I will post a few, but there is not enough space to post everything.
Dark Sun:
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In describing the climate in that year, Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness like the moon during this whole year.” Other accounts of the event say that the sun became “dim” or “dark” for upto eighteen months. Its light shone “like a feeble shadow”, and people were terrified that the sun would never shine properly again. Procopius, referring to the darkened sun, later wrote that “from the time this thing happened, men were not free from war, nor pestilence nor anything leading to death.”
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"There was a sign from the sun, the like of which had never been seen and reported before, the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months. Each day, it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again. " A sixth century historian and prominent church leader, John of Ephesus, wrote these words describing the app[arent fate of our planet’s star in the year 535 and 536.
35 years of Dark Sun & drop in temperatures:
- Continuous tree ring chronologies, going back to the sixth century AD and beyond now exist for Finland, Sweden, the British Isles, central Europe, the Aegean, Siberia, North America, Chile, Argentina, and Tasmania. In a substantial percentage of all the tree ring chronologies covering the sixth century that have been constructed so far, the period 535-550 (and sometimes even till 560 and beyond) stands out as a time of unusually low tree ring growth. In several key chronologies, that twenty five to thirty five year period contains many of the narrowest ring sequences known for the past 2,000 years. … But from 538 or in many places 540 there was an almost universal massive decline lasting between two and eight years. This was particularly marked in the southern hemisphere where, in Chile and Tasmania, for example, full recovery was not achieved until 580s and the 570s respectively.
Significance: The most accurate records of climate change are those hidden inside the trunks of trees. The growth rings of many species preserve an indeliable annual record of climatic history. Tree ring specialsts (dendrochronologists) can attempt to reconstruct past climate by studying two telltale sets of data. One is the width of each annual growth ring, which reveals the exact amount of growth in a given year ( indeed in a given growing season, usually spring and summer). A drought or unseasonable frost that restricts growth will therefore produce narrow rings. The second, the density of each ring in confers in cool climates, yields information about temperature. The colder the weather the less dense was the timber growing at that time.
Catastrophe, An investigation into the origins of the modern world, by David Keys.
Death & Pestilence:
- Evagrius
The church historian Evagrius lived through four great plague epidemics and lost most of his family to them. In the year 593 at the age of fifty eight, he wrote down his memories in a very personal lamentation:
“I believe no part of the human race to have been unafflicted by the disease,” for it occurred in some cities “to such an extent that they were rendered empty of almost all their inhabitants.”
Evagrius regarded it as his responsibility to describe these events, as he was present at the beginning of the spread of the bubonic plague and was struck by it while still a schoolboy:
“And during the course of the various visitations, I lost to the disease many of my children and my wife and much of the rest of my kin … For now, as I write this, I am 58 years old and it is not quite two years since the fourth outbreak of plague struck Antioch and I lost my daughter and the son born to her in addition to those I lost earlier. …”
- John Ephesus
“God’s wrath turned into, as it were, a wine-press and pitilessly trampled and squeezed the inhabitants [of many cities] like fine grapes,” wrote another eyewitness of the catastrophe, the hagiographer and historian John Ephesus, in a moving and vivid account of the horror unleashed by the epidemic.
“we saw desolate and groaning villages and corpses spread out on the earth; staging posts on the roads full of darkness and solitude filling with fright everyone who happened to enter and leave them.” And “cattle abandoned and roaming scattered over the mountains with nobody to gather them.”
He saw fields, “abundant in grain which was becoming white and stood erect” yet had no one “to reap or gather it in.” And he observed “flocks of sheep, goats, oxen and pigs which had become like wild animals, having forgotten [life in] cultivated land and the human voice which used to lead them.”
“…Thus, when I [John of Ephesus], a wretch, wanted to include these matters in a record of history, my thoughts were seized many times by stupor, and for many reasons I planned to omit it, firstly because all mouths and tongues are insufficient to relate it, and moreover, because even if there could be found such that would record at least a little from among the multitude of matters, what use would it be, when the entire world was tottering and reaching its dissolution and the length of generations was cut short? And for who would he who wrote be writing?”
Christians and Jews converted to Islam:
- Palestinian Muslim men are descendants of Jewish men:
More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.
The results match historical accounts that Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai.
http://bric.postech.ac.kr/science/97now/00_10now/001030a.html
- Lebanese Muslims are mostly descendants of Christians:
The scientists also found …But they emphasise that the differences between the two communities are minor, and that Christians and Muslim Arabs in Lebanon overwhelmingly share a common heritage.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Crusaders ‘left genetic legacy’
- Tsunami flood in South East Mediterranean Lebanon/ Israel:
Major Quake, Tsunami Likely in Middle East, Study Finds
- Floods in Southern Arabia:
The hydraulics of open channel flow … - Google Book Search