Timeline of Environmental History - 3rd Millennium BC

3rd Millennium BC

Year(s) Event(s)
Start End
c. 30th century BC
  • c. 3000 BC: Stonehenge begins to be built. In its first version, it consists of a circular ditch and bank, with 56 wooden posts. (National Geographic, June 2008).
  • Sumerian Cuneiform script, considered among the oldest alphabets, is created.
2900 BC Floods at Shuruppak from horizon to horizon, with sediments in Southern Iraq, stretching as far north as Kish, and as far south as Uruk, associated with the return of heavy rains in Nineveh and a potential damming of the Karun River to run into the Tigris River. This ends the Jemdet Nasr period and ushers in the Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia cultures of the area. Possible association of this event with the Biblical deluge.
c. 2880 BC Germination of Prometheus (a bristlecone pine of the species Pinus longaeva), formerly the world's oldest known non-clonal organism.
c. 2832 BC Germination of Methuselah (a bristlecone pine of the species Pinus longaeva), currently the world's oldest known non-clonal organism.
2807 BC Suggested date for an asteroid or comet impact occurring between Africa and Antarctica, around the time of a solar eclipse on May 10, based on an analysis of flood stories. Possibly causing the Burckle crater and Fenambosy Chevron.
2650 BC
  • Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh describes vast tracts of cedar forests in what is now southern Iraq. Gilgamesh defies the gods and cuts down the forest, and in return the gods say they will curse Sumer with fire (or possibly drought). By 2100 BC, soil erosion and salt buildup have devastated agriculture. One Sumerian wrote that the "earth turned white." Civilization moved north to Babylonia and Assyria. Again, deforestation becomes a factor in the rise and subsequent fall of these civilizations.
  • Some of the first laws protecting the remaining forests decreed in Ur.
c. 2630 BC 1815 BC Construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
2500 BC Sahara becomes fully desiccated, and conditions become largely identical to those of today. Desiccation had been proceeding from 7500-6000 BCE, as a result of the shift in the West African tropical monsoon belt southwards from the Sahel, and intensified by the 5.9 kiloyear event. Subsequent rates of evaporation in the region led to a drying of the Sahara, as shown by the drop in water levels in Lake Chad. Tehenu of the Sahara attempt to enter into Egypt, and there is evidence of a Nile drought in the pyramid of Unas.
2300 BC Neolithic period ends in China.
2200 BC Beginning of a severe centennial-scale drought in northern Africa, southwestern Asia and midcontinental North America, which very likely caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt as well as the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. This coincides with the transition from the Subboreal period to the subatlantic period.
21st century BC Construction of the Ziggurat of Ur.

Read more about this topic:  Timeline Of Environmental History

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