The Climatic Resilience of the Sasanian Empire

2024/12/01 by Matthew J. Jacobson, Alison L. Gascoigne, Dominik Fleitmann · 1 voice · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Eurasian Exchange Networks #Tree-ring climate responses #Water management and technologies

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10745-024-00554-w

openalex publication_date 2024/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

The Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE) has been given relatively little attention in research on climate-society interactions when compared to the neighboring Byzantine Empire, despite evidence of changing conditions and an agricultural economy that is theoretically vulnerable to droughts due to low annual precipitation. We review the available historical, archaeological, paleo-environmental, and paleo-climatic evidence to assess whether climatic conditions factored into periods of Sasanian growth and decline. We find evidence for drier conditions across Sasanian territories at the turn of the sixth century, a pattern that extends to the Aegean, Anatolia, and Central Asia. These same conditions contributed to a significant decline for the nearby Kingdom of Himyar but occurred alongside a period of expansion and intensification for the Sasanian Empire. We suggest that a combination of careful management of water infrastructure, including qanats, which can conserve water resources during dry periods, and land-use strategies that are both diverse and flexible, may have mitigated the worst impacts of this dry period. However, we note several weaknesses in the available data that still hinder confident interpretations of the potential impacts of climate change in the Sasanian Empire. Notably, there are gaps in the coverage of paleo-hydrological records and a complete lack of terrestrial paleo-temperature records in the region, as well as low resolution and high chronological uncertainties in the archaeological and paleo-environmental evidence. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10745-024-00554-w.

Citations

• The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, History, and Archaeology
• Environmental determinism in Holocene research: causality or coincidence?
• Fulayj: a Late Sasanian fort on the Arabian coast
• Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability
• Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change

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• The Circulation of Yersinia pestis in Central Eurasia before and during the First Plague Pandemic (Second to Eighth Century CE): Palaeogenetic and Historical Evidence and Sociopolitical, Ecological, and Climatic Factors

Discussions

• Final paper from my PhD now published in Human Ecology - The climatic resilience of the Sasanian Empire. We compiled and critiqued climate-society evidence in the Sasanian Empire, finding a lack of im [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]

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