A truly fascinating history | Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization

interesing premise | Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization | David Keys

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	• Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization David Keys Ballantine Books, 2000 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

My 100-word book review

In Catastrophe, author David Keys builds a convincing case for sudden climate change having occurred in the early 6th century, an abrupt dip in worldwide temperatures that would have had massive long-term consequences for civilisations all over the globe. Results could have included the weakening of the Byzantines, the downfall of Teotihuacan and the rise of Islam. This is a fascinating book, and the author's identification of a super volcano as the culprit is highly plausible. However, I think Keys possibly over-estimates this event as a shaper of our modern world, given the existence of so many other important factors.

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A truly fascinating history

This is truly one of the most fascinating theories in ancient history. A volcano that shaped the modern world by forcing the migration of the huns, the crop failures in the Middle East that led to the rise of Islam and the start of the barbarian migrations towards Rome. It is almost too hard to summarize but if you believe that climate can change history than this is the book that will provide excellent evidence on that idea. Truly a masterpiece of an idea.

interesing premise

This book has an intereting premise, that the world as we know it today developed in part from a volcanic eruption that shifted the balance of power.

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CREATION OF THE MODERN WORLD

David keys examines the dark ages and sees the foundations of our modern world, which, he says, emerged from a tremendous volcanic eruption 1500 years ago. The last section of the book is on this calamity, thought to have blocked out sunlight and changed climate around the globe, creating ecological and social conditions that promoted great changes.

The discussion of this volcanic event here is reasonably interesting. Keys also gives a fascinating description of how an asteroid impact would look to us earthlings. His thesis is plausable, but certainly not proven. After all, social changes can take place for any number of reasons. A writer in 3008 could just as easily point to the violent 20th century and ascribe everything to global warming.

This book is a good read in any event, if just for the first half, where Keys covers the early history of England, France, Arabia, China and Japan. It is unlikely many can say they are too familiar with much that occurred then.

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It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world?essentially the modern world as we know it today?began to emerge.

In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago.

The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave.

Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.

In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.

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