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The reason for the decline of the Hellenic-Egyptian civilization of the Ptolemies in Egypt was not a slave revolt, but the eruption of volcanoes, which destroyed agriculture and the state's economy, writes Success in UA.
Scientists came to this conclusion.
The last independent ruler of Ancient Egypt, according to the legends of antiquity, was the famous queen Cleopatra, after whose death in 30 BC Rome eliminated all remnants of independent power and made Egypt another province of the emerging empire, reports unian.ua.
However, in fact, according to researchers, the decline of Egypt began much earlier, around the middle of the 3rd century BC, when Egypt waged constant wars with another Hellenic "superpower" of the time, the Seleucid state.
At first, the Ptolemaic empire won this struggle - by 245, pharaoh Ptolemy III managed to defeat most of the Seleucid army and approached the walls of Babylon, but for unknown reasons he refused to completely defeat and capture Seleucus II, the murderer of his daughter and her children, and returned his army to Egypt and Syria.
The sudden retreat of the Egyptian army, historians today believe, was the beginning of the end for Egypt, as the Ptolemaic Empire was then struck by a dynastic crisis, as well as a series of Egyptian uprisings against the "Greek occupation". Literally 50 years after the triumph of Ptolemy III, the rulers of Egypt were forced to become de facto vassals of Rome in order to protect themselves from the attacks of the Seleucids and their Macedonian allies.
Now, researchers have discovered a possible reason for this state of affairs by studying the records of ancient Egyptian nilometers – special officials who monitored the water level of the Nile during its floods – and comparing them with how the climate in northeast Africa changed at the time as a whole.
Comparing all these data, scientists drew attention to one interesting thing. The mass uprisings that forced Ptolemy III to return from the campaign actually began at the same time as two other events - the water level in the Nile was extremely low for several years, and there were massive volcanic eruptions in Ethiopia at this time.
Turning to climatologists for help, historians tried to find out whether volcanic eruptions and associated climate changes could have affected the pattern of water movement in the Nile or caused crop failures in some other way.
According to climate calculations, volcanic eruptions in the middle of the 3rd century BC should have thrown huge amounts of sulfur oxide into the air over Ethiopia, which reduced its temperature and changed the nature of the monsoons near the eastern coast of Africa. As a result, the summer rains, which filled the sources of the Nile in the mountains of Ethiopia with water and forced it to overflow its banks in the lower part of the river, almost completely stopped for several years.
According to historians, the drop in the level of the Nile by several tens of centimeters in the first two years after the eruption led to the fact that the harvest decreased several times and famine arose. According to the chronicles, the traditionalist priests and nobles, who did not recognize the Greek "invaders" and constantly called on the people to rise up against the power of the Hellenes, who did not speak or write in the ancient Egyptian language, took advantage of this.
Similar eruptions, as noted by scientists, occurred later, in 160 BC and in 44 BC, and they were also accompanied by mass uprisings and defeats of Egypt in the wars with the Seleucids.
