Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (49 page)

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APPENDIX
 
  1. Text of John of Ephesus as recorded in the
    Chronicle of Michael the Syrian.
    9.296.
    Chabot quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before
    A
    .
    D
    . 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino,
    Journal of Geophysical Research
    88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
  2. Procopius,
    Wars, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard.
    4. 14.5 (H. B. Dewing).
  3. Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene,
    F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks, London, 1899. Quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before
    A
    .
    D
    . 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino,
    Journal of Geophysical Research
    88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
  4. De Ostentis
    by John Lydus (John the Lydian), edited by C. Wachsmuth, Leipzig, 1897. Quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before
    A
    .
    D
    . 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino,
    Journal of Geophysical Research
    88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
  5. The only full account of the surviving works of Cassiodorus Senator was published in Germany in the late nineteenth century as
    Cassiodorus, Variae XII,
    edited by Mommsen. This passage is quoted from an article entitled “Volcanic Winters” by M. R. Rampino, S. Self, and R. B. Stothers in
    Annual Review
    of Earth Planet Science
    16, pages 73–99, 1988.
  6. K. Briffa et al, “Fennoscandian Summers from
    A
    .
    D
    . 500. Temperature Changes on Short and Long Timescales,”
    Climatic Dynamics
    7, pages 111–119, 1992.
  7. Personal communication to Mike Baillie, Queen’s University, Belfast, from Don Graybill, late of the University of Arizona, using data collected by Valmore C. La Marche and Wes Ferguson.
  8. L. A. Scuderi, “A 2,000-Year Tree-Ring Record of Annual Temperatures in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,”
    Science
    259, pages 1433–1436, 1993. Two thousand three hundred miles to the east in the eastern United States, dendrochronologists have obtained a 1,600-year-long chronology from cypress trees and published it in
    Science
    240, pages 1517–1519. (North Carolina climate changes reconstructed from tree rings:
    A
    .
    D
    . 372 to 1985, by D. W. Stahle et al. Their data reveal that North Carolina’s worst drought of the sixth century took place between
    A
    .
    D
    . 539 and
    A
    .
    D
    . 544.
  9. A. Lara and R. Villalba, “A 3,620-Year Temperature Record from
    Fitzroya
    cupressoides
    Tree Rings in Southern South America,”
    Science
    260, pages 1104–1106, 1993.
  10. According to as-yet-unpublished data gathered in 1997 and 1998 in the Rio Cisne area of southern Argentina by dendrochronologists from the Laboratorio de Dendrocronologia in Mendoza, Argentina.
  11. Data collected by Ed Cook of Columbia University, New York.
  12. Data from Stepan Shiyatov et al of Ekaterinburg Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russia.
  13. Information from dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, Queen’s University, Belfast. He says that he found in reviewing the mean values for a set of eight filtered oak chronologies, covering the geographical region from Ireland to Poland, that the value for
    A
    .
    D
    . 540 is one of the three lowest-growth values in 1,500 years. In a selected subset of four of these oak chronologies, the filtered growth value for the year
    A
    .
    D
    . 539 is the lowest value in 1,500 years.
  14. The 540 record cold year is the first of a series of such cold years in southern South America in the mid–sixth century. Two other ultracold years, both among the coldest of the past 1,600 years, were 557 and 561. What is more, twenty-seven out of the forty-three years (62 percent) between 540 and 583 were below average in temperature compared to just fourteen out of forty (35 percent) in the previous four decades. These conclusions are based on the tree-ring data from Lenca in Chile supplied to me by the Laboratorio de Dendrocronologia in Mendoza, Argentina.
  15. Plazas et al,
    Bulletin of the Gold Museum,
    Bogota, 1988.
  16. Other information on the Ohio University expedition is provided in Chapter 23. The original 563–594 data and other relevant material were published in “A 1,500 Year Record of Tropical Precipitation Recorded in Ice Cores from the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru,” which appeared in
    Science
    229 (4717), pages 971–973; and “Pre-Incan Agricultural Activity Recorded in Dust Layers in Two Tropical Ice Cores” in
    Nature
    336, pages 763–765. Another Andean source also provides dramatic evidence of the sixth-century drought. Work by Alex Chepstow-Lusty et al, published in
    Mountain Research and Development
    18/2, 1998, shows that there was a massive and abrupt surge in sedge growth around the margins of Lake Marcacocha in the Peruvian Andes in around the mid–sixth century
    A
    .
    D
    . The data suggest that as the lake shrank, sedge began to flourish on those parts of the former lake bottom that had been exposed. It was the highest sedge growth peak experienced at the site in the 1,500-year-period
    A
    .
    D
    . 100 to
    A
    .
    D
    . 1600.
  17. Fitzroya
    conifers.
RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
 
 
THE LATE-ROMAN WORLD
 

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium,
edited by A. P. Kazhdan, Oxford University Press, 1991.

A Biographical Dictionary of the Byzantine Empire
by D. M. Nicol, Seaby, London, 1991.

