Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
The symbol on the national flag of Lebanon is the cedar tree. The problem is, there aren’t many cedar trees in Lebanon anymore.
In the ancient world, wood was used as a building material and a source of fuel, and there weren’t many alternatives.
As civilizations and empires grew, they had an insatiable demand for wood and agricultural land, which led to the systematic destruction of ancient forests.
Learn more about deforestation in the ancient world in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Deforestation has been practiced by humans since before the rise of civilization. Archaeologists and historians believe that Paleolithic peoples actively engaged in deforestation through controlled fires to reduce unwanted tree density, making hunting and gathering easier. Early stone tools provide evidence of hand axes used to fell smaller trees.
Neolithic peoples began to deforest as soon as they settled in fertile river valleys to provide irrigation and to create permanent communities along their banks.
These people practiced slash-and-burn farming, purposely burning trees to enhance the soil. The benefits of this process were quickly evident in higher yields, but the impacts were short-lived, as the boost in fertility they generated was wiped out by the cycle of erosion driven by the lack of trees.
When the soil was exhausted, the community moved to the next forest, repeating the cycle. So long as tribes were small, this wasn’t a big problem.
But as human societies transformed into civilizations, these patterns continued, now reinforced by new lumber needs and the construction of city walls.
In Mesopotamia, the arid landscape of the southern Tigris and Euphrates river valleys left early city-states completely starved of native timber. To build their grand temples and fleets of ships, these societies launched massive logging campaigns in the forested highlands to their north.
As local supplies dwindled, Mesopotamian rulers had to look further away, embarking on long-distance logging expeditions outside their borders. We can see direct evidence of this in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the subject of a previous episode, where the king journeys to the distant mountains of Lebanon specifically to cut down its legendary Cedar Forest.
The commonly cited estimate is that about 99.6 percent of Lebanon’s original cedar forest has been lost.
As a result of this persistent deforestation, soil erosion choked the river valleys, destabilizing the entire water system. This triggered a severe salinization crisis, lifting toxic salt deposits from deep underground up to the surface crust. The white, salt-encrusted soil eventually crippled Mesopotamian agriculture, turning the cradle of civilization into a barren desert.
Further east, the great Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro committed many of the same mistakes as their Mesopotamian counterparts.
To build their sprawling urban centers, they stripped the surrounding woodlands bare, consuming vast tracts of timber to fuel the massive kilns that produced millions of water-resistant baked bricks and a flourishing bronze industry.
This deforestation destabilized the Indus River basin, triggering severe soil erosion and causing devastating floods that ultimately pushed their civilization to the brink.
In a region regularly battered by seasonal monsoons and torrents of Himalayan snowmelt, these trees along riverbanks and their deep root systems had acted as vital natural sponges, absorbing the shock of annual floods. In their absence, the flood grew increasingly violent and unpredictable.
This escalating chaos sparked desperation, fueling a devotion to early Hindu deities like Indra, the god of storms and thunder, who was desperately implored by the people to tame the raging waters.
The Greco-Roman world also faced severe deforestation.
Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, Greece was not dependent on a great river system to irrigate its fields; it was a decentralized maritime power.
To build the massive fleets of triremes that projected power across the Mediterranean, they stripped the trees from the hills surrounding the hundreds of Greek city-states.
In the ancient Greek world, these city-states were fiercely competitive. If Athens built a large navy, then Corinth and Thebes rushed to follow suit.
The biggest casualty of this arms race was the Greek forests. Finding trees worthy of building triremes and the hundreds of powerful, long oars that drove them was difficult.
The Aegean world never possessed the massive, resilient timberlands found in the Americas. Mediterranean forests were relatively thin, and once they were gone, they didn’t easily return. This acute timber scarcity permanently damaged local ecosystems, eventually forcing the Greeks to launch colonization missions across the Mediterranean, in no small part, in search of more trees.
We know the effects of deforestation were well known in Greece because their philosophers wrote about it. Plato noted: There are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, as in the case of small islands, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.
As Rome expanded, their thirst for timber followed. Like the Greeks, the Romans relied heavily on shipbuilding to project imperial power across the Mediterranean, a body of water they proudly called Mare Nostrum, or ‘Our Sea.’
But the Roman Empire also had massive lumber needs that went far beyond building warships. Romans demanded an unprecedented amount of constant fuel to feed the great public bathhouses that dotted every corner of the empire.
These sprawling complexes were energy black holes, powered by massive wood-burning furnaces operating directly beneath the bathhouse floors, running continuously.
In addition to the typical effects of deforestation, Roman deforestation unleashed a cycle of death from mosquito-borne illnesses as marshland expanded amid coastal erosion. By stripping the Italian hillsides of their trees, the Romans destroyed the earth’s natural ability to absorb water, just as it had in so many other places.
