Rubbish

Elusa is an ancient city in the Negev, 20 km from Beersheba. Elusa was the departure point of the caravans for Egypt or for Sinai. In the Torah this city bears the name 'Bered', a city famous for the vineyards from which wine was made. The white wine of this city of nearly 20,000 people was considered a medicine in the countries of the Mediterranean.

This flourishing city, also called 'Haluza', disappeared in the 7th century CE, buried under the earth of the Negev. Today what can be seen are a few remains of its former life. Historians believed that the fall of Elusa came about through the presence of Islam, which prohibited the production of wine, the commodity on which its wealth was based. But the archaeologists who excavated and analysed the rubbish realized that the fall of the city was not in the 7th century but at least a century earlier, when the Islamic religion did not yet exist. So they understood that this tragedy happened after a great change of climate caused by volcanic eruptions.

The rubbish studies were carried out under the supervision of the professor of archaeozoology at the University of Haifa, Guy Bar-Oz. These studies were based on ashes, on bones of meat and fish, on grape pips and olive stones, on broken wine jars, and they saw that after the 550s there was no more rubbish, noting that at the same time as they stopped throwing out rubbish there was a great climate change in Asia and Europe, a change that caused great difficulties for survival in the years of the mid-6th century CE.

The cold period of the climate change was calculated by the professor of environmental analysis Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge, who found that this period ran from the years around 536 to nearly 660. Examining what happened in those years, the professor and his colleagues saw that there were certain volcanic eruptions in that same time. The ash from the lava, covering the sun, caused an excessive cold that made life quite hard to live, through lack of food and through certain pandemics that spread rapidly, such as the plague epidemic in the time of Justinian, the emperor of the Roman Empire that was later called the Byzantine Empire — an epidemic that reached almost the entire empire, including Elusa.

Probably the fall of Elusa came with the fall of the economy of the place. Elusa lived exclusively from the export of wine. Disease, hunger and cold put an end to the exports, and Elusa was abandoned. Today we know that the reason for many historic events was always the economy.

Source: Megan Gannon