Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period

Platforms for exchange bringing together scientists working on the same regions and time periods tend to be few and far between when combining the humanities with the natural sciences. Hosted at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, »Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period« (23.-24.01.2020) offered just this, encompassing 10 contributions and 3 expert responses. With participants once again ranging from the fields of ancient history, classics, climate science, environmental history, marine geology, and paleoclimatology, the international conference continued the efforts of the organizer Sabine R. Huebner's (Basel) previous endeavor "Climate Science & Ancient History. Decoding «Natural» and «Human» Archives" (Basel, 27.-28.11.2018) in linking the historical and natural sciences, this time focusing on Egypt as an exhaustive sample region for the Roman period. Considered the Empire's granary and the transportation hub linking the Mediterranean to Eastern territories, analyses of Egypt as a Roman province differ mainly in relation to the research questions posed by each discipline, but not so much in their shared aims of exploring the past.