2200bce (cont.)
By Andy Blackard

Conclusions:

Why have we previously seen history from the perspective that highly-urbanized civilization began in the near east around 3000bce? My personal opinion is that because what archeology has found in past decades was not the beginning of urban civilization, but possibly the oldest remnants of the rebuilding of civilization after the slate was wiped clean in around 3200bce (5.2kya). This does not preclude the possibility that the slate was likewise wiped clean earlier, in say 10,500bce as some suggest. However, it would make the evidence harder to find.

I realize that the above lists were a statistically-biased selection of climate change/cultural disruption events. By biased, I mean that similar events also happened in isolated instances at many other times. However, what I hope to provide is evidence that there was an extreme sycnchronicity of events at these two dates.

I tried to resist excessive speculation, but rather just present the events that I have noted (with references where possible) and my impressions as food for thought, topics for discussion and possible inspiration for future research. I am not a professional writer or archeologist, so I do not see pursuing this hypothesis to completion, personally.

However, I believe that I can point out one thing that I have learned from this investigation which may be new. That is that our view of legendary ancient floods and droughts may be far too simplistic. Except for the case of true planetary ice ages, where the earths water is taken up by the ice caps on a global scale, I think that we have to explain the other events with multi-regional models instead of a global model. I mean that various mythical floods and droughts do not represent a single global flood or drought. There appears to me to be a global water balance that can produce equal yet opposite reactions in remote (yet somehow connected) regions of the planet earth during a climatic perturbation. Looking at my data collected for my proposed 3200bce and 2200bce events, we see not a single global flood or a single global drought, but both floods and droughts along with volcanic activity and meteoritic impacts in different regions of the planet.

I can point to one example as proof of concept: when the Asian monsoon patterns and Atlantic circulation patterns were simultaneously upset around 2200bce, the effect was a simultaneous epic flood in China and a drought in the Middle East[18]. Likewise, the legendary flood of China was followed by a legendary drought. Therefore, the mythical floods were local/regional events and probably did not happen in isolation, but instead, can be correlated with other catastrophic events of a different kind in the same and in other regions of the world.

Andy Blackard (September 2005)

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