Sea-Floor Dust Shows Drought Felled Akkadian Empire

SAN FRANCISCO—When civilizations collapse, the blame is often laid on the culture itself—leaders who overreached, armies that faltered, farmers who degraded the land. Such were the conventional explanations for the end of the world's first empire, forged by the Akkadians by 2300 B.C. Their reign stretched 1300 kilometers from the Persian Gulf in present-day Iraq to the headwaters of the Euphrates River in Turkey. They were the first to subsume independent societies into a single state, but the Akkadian empire splintered a century later, not to be reunited in such grandeur for 1000 years.