In a semi-arid environment, the only plausible reason that's happening is because there's little water, therefore it's a drought, and this one is particularly serious for three consecutive years. "The tree-ring widths indicate something really unusual is going on, and because it's very narrow rings, that means the tree is struggling to stay alive. "We have two complementary sets of evidence," Manning said. Their analysis finds a general shift to drier conditions from the later 13th into the 12th century BC, and they peg a dramatic continuous period of severe dryness to approximately 1198-96 BC, plus or minus three years, which matches the timeline of the Hittite's disappearance. The researchers looked at the patterns of tree-ring growth, with unusually narrow rings likely indicating dry conditions, in conjunction with changes in the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 recorded in the rings, which indicate the tree's response to the availability of moisture. But equally important are the juniper trees - which grow slowly and live for centuries, even a millennium - that were used to build the structure and contain a hidden paleoclimatic record of the region. The mound contains a wooden structure believed to be a burial chamber for a relative of King Midas, possibly his father. Manning and Sparks combined their labs to scrutinize samples from the Midas Mound Tumulus at Gordion, a human-made 53-meter-tall structure located west of Ankara, Turkey. To find an explanation for the empire's much-debated collapse, Sturt Manning, professor of arts and sciences in classical archaeology teamed up with Jed Sparks, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. For the next five centuries, the Hittites were one of the major powers of the ancient world, but around 1200 BC, the capital at Hattusa was abandoned and the empire was no more. The Hittite Empire emerged around 1650 BC in semi-arid central Anatolia, a region that includes much of modern Turkey. The group's paper, "Severe Multi-Year Drought Coincident with Hittite Collapse ~1198-1196 BC," published in Nature.
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