CLIMATE CHANGE ILLUSTRATED IN ROCK ART/HISTORIC INSCRIPTIONS - HUNGER STONES REVISITED:

An exposed Hunger Stone inscription. Internet photograph, public domain.

There are various implications in climate change that can be seen in rock art, or ways that the changing climate affects rock art. One of the simplest, and most obvious to illustrate, is drought caused by climatic warming and announced by Hunger Stones.

Readers of RockArtBlog will remember that I include inscriptions on stone as a part of our field of interest. I cannot personally find the dividing line between petroglyphs or pictographs and various forms of writing (which can be pictograms such as Egyptian hieroglyphs). I have recently run across a form of inscription carved in stone that I had been previously unaware of - the “Hunger Stone.” Art historians, and historians in general, will have heard of nilometers, the various inscriptions carved into rock that allowed Egyptians to judge the height of the Nile flood phase each year. These have been used for thousands of years. Hunger Stones (hungersteins) are sort of the opposite of this. The nilometer measures the height of the water in the Nile, a hunger stone indicates that the water level is dangerously low. When the river flow is low enough that the inscription is exposed the inhabitants are, in effect, warned that famine may occur because of water shortage, lack of moisture and crop failure.

"If you see me, weep." Elbe river, Decin, Czech Republic. Internet photograph, public domain.

Hunger stones are “a type of hydrological landmark common in Central Europe. Hunger stones serve as famine memorials and warnings and were erected in Germany and in ethnic German settlements throughout Europe in the 15^th through 19^th centuries. These stones were embedded into a river during droughts to mark the water level as a warning to future generations that they will have to endure famine-related hardships if the water sinks to this level again. One famous example in the Elbe river in Děčín, Czech Republic, has ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’ (lit. ‘If you see me, weep’) carved into it as a warning.

Many of these stones, featuring carvings or other artwork, were erected following the hunger crisis of 1816-1817 caused by the eruptions of the Tambora volcano. In 1918, a hunger stone on the bed of the Elbe River near Tetschen, became exposed during a period of low water coincident to the wartime famines of World War I. Similar hunger stones in the river were uncovered again during a drought in 2018.” (Wikipedia)

Dry Sangone river, Turin, Italy. Internet photograph, public domain.

The “If You See Me, Weep” warning had been carved in German by boatman and riverside innkeeper Franz Mayer during a period of low water in 1904 while the country was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Marchal 2018) Others have considerably less carving bearing only dates marking the low water levels for that specific year.

Boatmen and rafters had earned their livelihoods by ferrying goods and passengers back and forth over the river, and when the river water was too low their business and income collapsed. “The rafters engraved the dates of those bad years on the soft sandstone boulders typical for this region, hence the name ‘Hunger Stone.’ About 20 such boulders, engraved with markers and dates going back centuries, can still be found on the banks of the Elbe, a major central European waterway running from the Czech Republic through Germany to the North Sea.” (Marchal 2018)

Dry port, Velence, Hungary. Internet photograph, public domain.

The 2018 exposure of that stone was caused by drought that “affected around 94 percent of the Czech Republic, causing crop damage estimated at nine to 11 billion koruna (350-427 million euros, $408-500 million), according to the Agrarian Chamber.” (Marchal 2018) It would seem that, in spite of modern dams and water control features, the message of the hunger stones is still relevant to modern times, and in the age of global warning, may become ever more pertinent as the current drought in Europe drops water levels to new record lows.

NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.

REFERENCES:

Marchal, Jan, 2018 ‘Hunger Stones’ Tell Elbe’s Centuries-Old Tale of Drought, September 10, 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-09-hunger-stones-elbe-centuries-old-tale.html

Wikipedia, Hunger Stone, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone

METEOROLOGICAL RECORDS IN ROCK ART - CHINESE CAVE INSCRIPTIONS:

Chinese drought inscription,

Davu Cave, Qinling mountains,

China. From Ghose, LiveScience,

August 20, 2015.

A subject in rock art that has long fascinated me is evidence of verifiable events recorded on the rocks. As everyone's daily life is directly impacted by meteorology, that is one area that we should expect to find evidence of in rock inscriptions or pictures. An example of this can be found in inscriptions in Davu Cave, in southeastern China. Located in the Qinling Mountains, this cave contains written inscriptions of droughts occurring in the region and their impact upon the population.

Writing for LiveScience on August 20, 2015, Tia Ghose cited an August 13 article from the journal Scientific Reports that outlined a series of droughts in that area and the inscriptions that record them. The droughts were confirmed by analysis of chemical elements in stalagmites from the cave. Study co-author Sebastian Breitenbach, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Cambridge, England explained that the team analyzed the proportions of carbon, uranium, oxygen, and other isotopes, in stalagmites  to detect climate changes over time that signaled droughts." The amounts of radioactive uranium and carbon, which decay at a known rate, tied specific parts of the stalagmite to particular historic times." (Ghose 2015)  And, "because the water seeping into the cave was likely groundwater, the levels of oxygen and carbon isotopes could provide information about surface conditions outside the cave. The team found that oxygen and carbon levels rose when rainfall was low, suggesting that those markers could reliably reveal when drought conditions occurred." (Ghose 2015)

Comparing this scientific record then with cave inscriptions revealed a very accurate correlation.

"One inscription, which is dated to July 27, 1596, says directly that there is a big drought, and that the writers had come to the cave to get water and pray for rain. Another, dating to 1891m reads: 'On May 24th, 17th year of the Emperor Guangxu period, Qing Dynasty, the local mayor, Huaizong Shu, led more than 200 people into the cave to get water. A fortune-teller named Zhenrong Ran prayed for rain during the ceremony.'" (Ghose 2015)

"Another inscription mentions a Dragon Lake that may have been in the cave." (Ghose 2015)

All in all, records of seven droughts over the past 500 years corresponded quite well with the recorded droughts in the cave formations. The team even used their data from the chemical record and the inscriptions to construct a model to predict future periods of drought in that region. That model predicts that "in the next decade, China is in for more severe and more frequent droughts, though the model can't predict exactly where or when the droughts will occur." (Ghose 2015)

Rock art, not only as a record of the past, but as a predictor of the future. How about that?

REFERENCES:

http://www.livescience.com/51929-cave-graffiti-reveals-drought.html