Paleoenvironmental reconstructions for the ancient Near East rely in part on investigating past weather patterns. These investigations are based on the presumption that a better understanding of ancient climate should help us know more about the conditions under which a number of civilizations flourished and declined. The region is one in which agriculture and animal husbandry were often marginal even under the best climatic conditions. Temperature and Precipitation Records. In the Near East, where written records have existed for millennia and significant temperature and precipitation records might be expected to have been kept, there exist, in fact, very few sets of meteorological station records that cover more than one hundred years.
Details are generally, and perhaps mercifully, lacking.
A few nongovernmental records exist such as the diaries of British Residents in Smyrna, Turkey, but at best these cover only the nineteenth century. Some Ottoman archival records were sent to Berlin for analysis at about the time of World War I, but the building in which they were housed burned down. The data exist for little more than a century and a half at best. Even more limited in time and number of stations reporting are such records as soil moisture, soil temperature, wind speed and direction frequencies, and sunshine, or solar radiation. Pollen Records Proxy records, substitutes for thermometric and rain gauge records, such as pollen analyses from stratified cores taken from geological or lake sediments are another step toward developing a climatological record.