From Library Journal
In the years 535 and 536 C.E., according to archaeological journalist Keys, a dusky haze blotted out the light and heat of the sun and brought about both massive droughts and floods. The famines and plagues that resulted from these climate changes then drove tribal groups out of the heartlands of Asia and into the Mediterranean world of the old Roman Empire. Then, the wars and displacement of long-settled peoples that resulted destroyed the old order and, in Keys's opinion, marked the emergence of the modern world. Keys supports his thesis with an impressive array of scientific and historical evidence. Although it seems unlikely that any single factor could have such catastrophic consequences, the book, written in an engaging manner, should stimulate interest in the role of climate in human events. Suitable for academic libraries.
-Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Isn't world history too messy and complicated to be susceptible to single-cause explanations? Not to Keys, who simplifies the eclipse of the Eastern Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, the beginning of nation-states from Ireland to Japan, and assorted other civilizational rises and falls by sourcing them ultimately to a volcanic eruption in the Sunda Strait separating Sumatra and Java. From ice cores and tree rings climatologists know temperatures nosed down around A.D. 535, a fact that Keys, while hedging it as a possible cause, narratively treats as the actual initiator of the "proto-modern" world. Keeping that condition in mind, the skeptical reader can still engage with this Keys' lively, popular story. At its center figures a Mongolian people, the Avars, made itinerant by droughts, plagues, and wars. They headed west across the steppe, and the rest is history. Whatever the merit of Keys' single chain of causality, his marshalling of a variety of evidence and literary sources in his cause produces rhetoric that can persuade. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
The political face of the world changed irrevocably in midsixth century a.d., says the archaeology correspondent of The Independent, in a formidably argued treatise. Armed with advice from dozens of academic consultants and visits to archaeology sites worldwide, Keys proposes that a catastrophic volcanic eruption in a.d. 535 launched persistent and devastating climate change. Atmospheric dust obscured the sun, leading to crop failures, drought, famine, and epidemic disease, followed by floods in many areas, more disease, more civic disruption, major migrations and large- and small-scale warfare. It meant the end of storied old regimesthe Roman Empire and Teotihuacan in Mexico, as well as more obscure chiefdoms among the peoples of central Asia and the Far East, Northern Europe and the British Islesindeed, no continent was untouched. This domino theory focuses first on Egypt, where the drought-cum-flood scenario led to a population explosion of rodents, bringing flea-borne bubonic plague to devastate the Mediterranean world and thence to the western British Isles. Keys catalogues the chronology of climate change and social disruption area by out-of-the-way area, buttressing his case by diverse contemporary observations that ``yellow dust rained down like snow'' (China) and ``the sun gave forth its light without brightness like the moon during this whole year'' (Rome). Still, skeptical readers may look to other forces at workpolitical, circumstantial, even personalespecially since Keys admits that conclusions about changes in the New World are more speculative. In the end, the evidence of a volcanic eruption more powerful than Krakatoa, occurring in that same part of the world, is the linchpin of Keys's argument. Such an event could wreak major mayhem in a much less populous world. Let the scholars debate the evidence while the rest of us enjoy the encapsulated history of all those tribes ancestral to the nation states we recognize today. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A challenging new perspective. [Catastrophe] is original, provocative and should be taken seriously."
-HUGH KENNEDY
Professor of Early Islamic History,
St. Andrews University, Scotland
"[Catastrophe is] a radical new approach to historical writing. This is truly a book for the end of the millennium."
-DR. MARK HORTON
Leading authority on African archaeology,
British University
From the Inside Flap
It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world―essentially the modern world as we know it today―began to emerge.
In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago.
The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave.
Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.
In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.
From the Back Cover
"A challenging new perspective. [Catastrophe] is original, provocative and should be taken seriously."
-HUGH KENNEDY
Professor of Early Islamic History,
St. Andrews University, Scotland
"[Catastrophe is] a radical new approach to historical writing. This is truly a book for the end of the millennium."
-DR. MARK HORTON
Leading authority on African archaeology,
British University
About the Author
David Keys - archaeology correspondent of the London daily paper, The Independent, and leading TV archaeological consultant - has visited over one thousand archaeological sites in sixty countries.