Severe soil erosion choked local river deltas, such as the Tiber, transforming formerly fertile valleys into the stagnant, sunlit swamps, such as the Pontine Marshes, which were located along the coast southeast of the city of Rome.
This human-made landscape became the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. When the highly lethal malaria parasite arrived from Africa, these artificial swamps turned a regional nuisance into a centuries-long nightmare.
The resulting epidemics rendered vast parts of rural Italy completely uninhabitable, crippling Roman agriculture, altering its labor demographics, and leaving a permanent scar on the empire.
During the reign of Nero, an agriculturalist named Columella warned of the dangers. He said, And neither should there be any marshland near the buildings… for the former throws off a baneful stench in hot weather and breeds insects armed with annoying stings, which attack us in dense swarms… whereby hidden diseases are often contracted, the causes of which even physicians cannot understand
Despite their wisdom, science, and innovation, the Greeks and Romans still fell prey to the damaging effects of deforestation.
Perhaps the civilization most dramatically impacted by deforestation was the Maya.
The Maya, which was a conglomerate of city-states in Mexico and Central America, unintentionally inflicted severe damage on their civilization because of deforestation.
Mayan deforestation was largely driven by an unlikely culprit: their monumental architecture. Every rival city-state across the Mayan world constructed massive pyramids and sprawling plazas. To preserve these sacred ceremonial wonders, the Maya encased them in a thick, protective layer of stucco.
But producing this material came at a staggering ecological cost. To create lime plaster, the Maya had to burn raw limestone at temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Celsius (1,500 degrees Fahrenheit).
Generating that intense, prolonged heat required an incredible amount of wood.
When the Mayan civilization first began, their environment was a dense, unbroken tropical rainforest. Villages were entirely shaded by massive tree canopies, with farmlands carefully carved out of the edges of the jungle.
But as the architectural arms race intensified, the trees began to vanish.
Historian and Biologist, Jared Diamond, described the impacts of Mayan deforestation in his book Collapse. He wrote: Calculation suggests that most of those felled pine trees were being burned for fuel, while the rest were used for construction or for making plaster. At other Maya sites from the pre-Classic era, where the Maya went overboard in lavish use of thick plaster on buildings, plaster production may have been a major cause of deforestation. Besides causing sediment accumulation in the valleys and depriving valley inhabitants of wood supplies, that deforestation may have begun to cause a “man-made drought” in the valley bottom, because forests play a major role in water cycling, such that massive deforestation tends to result in lowered rainfall.
The ecological fallout of this plaster-driven deforestation had drastic consequences for the entire region. The Maya engaged in such widespread clear-cutting that Diamond and other scientists argue they actively transformed their entire ecosystem.
Trees play a vital, stabilizing role in regulating the water cycle, and when that defensive canopy is compromised, the environmental feedback loop turns disastrous.
Stripping the forest didn’t just suppress rainfall; the naked landscape absorbed massive amounts of surface heat, rapidly baking and drying out the tropical soil. This desiccated soil became entirely vulnerable to severe erosion.
While it was completely unintentional, the Maya’s desperate need to fuel their ceremonial architecture triggered a catastrophic ecological collapse.
This human-made crisis fundamentally broke the southern lowlands, facilitating the end of the Classic Maya era and permanently shifting the center of Maya urban civilization hundreds of miles north to the arid plains of the Yucatán Peninsula, giving rise to legendary new cities like Chichén Itzá.
Under the weight of agricultural and social collapse, the Mayan kings, who had practiced the principles of divine right, lost their divine sovereignty. When the rains failed year after year, and the rulers proved utterly powerless to produce the vital agricultural surpluses needed to feed their people, the social contract tore apart.
Desperate, starving populations turned on their elites, triggering a wave of violent revolts and civil unrest that resulted in the collapse of the Mayan world in the 10th century.
Perhaps the most famous example of human-induced deforestation and its dramatic effects is the tragedy that unfolded on Easter Island. When Polynesians first settled the island in the 13th century, the island was lush with trees.
Once they settled, they launched a rapid campaign of deforestation, stripping the land of its giant palm trees. It was an ecological disaster, as it induced widespread soil erosion exacerbated by the intensity of ocean winds.
To make matters worse, the Polynesians also introduced rats, which ate the palm seeds, which prevented natural reforestation.
Wood, in many ways, was the ancient equivalent of what oil is to the modern world. It supplied energy, tools, ships, buildings, and farmland. Because wood performed many of the roles later filled by coal, petroleum, steel, concrete, and plastics, ancient economies were deeply dependent on it. States could postpone local limits by importing timber or conquering new territory, but they could not escape that dependence.
Deforestation wasn’t the sole cause of the collapse of most ancient civilizations, but it was certainly a major contributing factor in many of them. The thirst for the one commodity used for almost everything had unforeseen and devastating consequences.