Why Did These 8 Ancient Civilizations Mysteriously Collapse? | Unveiled

Why Did These 8 Ancient Civilizations Mysteriously Collapse?

The world is constantly changing. Societies rise and fall, empires crumble and monuments get abandoned. Throughout history, humanity has gradually gained knowledge… but we’ve forgotten a lot of what came before us, as well. Many of the most famous and beautiful ruins from the ancient world weren’t just lost to time, though… so, what happened to them?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; why did these ancient civilizations mysteriously collapse?

First, it’s important to distinguish between a culture and a civilization. While the civilizations and cities themselves have been lost, the people who inhabited them – and their cultures – often still exist today. For example, probably the most famous collapsed civilization of all time, the Maya, still has a population in the millions in Mexico and Central America. The mystery, then, isn’t where did the people go, but why did they go? What convinced ancient citizens of lost civilizations that they’d be better off leaving their own advanced and beautiful cities rather than remaining within their walls?

The classic Maya collapse wasn’t the only Maya collapse in history – there was another in the 2nd century AD – but the one that’s been confounding archaeologists for years, now, happened between the 8th and 9th centuries. Enormous Maya cities characterized by distinct, terraced pyramids like Copán (in modern day Honduras) and Tikal (in Guatemala) were abandoned before the year 1,000. Archaeologists can be confident of the dates because the Maya wrote the date onto the monuments they built, and such records disappear around the 9th century, when it seems monument construction stopped, and cities fell into disrepair.

It’s generally accepted that at this time the Maya travelled further north to different Maya centres, like Chichen Itza in what’s now Mexico, but there are dozens of theories on exactly why they left the southern lowlands to begin with. Some of the most popular explanations suggest that the more southerly regions were, around the time the Mayans moved, rendered uninhabitable by logging and a severe drought – a “megadrought” by some estimations. Essentially, the Mayans had cut down too many trees, so when the drought rolled in, topsoil was eroded, and their once-reliable cities were no longer able to feed their growing population. So, under threat of starvation, the Mayan people dispersed and found new places to live. Another theory, though, is that it was an endemic disease, potentially a widespread parasitic infection, which primarily destabilized the Maya and forced them to relocate. Then, another suggests that regional conflicts might’ve been to blame. Today, while we know they did move, we’re still not certain on their reasons for doing so.

But the Maya weren’t the first or last civilization to collapse in the Americas. Much earlier were the Olmecs, Mesoamerica’s earliest recorded, advanced civilization who thrived around 1,500 BC. The Olmecs were known for building statues of enormous heads, now called “Olmec colossal heads”, many of which survive today. Their largest city was San Lorenzo (also now in Mexico), which collapsed as far back as 900 BC, nearly 2,000 years before the end of the Maya. It’s theorized that the Olmecs had to move because of volcanic activity; that a big enough eruption could have decimated their crops, forcing them to go elsewhere for food.

Much further north is the United States’ “First City”, Cahokia, a Native American city that at its height had a population between 10,000 and 20,000 in the 11th century AD - which is roughly equivalent to the population of London, England, in the same period. Early European settlers purportedly didn’t believe that Native Americans could be capable of building such a city, and so wrongly attributed it to another group, like the Phoenicians (from present-day Lebanon), or even the Vikings, instead. Today, the ruins of Cahokia are found in the Midwest, close to St Louis, Missouri. The site bears evidence of at least two major floods in its past, prompting many to suggest that it was the flooding which forced the population to disperse. While they can’t rival Cahokia for size or scope, there are many older Native American sites across the continent, too… with some of the oldest belonging to the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in the American southwest. Some of their remarkable dwellings (carved into cliff-faces) survive today, such as the Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.

