It was three-quarters of a century ago today, on November 5th, 1922, that Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the boy-king, Tutankhamun, near Luxor in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. When the tomb was entered three weeks later, it was found to contain a wealth of buried treasure: golden statues; couches richly laid with ivory and jewels; a large throne studded with precious gems; and most magnificent of all, the great golden mask of Tutankhamun.
Tutankhamun died around 1337 BC at the height of a period of great post-glacial warmth. The hot and dry climate of Egypt at the time provided ideal conditions for the building of the massive monumental structures that have made the Pharaohs famous. But the high global temperatures also made even more ambitious projects feasible. In 2000 BC, for example, Sesostris I began the construction of the very first Suez Canal - a fresh-water channel from the Nile Delta to where the town of Suez now exists. It was the first attempt to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, but it was a less daunting task than it might have seemed to later generations; sea level was significantly higher than it is now, leaving a much narrower neck of land to excavate.
It was the Egyptians, too, who produced the first meteorologist worthy of the name, albeit a long time after Tutankhamun. Claudius Ptolemy was born around AD 85, and spent most of his long life in Alexandria. He was a noted geographer, and constructed a map of Europe whose shapes agree remarkably well with the familiar patterns we know today. He also published an astronomical treatise called the Almagest, whose fourth volume, Tetrabiblos,. contains many useful hints and tips on meteorology, and was the seminal authority on weather prediction for the next 1,000 years.
The Egyptians, like the Romans and the Greeks, were quite familiar with the wide variations in the climate of their known world, which stretched from the hot arid lands of Arabia and North Africa, through the warm and relatively moist countries of southern Europe, to the colder northern regions. It was natural for them, in differentiating between these various weather regimes, to place emphasis on the inclination of the sun's rays, and indeed the word climate comes from the Greek word klima, meaning "slope" or "incline". Ptolemy is credited with producing the first climatological atlas, dividing the world into climatic zones, or horizontal strips on the map, each classified with reference to the angle of the sun at that latitude. It was, of course, an over-simplification, but a first approximation nonetheless.