Philolog

Posted by Patrick Hunt

Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498.

Dr. Patrick Hunt, Stanford University

"The Lamb broke the first seal...and I looked and saw a white horse, and seated on him was one carrying a bow, and a wreath was given to him and he went out out conquering in order to conquer...and when he broke the second seal...another horse came out fiery red and to him seated on it was given power to take peace from the earth and internecine strife and he was given a great sword...and when he broke the third seal... I looked and saw a black horse and him seated on it carried a pair of scales in his hand and I heard a voice in the middle of the creatures calling, 'A quart of wheat for a denarius and three quarts of barley for a denarius and do not injure the oil and the wine"...and when he broke the fourth seal... I looked and saw a yellowish-green horse and the name of him seated on it was Death, and Hades followed him, and authority was given to them over a quarter of the earth to kill with sword and famine and plague and by wild beasts of the earth." Apocalypse 6:1-7 (1)

This brief note is a mostly sobering assessment in the form of historical observation about ancient precedents and possible modern parallels for the metaphor of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As an elected Fellow of the Royal Geogrpahical Society (since 1989), and some of my alpine research has also been sponored by the National Geographic Society's Expedition Council (2007-2008), the scenario of snowballing cataclysmic ecological phenomena has long occupied my thinking since studying paleoclimatology in graduate study. The cause-effect interrelationships between war, famine and plague and death are hardly lost on the historian, The above enigmatic biblical passage has been subject to so many bizarre and contradictory literary and theological misinterpretations, like so much of religious writ, and its apocalyptic genre does little to discourage a wide range of visionary hermeneutics. At least this musing is on somewhat common ground in the long view of concatenated cyclical or cause-effect related catastrophes.

Dürer's above image is perhaps the most famous of any attempts to visualize this difficult passage and easily also one of the most dramatic with its gaunt and skeletal pair of deathly horse and rider in the foreground with sad people underfoot - even the religious leaders and kings are not spared - as the very pillars of society and foundations of civilization seem to be swallowed up. Naturally, it is unlikely for the biblical author[s] to derive an environmental application - as this brief note extrapolates - from the possibly allegorical literature here with an implied sequencing of drought, famine, pestilence and death or with war inserted at the beginning or somewhere along the downward-spiraling process.

I prefer to interpret the above biblical passage where it refers to the indirect object "them" in the last verse "authority given to them " as a somewhat interlocking operation by sword, famine, plague and so on since so many are affected, possibly each one individually reducing population by a quarter in a snowball effect. Most interpretations equate the third seal and black horse and rider as famine, especially with the scales and selling of food commodities in quarts of grain. The paucity of agricultural food supply referenced is understandable because a Roman denarius was about the equivalent of a daily wage in the late first century Roman world of the biblical text. That a daily wage's earning power would only buy a quart of wheat - the more valuable grain here - speaks to the meager supply of food and therefore an extended figure for famine.

Few realize the interconnections of how the legendary “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” might also function as a collective metaphor for the ravages of humankind and the environment in history, often found together in war, famine, disease and death. In figurative language here, however, the four horsemen can manifest such cause-effect relationships that one can easily lead even galloping into the other.

As mentioned, historians attempt to understand the cause-effect interrelationships between war, famine and plague and death. In fact, it is fairly easy to recognize a terrible sequence too often familiar in war-ravaged states. The sequence may or may not replicate the exact sequence in the literary text above. Historically, war generally upsets the agricultural stability such that famine often results from the chaos of marauding, the privations of siege, or the policy of scorched earth. Famine follows, as does plague and death. Plague, however, is the least recognized, the last diagnostically-validated link described in antiquity because of ignorance of microbial activity other than contagion deduced from proximity.

By no means the only quotable text, Polybius describes, for example, in his History III.30.1-4 the narrative of Hannibal's Battle of Saguntum, with just such a sequence of war, famine and death, although any related plague is invisible and not mentioned. As a prelude to the Second Punic War, the people of Saguntum are besieged in their fortress city. Food runs out until, if in credible detail, a diminishing and dying population even resorts near the end to familial cannibalism. Finally the broken walls of the long-weakened city fall to the force of Hannibal's army and even a hardened army is horrified by what they see of the mountain of burning carcasses, which may be the only way to reduce an invisible contagion although Polybius does not record this. (2)

But there is also another observable sequence that deserves mention, one that may or may not be deducible from the above text in Apocalypse 6 but is equally recognizable and may become far more so in the 21st century as increasing feuds over water rights and possibly exponential change in global climates seem imminent, where drought, famine and malnutrition are already visible links in a chain of consequences. (3)

Extended drought - or rain at the wrong times or other disruptions of climatic patterns - can ultimately bring down a civilization, as was likely in ancient history and never too far from present reality even in a world where globalization provides food overnight from seven (or more) thousand miles away. Coupled with rising population, the resulting decreasing per capita grain production is even a looming current problem:

"Confirm[ing] the serious nature of the global food supply...the per capita availability of world cereal grains, which make up 80-90% of the world's food supply, has been declining for the past 17 years (2002)." (4)

