Survival Against Climate Change and War in the 6th Century: The Resilient Communities of the Levant

"From the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing that brings death." (Procopius, Bell. 4.14.5-6, tr. Kaldellis). As described by the Byzantine scholar and historian Procopius, the 6th century was perhaps one of the most disruptive periods in the historical record.

Those living on the borders of the Byzantine Empire faced an unprecedented ecological shift, the first outbreak of the bubonic plague and the rekindling of military conflict between the Byzantine and Persian Empires. Recent paleoclimate data has unlocked new research possibilities, demonstrating through dendroecological studies a clearly identifiable period of climate instability in the middle 6th century.

Human-environment relationships that were previously locked behind a lack of direct climate evidence are finally available with increasing precision. This has inspired a new wave of research that has begun to unpack how some communities managed to survive such complete upheaval. Settlements documented in the archaeological record demonstrate incredible resilience against what we might otherwise call a climate disaster.

Archaeobotanical data on a decadal scale demonstrates continued, or in some cases increased, productivity. My project will push this research further. To understand how it was possible that some communities survived this turmoil, we must study them in the finest detail possible. It is time we turned our attention towards the individual.

The Nessana and Petra papyri are collections of legal administrative documents dated from 505CE to 689CE that have been uniquely preserved by the arid desert heat. They offer us the only glimpse at local agents of socio-economic change by documenting their private affairs; tax payments, sale agreements, invoices, and marriage dowries. Expanding upon my previous research (McNey 2023, 53.), I will unpack the social networks of resilience hidden within these legal texts.

Reading beneath the surface it is evident that the management of land, coin and produce operated within a nexus of informal social arrangements that ran parallel to the legal framework. In some cases informal arrangements for tax payments, land ownership and payments in kind stretch back generations before surfacing in the legal documents. Are we witnessing the historical reality of a resilient community employing co-operation as its bulwark against ecological destruction?

Agricultural communities across the globe continue to rely upon local environments that are under increasing threat from climate change. Nobel Prize winning economist, Elinor Ostrom, argues that for these communities co-operation at a local level is key to understanding and implementing sustainable land-management strategies. Do we witness this in the papyri, and if so, what can we learn from these historic communities to secure our own sustainable future?