Hill, DJ orcid.org/0000-0001-5492-3925 (2019) Climate change and the rise of the central Asian Silk Roads. In: Yang, LE, Bork, H-R, Fang, X and Mischke, S, (eds.) Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road. Springer , Cham, Switzerland , pp. 247-259. ISBN 978-3-030-00727-0
Abstract
The final centuries BCE (Before Common Era) saw the main focus of trade between the Far East and Europe switch from the so called Northern Route across the Asian steppes to the classical silk roads. The cities across central Asia flourished and grew in size and importance. While clearly there were political, economic and cultural drivers for these changes, there may also have been a role for changes in climate in this relatively arid region of Asia. Analysis of a new ensemble of snapshot global climate model simulations, run every 250 years over the last 6000 years, allows us to assess the long term climatological changes seen across the central Asian arid region through which the classical Silk Roads run. While the climate is comparatively stable through the Holocene, the fluctuations seen in these simulations match significant cultural developments in the region. From 1500 BCE the deterioration of climate from a transient precipitation peak, along with technological development and the immigration of Aryan nomads, drove a shift towards urbanization and probably irrigation, culminating in the founding of the major cities of Bukhara and Samarkand around 700–500 BCE. Between 1000 and 250 BCE the modelled precipitation in the central Asian arid region undergoes a transition towards wetter climates. The changes in the Western Disturbances, which is the key weather system for central Asian precipitation, provides 10% more precipitation and the increased hydrological resources may provide the climatological foundation for the golden era of Silk Road trade.
Metadata
Item Type: | Book Section |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
Keywords: | SIlk roads; Climate change; Climate model; 6000 years; Precipitation |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 15 Jun 2018 12:28 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 21:21 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/978-3-030-00728-7_12 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:131262 |