Collapse of the Akkadian Empire

Barely a century after Sargon, his empire fell apart — and the likely trigger came from the sky. Cores drilled from ancient soils and seabeds record a brutal, centuries-long drought beginning around 2200 BCE that gutted the rain-fed farmland the empire lived on. A near-contemporary poem, 'The Curse of Akkad,' mourned a land where 'the large fields produced no grain.' It is history's first recorded case of a pattern still with us: an empire that reached farther than its margins could be fed, undone when the climate turned.