Justinian
by J. Moorhead, Longman, London, 1994.

The Early Byzantine Churches of Cilicia and Isauria
by S. Hill, Variorum (Ashgate Publishing), Aldershot, UK, 1996.

Die ‘Toten Städte’, Stadt und Land in Nordsyrien während der Spätantike
by C. Strube, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rheim, 1996.

The Sixth Century, End or Beginning,
edited by P. Allen and E. Jeffreys, Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, University of Sydney, 1996.

Procopius. History of the Wars,
translated by H. B. Dewing, Harvard University Press, 1914.

Procopius. The Anecdota or Secret History,
translated by H. B. Dewing, Harvard University Press, 1935.

The Emperor Maurice and his Historian
by Michael Whitby, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens
(volume 1) by Jean-Noël Biraben, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Mouton, France, 1975.

 
ARABIA
 

The Life of Muhammad,
a translation of Ibn Ishaq’s
Sirat Rasul Allah,
translated by A. Guillaume, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1967, 1996.

The History of al-Tabari
by al-Tabari, volume 7, translated and annotated by W. M. Watt and M. V. McDonald, State University of New York, 1988.

Muhammad at Mecca
by W. M. Watt, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1979 and 1993.

Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman
by W. M. Watt, Oxford University Press, 1961.

A Chronology of Islamic History 570–1000 CE
by H. U. Rahman, Ta-Ha Publishers, London, 1995.

The Koran,
translated by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, and published by HarperCollins.

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
by P. Crone, Princeton University Press, 1987.

Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World
by P. Crone and M. Cook, Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests
by W. E. Kaegi, CUP, 1992.

The Early Islamic Conquests
by F. M. Donner, Princeton University Press, 1981.

The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates
by H. Kennedy, Longman, London, 1986.

Encyclopedia of Islam
(New Edition), published by E. J. Brill, Leiden.

History of the Jews of Arabia from Ancient Times to their Eclipse under Islam
by G. D. Newby, University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

 
AVARS AND TURKS
 

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage
by A. Koestler, Hutchinson, 1976.

Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the 10th Century
by Golb and Pritsak, Cornell University Press, 1982.

Geschichte und Kultur eines Volkerwanderungszeitlichen Nomadenvolkes
(2 volumes), Klagenfurt, Austria, 1970.

 
BRITISH ISLES
 

Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity 300–800
by K. R. Dark, Leicester University Press, 1994.

Lords of Battle: Image and Reality of the Comitatus in Dark-Age Britain
by S. S. Evans, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997.

An English Empire: Bede and the Early Anglo-Saxon Kings
by N. Higham, Manchester University Press, 1995.

The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century,
edited by J. Hines, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997.

An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons AD 400–600
by C. A. Snyder, Sutton, Stroud, 1998.

Anglo-Saxon England
by M. Welch, Batsford, London, 1992.

Wroxeter: The Life and Death of a Roman City
by R. White and P. Barker, Tempus, Stroud, 1998.

The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland
by N. Edwards, Batsford, London, 1990.

The Irish Ringfort
by M. Stout, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997.

The Annals of Ulster,
edited by S. Mac Airt and G. Mac Niocaill, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983.

Wales in the Early Middle Ages
by W. Davies, Leicester University Press, 1982.

A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain: England, Scotland and Wales c.500–c.1050
by A. Williams, A. P. Smyth, and D. P. Kirby, Seaby, London, 1991.

The Age of Arthur. A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650
by J. Morris, Phillimore, Chichester, UK, 1977.

Nennius. British History and the Welsh Annals,
edited and translated by J. Morris, Phillimore, Chichester, 1980.

The Mabinogion,
translated by J. Gantz, Penguin, London, 1976.

The History of the Kings of Britain
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1966.

A History of the English Church and People,
by Bede, translated by L. Sherley-Price, Penguin, London, 1955.

Sources of the Grail: An Anthology,
selected and introduced by J. Matthews. Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1996.

Celtic Britain
by C. Thomas, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.

The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,
edited by S. Bassett, Leicester University Press, 1989.

 
EUROPE
 

The Early Slavs
by P. M. Dolukhanov, Longman, London, 1996.

The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751
by I. Wood, Longman, London, 1994.

The History of the Franks
by Gregory of Tours, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1974.

The Goths in Spain
by E. A. Thompson, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom
by D. King, Cambridge University Press, 1972.

The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History
by C. McEvedy, Penguin, 1998.

 
FAR EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
 

A New History of Korea
by Ki-baik Lee, translated by E. W. Wagner with E. J. Shultz, Harvard University Press, 1984.

The Emergence of Japanese Kingship
by J. R. Piggott, Stanford University Press, 1997.

Nihongi. Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to AD 697,
translated by W. G. Aston, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo, 1972, 1993.

The Sui Dynasty
by A. Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978.

The Indianized States of Southeast Asia
by G. Coedés, The University Press of Hawaii, 1968.

 
AMERICAS

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