E is for Earthquake

I personally have felt several earthquakes, from big ones like Loma Prieta where the things fell off the shelves while I was shopping, to lots of small ones at home, because I live on the Hayward Fault. A month ago, a 3.9 twitch occurred less than 2 miles from my neighborhood, causing the house to “boom” and shake so hard that I thought we were going to get lifted off to Oz. My wife simply looked up and said, “Oh, earthquake,” which is usually what Californians do. You don’t know when earthquakes will happen, which is a blessing and a curse. I’ve not been through hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes, but I’m sure those are equally frightening. A reminder of our puniness in the face of Mother Nature.

Ancient people wrote about earthquakes, volcanoes, and other disasters. They were common enough that writers used them as metaphors as well as describing when they happened. This is why today’s post on Earthquakes isn’t precisely cheating in terms of Ancient Inventions. Clearly, earthquakes aren’t an invention. But history is.

So this post will take a slightly different approach:

1. A core definition
2. Physical evidence of ancient disasters
3. Ancient historical evidence of ancient disasters

Big Booms

The first Earth-quake, in theory, was when the monster planet Theia crashed into our fledgling rotating proto-planet and split the moon off, thereby causing us to spin on an axis at an angle to our elliptical orbit around the sun. But that’s a little too far back, further than perhaps 4.5 billion years. Certainly, there has been a relentless march of earthquakes, volcanoes, and things that go boom in the 4.435 billion years after that. The 65 million ya disaster was also exciting, when that asteroid hit in Cancun and destroyed the dinosaurs. Again, a little too far back.

What I’m talking about here is earthquakes that happened after people started building settlements. After–because it means somebody mentioned it in writing, which allows it to be pinpointed within a century–a nanosecond in geological terms.

Active tectonic plates ripple around the world. People like me who live on an active fault usually know it. They stretch down the California coast, throughout Mexico, and around the Pacific in the Ring of Fire. They also criss-cross the Mediterranean, surrounding the Middle East. When earthquakes happened in Mexico City, China, Greece, or in Mesopotamia, they were as destructive as they are today. There are plenty to identify, whether they can be “diagnosed” from the ruins they left behind, or whether the scribes noted them in the official records. Thus, no surprise if I say that one of the first known volcano/earthquake combinations took out one of the most famous of all ancient cities among the Greek islands.

Curled Hair Among the Ruins

I learned about the magnificent Palace of Knossos my second day of college, in a class of Greek and Roman history and literature. King Minos of Crete had built an ancient wonder, maybe not one of the Seven, but a palace of beauty and grandeur worth its reputation. While some of it is restoration, most of the original painted frescoes –colored applied on wet plaster–is still vibrant, even after centuries of ruin. Minoan women dance in a line, their black ringlets bouncing in joy. Cretan teenagers, boys and girls, fly over the backs of bulls in the world’s most unusual sport or dare or rodeo. This is the place where Daedalus built a labyrinth in the deep basements, to hold the strange beast, the Minotaur.

Was it taken out by a volcano? An earthquake? Or a tsunami? Researchers debate what caused part of the city to collapse between 1700 and 1600 BCE, but they know with certainty that Knossos fell and was rebuilt several times. They know that the first collapse/rebuild happened before 1600, and earthquake are what cause buildings to collapse. But there’s also an island nearby with an equally plausible cause, always ready to cause havoc: Santorini. They know the volcano at Santorini erupted in the 1650s. Whether it was an accompanying quake, ash, or a tsunami from the quake, it took out Knossos the first time. The leaders rebuilt, but more quakes, fires, and devastation lasted until the 1350s, after which the residents moved elsewhere, probably tired of living quite so close to a volcano. (Though Athens and Sparta still got their share of shaking, as we’ll see.)

If Knossos was one of the most sophisticated cities to fall in the 2nd millennium BCE, it was flanked by others. Another town was destroyed, one I mentioned a few days ago. Lajia, in midwestern China, is where they found the world’s oldest noodles. (See “B”) Near that archaeological dig, the found another settlement buried by a giant mudslide.

Here again, causes are debated. Some claim there is a famous Chinese Great Flood, one which has been said to lead to the Xia Dynasty. Others argue that the Lajia disaster doesn’t fit that timing (Great Flood legend or not). Whatever the cause, Lajia was buried under mud with little warning, because bodies are still in place, mothers embracing children. They call it the Chinese Pompeii.

Historical Archives Come in All Forms

Knossos and Lajia can be decoded by geologists, reading the stratigraphic layers. But written records also help, and they tell us a lot, too. The Bamboo Annals are the earliest official records from China, written before the first Xia dynasty came into place. They mention an earthquake on Mount Tai, described in either 1831 or 1731 BCE–presumably that 4000-year-old ink has faded. It would count as the earliest earthquake on record.