Far away from the Americas, civilizations in Europe and Mesopotamia had risen and fallen as well. The oldest advanced civilization in Europe was the Ancient Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete between the years 3,000 and 1,000 BC. Unsurprisingly, Minoan ruins (like the Palace of Knossos) are now major historical sites in modern Greece, but details on what happened to the Minoans remain elusive. The leading theory blames their demise on the Thera Eruption, occurring on a nearby island now known as Santorini, which is thought to have been one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history. It happened around 1,600 BC, creating a tsunami that decimated Minoan settlements. It’s believed by some that the fate of the Ancient Minoans is actually what inspired Plato’s world-famous Atlantis allegory, depicting a powerful civilization destroyed by the gods. Interestingly, the Minoan Civilization also has ties to another mainstream Greek myth, that of Theseus and the Minotaur; some believe that Knossos itself is the real-world location of the legendary labyrinth.

But what about the oldest recorded civilization we know of? Well, it also collapsed, for various reasons. Ancient Mesopotamia was the birthplace of the written word more than 3,000 years BC. Some of the oldest texts in the world are written in Sumerian, with Sumer (today Iraq) being where the civilization emerged from. Mesopotamia hosted a number of civilizations (including the Sumerians and Akkadians) across an exceptionally wide region for thousands of years, lasting until the fall of Babylon in the 6th century BC, before it was ultimately conquered by Alexander the Great two centuries later.

Another civilization thriving around the same time, though, was that of the Indus Valley, the remains of which can be found in Pakistan. It’s also called the Harappan Civilization after one of its largest cities, Harappa. In their prime, cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were extraordinary; boasting the world’s oldest sanitation systems, public baths, evidence of city planning, and potentially even of elected officials, they were significantly ahead of their time. But archaeological evidence suggests that Indus Valley success was short-lived, and that by 1,900 BC, the cities were in chaos. Dead animals and people lay unburied in the streets, disease was rife, conflicts were common, and eventually, the centres of the Indus Valley civilization were abandoned. Again, there are multiple theories as to why it all fell apart. Some believe the changing course of the Indus River was chiefly to blame… for others it’s a string of severe earthquakes and weak monsoons, leading to social instability and water shortages. Ultimately, many of the Indus Valley people moved southeast into parts of modern India where their influence can now be seen in various other ancient sites.

There is one theory, however, which proposes a grander connection between the end of the Indus Valley civilization and the end of Mesopotamia, and also with the demise of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, and the long lost Liangzhu culture in Ancient China, for example: the 4.2 Kiloyear Event. Speculated to have occurred around 2,200 BC, the 4.2 Kiloyear Event is said to have been a worldwide epidemic of severe droughts that crippled many powerful societies. It didn’t spell instant doom for all of them, with some surviving from this point longer than others, but it’s suggested that it did spark the beginning of the end for most. However, many scientists don’t agree with this idea, arguing that no one single event can be blamed for the collapse of multiple societies across a considerable timespan. Nevertheless, all indicators are that severe droughts were a major reason that many of the world’s most powerful civilizations fell… and if not droughts, then other weather events and natural disasters. Connected or not, similarities can be drawn.

That said, sometimes human and political reasons are to blame, when empires get too big to be properly and effectively managed. Once the largest empire in the world, for example, the Mongol Empire, splintered in the 13th century AD into four separate empires with different rulers. This move meant the Mongol Empire could eventually be taken over and dissolved by the Ming Dynasty to the east and the Russians to the north. And sometimes wars really do bring down vast, seemingly impenetrable empires, too; with one of the leading causes for the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD being that the Romans suffered too many consecutive military defeats. There’s less by way of “mystery” in these cases, because the outcomes are more linked to human choice and activity, but we have seen civilizations effectively dismantled in this way, too.

In every case, there are myriad, complex reasons behind people abandoning their cities and starting afresh elsewhere, and societal collapses don’t happen overnight. Often, the decline and desertion of a civilization takes hundreds of years, as it did with the Maya, the Harappans and the Romans in particular. But natural disasters like flooding at Cahokia or the eruption of Thera can accelerate the process. And that’s why these ancient civilizations mysteriously collapsed.