Fig. 2 USDA 2007: Stocks-Use Ratios Indicators: note lowered supply even with 2007 factored

It is well attested that both global demand for and global food costs rose sharply in 2007-2008, gravely affecting the poorer, developing countries of the world. (5) While I am not be the first to present this ancient and possibly contemporary sequence suggested by the above literary text - many have also alluded to this metaphor in climate change projections and carbon sequestration models (6) - and a reasonable study of paleoclimatology based on palynology, the carbon record, evaporitic basins, oxygen isotopic studies and other data, I hope to summarize it briefly in accessible terms. Pointing out how humans have at times influenced this chain of events, others have posited parts of the sequence as links of the anthropogenic chain, however generalized but no less real. (7)

Here is a hypothetical situation that must have actually also happened in history, possibly at the interstices of what we often term the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean world when mass migrations and general chaos suggest a possible scenario like below. (8) In antiquity, it was recommended that a portion of every seed harvest be reserved for the next year's planting seed. Purely for example, if on any given small to medium-sized farm, a normal crop yield was 100 bushels, it was practical to save 10% or 10 bushels of grain for planting. Given the same expected amount of mouths to feed, if conditions are good, expectations would be at least that 10 bushels of grain seed would yield another 100 bushels the following year, guaranteeing some form of stability provided that rainfall or climatic circumstances did not change radically. But if drought or freakish bad weather occurred, dramatically lowering the crop yield to 70 bushels, and if the same ratio of seed grain was put aside for planting the next year and the population remained the same, this resulted in only 70% of the comestible grain for the same number of mouths to feed. Naturally, agriculture did not produce the only food sources of antiquity, but grazing or fed livestock would also suffer accordingly from drought and famine. What results is understood by the principle of diminishing returns.

Presumably, if this drought were limited to only a local disaster, the opportunity might exist to purchase someone else's surplus. But if this became a regional disaster of widely-suffered drought or crop-afflicted change, the consequences were far more dire and more difficult to mitigate depending on the volume of total farmland affected. If it were a severe drought and water was scarce over an extended several years, the resulting problems could be catastrophic across a society. If the 10% of the crop yield of 70 bushels was reserved for seed for the following year, having eaten the diminished 70%, and if the drought gained severity so that there was again a lower harvest of only 50 bushels of grain from the 7 bushels of planted seed grain, this means that the same number of mouths to feed were now having to live on 50% of the yield even before the seed grain was yet again to be reserved, and it is more likely the reserve of 5 bushels would have been eaten too because people and farm animals would now be in trouble (a forget-the-future-we-must-survive-the-present radical philosophy). In the second year of such a drought, there would already have been some incipient malnutrition, a lowering of immune systems and resistance to disease, but now it would become especially hard for the weak, particularly the aged and infants. By the third year of extended drought, famine could easily lead to plague and pestilence and beyond to widespread death. If the social structure was also undermined by such a deepening crisis where laws or a ruler could no longer provide parameters of stable behavior for a people, the stability of the state or dynasty was greatly threatened and civil war may ensue. In any case, applying the basic scenario where drought led to famine, which led to disease and this either led to war (or in some cases followed it) and to death, it is not hard to imagine the havoc.

Fig. 3 Harvested grain - a diminishing, more costly commodity?

The above hypothetical scenario is derived from a generic grain. Agronomy in antiquity was unlikely to know, except by empirical experience, that some grains are more or less sensitive to drought and to salinization, especially salinity that might result from cultivation in an evaporitic basin. Barley (8.0) and Rye (11.4), for example, have relatively high treshhold salinity levels known as EC values, whereas rice (3.0) and corn (1.7) are relatively sensitive in EC values. (9) There is also an obvious linear decrease in crop yield as salinity increases.

If everyone in a radius of a thousand miles is so afflicted today, we compensate by importing more foodstuff from abroad or across a continent. In antiquity, there was often no other recourse than to leave the territory in a mass migration after a social catastrophe following such an environmental disaster. Some deduce this very scenario for the Aegean with the migrations of the Sea Peoples in the 12th c. BCE southeast to Egypt and to Palestine. (10) The climatic swath of the Sahel on the continent of Africa today, however rich in mineral resources, is suffering in exactly these terms on the increasingly-desertified margins of the Sahara. (11) Every observer can easily note that the once-permanent snowpacks on Mt. Kilimanjaro are greatly reduced even in the last few decades. Alpine glaciers in Europe are projected to be reduced by 25% by the year 2025, and in 2008 there was a recorded higher temperature gain of 1.1 º Celsius (compared to previous years) and a reduction of at least an overall 1.5 meters on some of the highest glaciers around Col d'Ambin in the Cottian Alps relative to 2007 alone where this researcher also works on reconstructing paleoclimatic environments and where the National Geographic Society has been sponsoring my research in 2007-2008. (12) Although not the first in the modern world, for the first time ever in extended drought the State of South Australia has had to import necessary water because its own sources have dried up, purchasing 261 gigalitres. (13) One hardly has to wonder what could happen if the vast Himalayan and related montane snowpack that supplies water for half the world's population from such rivers as the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, etc., begin to melt as projected by even conservative hydrologists. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may indeed already be in the saddle.

