Reading through
@Semper Victor's excellent Sassanian thread, I was stuck by the frequent mention of cities which had been wholly abandoned by ~1000 CE, never to be refounded.
However, a cursory google search reveals that wholly abandoned cities are extremely uncommon in Europe, and are only a thing in the US because they were single-resource boom towns, which never diversified.
How common was if, in the timeframe of lets say 476-2018, for a city (not a village) to be abandoned and never rebuilt, refunded? Is my impression that this is very common in the ME correct, and why?
In the Middle East it's quite common due to environmental, political and economic factors. The ME is an ecologically fragile environment, subject to climatic oscillations that are rare in northern Europe. For example, let's take the heart of the ME, the Mesopotamian plain. This plain is an alluvial plain in its middle and southern parts, created through the input of river sediments from the great mountain chains that exist to its north and east (in this sense, Iranian Khuzestan is just an extension of the Mesopotamian plan further east).
This plain is one of the flattest areas on earth, with a medium incline of 1% towards the sea. On one side, this has historically favored transportation, agriculture and the building of irrigation networks. But it also implies some ecological constraints. The Euphrates and Tigris are alpine currents in the upper courses, and from these parts of their length they carry downstream large amounts of sediments. After it leaves the Anatolian highlands, the Euphrates has no more important tributaries (the Khabur river usually runs dry in summer), but this is not the case of the Tigris, which on its eastern side joins water with several important tributaries (the Great Zab, Lesser Zab and Diyala, among others) which carry down even more sediments from the Zagros mountains.
When a river carrying large amounts of sediments enters a plain as flat as the Mesopotamian plain, what happens is that the waters slow down so much that sediments begin to precipitate onto the riverbed, which then begins to rise. As a consequence, whenever the water levels of the river rise, they become more and more prone to cause ever more dangerous floods. Usually, settled riverine communities try to control this development building dams (which becomes a race between nature and humans) or with artificial canals that divert part of the water flow through other beds in order to lessen the danger of a catastrophic flood. This phenomenon is not unique to Mesopotamia, it can also be observed in the Mississipi delta or in its most extreme case in the North China Plain.
But Mesopotamia is also an area (unlike northern Europe) geologically active. The Arabian tectonic plaque is pushing in a northeast diection, which is the geological cause behind the formation of the Iranian plateau, the Zagros mountains and the eastern Anatolian highlands (the Iranian plateau and the Zagros are still slowly rising due to this), so from time to time there are earthquakes, which historically have had catastrophic results. Nowadays, archaeologists acknowledge that the Euphrates and especially the Tigris have undergone drastic riverbed changes through the times. The decadence and disparition of Seleucia after the II century CE was due not only to the several Roman lootings it suffered, but the most important factor was that the course of the Tigris moved east and the city lost its river port; and then the population began moving to the neighboring cities of Vologesias, Veh-Ardashir and Ctesiphon. And its current riverbed is again different from the one it had in Sasanian times, which is the reason why a large part of these cities' remains are either underwater of have been washed out by the periodical riverbed changes and catastrophical floods caused by the Tigris.
Also, a cursory look at reconstructed maps of lower Mesopotamia in ancient times will reveal how much the coast of the Persian Gulf has receded since the times of the Sumerian civilization, a progress accelerated by human activities and especially by deforestation in the eastern Anatolian and Zagros mountains, which have caused an increase in erosion and in the amount of sediments carried by the two rivers. In the third millenium BCE, Ur was probably a coastal city, and today the great trade emporium of Arsacid times that was the city of Spasinou Charax lies well inland from the coast.
Another factor that has affected human life in Mesopotamia is salinization. Mesopotamia was a shallow sea not long ago, and so a layer of salt lies underground not far from the surface. Intensive irrigation by inundation (which is the way irrigation has been universally done until the XX century) causes underground salt to migrate to the surface by capillary action. Climate scientists believe that these processes have happened periodically in Mesopotamia: large increases in population led to an increase in the intensity of irrigation and the extension of irrigated lands, which caused the salinization of cultivated land, which could then not sustain the population, which led to population drops and abandonment of lands, which over time (due to wind and floods) lost that surface salt, and then the cycle began again.
Other areas of the Middle East have different environments, but these boom-and-boost cycles have been historically ever-present in the Middle East. Some examples of abandoned cities for the time period you have quoted:
- Ctesiphon (Iraq).
- Veh-Ardashir (Iraq).
- Peroz-Shapur / Anbar (Iraq).
- Samarra (Iraq).
- Jerash (ancient Gerasa, Jordan).
- Apamea (Syria).
- Sebaste (ancient Samaria, Palestine).
- Estakhr (Iran).
- Bishapur (Iran).
- Ephesus (Turkey).
- Aphrodisias (Turkey).
- Ani (Turkey).
- Aspendos (Turkey).
- Ganzak (Iran).
- Qumis (ancient Hekatompylos, Iran).
- Gor (founded as Ardashir-Kwarrah, Iran).
- Caesarea (Israel).
- Resafa (later Sergiopolis, Syria).
- Cyrrhus (Syria).
Also, for a fascinating example of an area that was once densely popualated and filled with prosperous villages and towns and which later became largelly abandoned you can take a look at the
Dead Cities of Syria.