Cuneiform records also made note of disasters. For instance, two earthquakes hit the temple of Ishtar in the city of Nineveh, a city near modern-day Mosul. The king Aššur-rēša-iši wrote of their damage to the stone towers and how they were so dilapidated that they needed refurbishing. Sounds like an explanation for tapping into the royal treasury to me.

I tore down fifteen layers of brick (and) [raised (this section)] fifty layers of brick making it [thirty]-five layers of brick higher than before. I put stone rosettes all around them.

1189 BCE, notes by an Assyrian king for his refurbishment after an earthquake.

Well, it was the goddess Ishtar, so better put some nice stone rosettes up.

Records can be indirect as well. The Bible is both a manual for the practice of faith and a history of the Middle East. There are dozens of references to earthquakes, both as metaphors for God’s anger and as actual occurrences. One famous example from the Book of Amos specifies that something occurred in the days of Jeroboam, a king of Israel, two years before the earthquake. Since they can date the reign of Jeroboam’s, they can narrow the earthquake to 760 BCE.

Greeks Who Kept Track and Sometimes, Made Things Up

It’s handy when those writing the documents connect an occurrence to something else well-documented, like a king or an emperor’s tenure. As the classical Greek civilization developed, those documents came from a variety of sources. Thucydides and Plutarch, the Greek and Roman historians, mentioned the earthquakes of the 430s BCE, “calamities” which hit Sparta especially hard. According to Plutarch, an earthquake hit Sparta so hard that the King, Agis I, leapt out of the royal bed during an act of love making and refused to meet his wife in bed for more than a year. However, she had a son, which Agis refused to acknowledge. The rumor was that the father was the Greek exile, Alcibiades, and the subsequent fallout partly sparked the Peloponnesian War.

The cause of such common earthquakes was of much debate. One of the great respected thinkers of the 600s (BCE), Anaximander, had a fairly scientific explanation. He claimed that upper air entered clefts in the earth’s crust produced either by drought or by excessive rainfall, and that it then had a kind of pneumatic effect on the earth, like blowing up a football bladder. It’s not the dumbest idea. Wrong, but entirely based on natural causes.

Herodotus, the “first” Greek historian, well-known for mixing dragons and giants with his facts, claimed with more confidence that it was definitely and absolutely Poseidon. Poseidon was the god associated with earthquakes, which doesn’t seem surprising in a culture surrounded by water and experiencing frequent earthquakes.

The Thessalians themselves say that the gorge through which the water flows was caused by Poseidon, and this is reasonable enough; at least any man who believes that Poseidon causes earthquakes, and that chasms so produced are the handiwork of this god, would say on seeing that gorge that Poseidon did it. For it plainly appeared to me that the mountains had been torn apart by an earthquake.

Herodotus writing in 430 BCE.

But for all the crap that Herodotus gets for mixing dragons, giants, and other fanciful creatures among his facts, the biggest scientific liar was Plato. Sorry to break it to you, those who yearn for the philosophy of perfection and ideals, but Plato was responsible for one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated in human history. There are still movies about it–Disney movies, Aquaman, Black Panther tie-ins, and so on. But the only person to ever write about Atlantis was Plato.

Plato claimed there was a city, Atlantis, linked to Libya and ruling the Mediterranean, a rival to Athens. He said it happened 9000 years ago, conveniently before any written records. It was beyond the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. Gibraltar, and the most advanced city in the world in terms of art, science, and philosophical advancement. Unfortunately, moral decay angered the gods, who took it out with earthquakes and so on and so forth.

Because Plato had such a good rep, adventurers and explorers have been looking for it ever since, but they’ve never found a trace of it. Perhaps Godzilla is down there or Namor or Aquaman, hiding the city behind an invisible shield. Or perhaps Plato was just a much more convincing liar than Herodotus.

Meanwhile, there were actual famous ancient cities buried by quakes. As droughts have hit Iran and shrunk the Tigris River, archaeologists rediscovered a city belonging to the Mittani Empire. They didn’t keep a lot of imperial records (or maybe they were drowned?), but the Mittani’s were known, and their city of Zhakhiku was mentioned in historical documents.

Researchers know the city was destroyed around 1350 BCE. Digging has been tricky since the river has risen since 2022 to rebury the site. Perhaps climate change will once again reopen the site for archaeologists, which will be one of the few benefits of drought in the region.

Because no one wants to hope for one natural disaster, just so they can find out about another.