In conclusion, while this brief note is not in any way intended as a Doomsday scenario, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to have ridden together through the ancient world and can easily ride again, with or without a prophetic trumpet to announce them. "Amber waves of grain" may be at more risk than we think.

Notes:

(1) Revelation, vol. 38, Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1975, 96 & ff. Commentary by J. Massyngberde Ford, excerpted by the author of this brief article. As a possible precedent, in the Hebrew scriptures, another set of four horses - now in chariots - with similar colors appears in Zechariah 6:1-7 although without such negative connotations or direct associations with these dire horses in the New Testament passage.

(2) Thomas Madden. Empires of Trust. New York: Penguin, 2008, esp. 98-108. An excellent study of the circumstances of the siege.

(3) C. Rosenzweig and D. Hillel. Climate Change and the Global Harvest. Oxford University Press, 1998; Brian Dawson and Matt Spannagle. The Complete Guide to Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2009, 215-216

(4) David Pimentel. "Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global Environmental Change" in Ian Douglas, ed. Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change: Causes and Consequences of Global Environmental Change. John Wiley & Son, 2002, 441.

(5) Martin Wolf, "Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture." April 30, 2008. Financial Times Economists Forum, 2008: http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2008/04/food-crisis-is-a-chance-to-reform-global-agriculture/

(6) Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, "Climate change and health: preparing for unprecedented challenges." 12/10/07, http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2007/20071211_maryland/en/index.html?language=; also see Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, "IMPACTS: On the Threshold of Abrupt Climate Changes", Paul Preuss, 9/17/08, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2008/09/17/impacts-on-the-threshold-of-abrupt-climate-changes/

(7) J. V. Thirgood. Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion. London: Academic Press, 1981; R. Meiggs. Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; A. W. Crosby. Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2004. Diamond has his critics, to be sure, and this author will be neutral on this matter, but Diamond does present an ample group of case studies and a bibliography of specialists' research supporting some anthropogenic change.

(8) M. Williams. "Dark Ages and Dark Areas: Global deforestation in the Deep Past." Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000) 28-46; A. J. McMichael. Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. Cambridge University Press, 1993; R. R. Colwell. "Global Climate Change and Infectious Disease." Science 274 (1996) 2025-2031.

(9) R. A. Fischer and R. Maurer. "Drought resistance in spring wheat cultivars. I. Grain yield responses." Australian Journal of Agricultural Research 29.5 (1978) 897 - 912. Drought experiments were conducted in northwest Mexico on a wide range of cereal cultivars, mostly durum wheats; T. Ameda and S. Schubert. "Mechanisms of drought resistance in grain legumes: I. Osmotic adjustment." SINET: Ethiopian Journal of Science 26.1 (2003) 37-46. Drought experiments in Germany in 1994-95 on diverse grain legumes to determine osmotica and alternative mechanisms; Donald Sparks. Environmental Soil Chemistry. London: Academic Press, 1995, 231, Table 10.2. Note that in Sparks citations these are relative salinity tolerances and that "absolute tolerances vary, depending on climate, soil conditions and cultural practices." EC (salinity threshold) is expressed as ECe (dS m-1).

(10) Trude and Moshe Dothan. Peoples of the Sea. New York: Scribner's, 1992, 87-96 & ff., esp. 87; Joseph Maran. "The Spreading of Objects and Ideas in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean: Two Case Examples from the Argolid of the 13th and 12th centuries BC," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 336 (Nov. 2004) 11-30; Ayelet Gilboa. "Sea Peoples and Phoenicians along the Southern Phoenician Coast - A Reconciliation: A Representation of Sikila (SKL) Material Culture." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 337 (Feb. 2005) 47-78; S. Wachsmann. "The Ships of the Sea Peoples." International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 11.4 (2007) 297-304.

(11) "Micronutrient Malnutrition: Half the World's Population Affected" WHO: The World Health Report 1996, World Health Organization 13 Nov. 1996 (78) 1-4.; also see Lester Brown, "World Grain Stocks Fall to 57 Days of Consumption: Grain Prices Starting to Rise" 2006, http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/indicators/C54/ (source of USDA figure).

(12) Luca Mercalli, President, Italian Meteorological Institute, Busseoleno, pers. comm., September, 2008; Patrick Hunt. Alpine Archaeology, New York: Ariel Books, 2007, chs. 1-3; Patrick Hunt. Field Report to Expeditions Council, National Geographic Society, 2008 (Hannibal Expedition); Mateo Gutierrez. Climatic Geomorphology. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005, on soils and humans in climatic change, 349, 601.

(13) "Climate Watch: Australia" Geographical Magazine. Royal Geographical Society, London, February, 2009, 10.

Photo and image credit:
Fig. 1 www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/durer1.jpg; Fig. 2 USDA Economic Research Service 2007; http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September07/Indicators/Charts/Indicators_market_fig2.gif; Fig. 3 Purdue University CES.

copyright © February 2009 Dr. Patrick Hunt
Stanford University

http://www.patrickhunt.net
phunt@stanford.edu