The Palace at Megiddo
Beneath the Sea of Galilee lies a core of grey mud about 18 metres long, and in it is a record of the end of a world. In 2013 Dafna Langgut and Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, with Thomas Litt of the University of Bonn, counted the pollen grains in that mud at intervals of about 40 years. Between roughly 1250 and 1100 BCE the oaks, pines and carobs thinned, and so did the olive groves. It was the driest spell of the entire Bronze and Iron Ages.
Over the same stretch of time, the palaces of the eastern Mediterranean burned. Ugarit fell. Hazor fell. Megiddo, guarding the road from Egypt to Mesopotamia, saw its last Canaanite palace destroyed in the second half of the twelfth century BCE. Finkelstein’s verdict was blunt: within a few generations, the whole Bronze Age order had “crumbled”.
The pollen raises a question that reaches far beyond Canaan, and it hangs over Antalya this week, where the UN climate summit, COP31, runs until 20 November. Is sudden climate stress a recurring trigger of political collapse? Or is it a pressure that only weak states fail to survive?
I have spent much of this year testing that question on a country whose record of upheaval runs unbroken for nine centuries. England, from Domesday to the present, gave me 53 episodes of rebellion, deposition, civil war, foreign war and plague. Thirteen of them were major internal crises. I set them against a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature and asked one thing of each: was the decade before it colder than the half century people had grown used to?
Eleven of the thirteen began after such a decade. A decade sharply colder than recent experience carried roughly a one in four chance of a major internal crisis. A sharply warmer decade carried somewhere between one in twelve and one in twenty.
The clearest case is the Wars of the Roses. A great volcanic eruption around 1452 chilled the north, and tree rings across the hemisphere record a savage cooling in the summer of 1453. That year England lost Gascony, and Henry VI collapsed into a stupor that lasted more than a year. The first battle of St Albans followed in 1455, Towton in 1461. All three phases of the war began after decades in the coldest sixth of all years on my measure.
Cold did not predict England’s foreign wars. The danger lay at home.
The modern Levant has run the same experiment. Syria’s drought of 2007 to 2010 was the worst in its recorded history. In 2015 Colin Kelley and colleagues argued that it drove rural families into the cities and helped light the fuse of the civil war. In 2017 Jan Selby and colleagues replied that the evidence for that chain was far weaker than the headlines suggested. The dispute is still open. But one point in it is hard to dodge: Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus lived through dry years too, and none of them descended into civil war.
Israel is the starker contrast. Half of the country is desert, yet about 60 per cent of its drinking water now comes from the sea. It collects and treats about 94 per cent of its wastewater and reuses about 87 per cent, mostly on farms, more than any other OECD member. When the Water Authority warned of a serious drought in August 2025, it was a problem for engineers and planners, not for the stability of the state.
England’s record makes the same point from the other side. The 1570s and 1580s were among the coldest decades in the whole reconstruction, yet Elizabethan England did not dissolve into civil war. It had a secure monarch, a working Privy Council and a growing system of parish poor relief. More than a century earlier, Henry VI’s government had entered its cold decades with royal debts of £372,000 and a king who could not rule. The same weather that one regime absorbed broke the other. Climate loads the dice. Institutions decide the throw.
For Israel, the lesson cuts two ways. Its water system is itself an institution, and institutions decay when they are taken for granted: the Taub Center’s 2025 State of the Nation report warned that the water sector is in a crisis the public barely sees. Nor is the neighbours’ fate written in the rainfall. Whether their states can bend is a matter of politics, not weather, and Israel has every interest in the answer.
In the late 1930s, excavators from the University of Chicago dug into the annex of Megiddo’s last Canaanite palace. In its ruins they found a hoard of carved ivories, treasures of an international age, buried as that age came apart in drought and fire.
The annex has been empty for three thousand years. The mound it stood on still looks out over the Jezreel Valley. The rains will fail again, and the mud beneath the Sea of Galilee will record it, as it always has. What the mud cannot record is whether anyone was ready.
