Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God

  • Amos Nur &
  • Dawn Burgess
Princeton University Press: 2008. 304 pp. $26.95/£15.95 069101602X 9780691016023 | ISBN: 0-691-01602-X

At 5:04 p.m. on 17 October 1989, Stanford University geophysics professor Amos Nur was sitting in his office in California when it started to shake. His steel bookcases toppled and crushed his chair. Ducking under his desk, he somehow escaped injury. Nur had just experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nur has long been interested in archaeology. Growing up near Haifa in Israel, he walked behind his father and two mules as they ploughed the family's field. “I remember picking up shards of ancient glass,” he writes, “pieces of simple mosaics and little squares of pink or white limestone exposed in the turned earth.” On a few rare occasions, the plough struck a massive object: a rough block of stone about 1 metre tall and 25 centimetres square in cross-section. “Probably a Roman mile marker,” they thought. Much later, Nur discovered that the field was on the Via Maris, the ancient Roman highway connecting the Mediterranean to the East.

A twin passion for seismology and archaeology drives Nur's deeply researched and compellingly written book, Apocalypse, co-authored with Dawn Burgess. In it he asks how earthquakes might be detected in the archaeological record, by analysing geological formations, faults, structural movement, human remains, the collapse of pillars and walls, and inscriptions. Nur wonders if earthquakes played a part in the collapse of ancient civilizations. Might they explain the enigmatic and quick disappearance of so many Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean during a mere 50 years around 1200 bc?

Credit: ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. ALLEN-FLETCHER

Most archaeologists today say that earthquakes have had little to do with historical demises. They prefer to attribute the collapse of civilizations to human agency: war, invasion, social oppression, environmental abuse and so on. The conventional explanation of the Bronze Age collapse involves maritime invasion by the mysterious Sea Peoples, whose identities have long eluded scholars. There are notable exceptions of academics who were sympathetic to the idea that earthquakes could crush civilizations — Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete, Carl Blegen at the Turkish city of Troy and Claude Schaeffer, for instance — but the majority are sceptical.

Robert Drews took pains to quash any earthquake explanation in The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 bc (Princeton University Press, 1993), as Nur is contemptuously aware. Jared Diamond made no mention of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005). If earthquakes really have had so great an influence, the sceptics ask, then where is the hard evidence?

In reply, Nur and Burgess cite several powerful instances. The seismic destruction of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755, which provoked Voltaire to write Candide, shook the pillars of both religious faith and Enlightenment optimism. “By striking at a time when there was a particularly delicate balance of power between church and state, and between science and religion, the earthquake tipped the scales and changed society around the world,” the authors argue.

In Venezuela, an earthquake in 1812 precipitated the collapse of Simón Bolívar's republic by his own reckoning. This ultimately led to Bolívar freeing Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from Spanish rule.

In Japan, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which reduced two-thirds of Tokyo to ashes, spawned political and racial turmoil that contributed to the rise of militarism and, ultimately, to the Pacific war. If the Tokyo area experiences another such earthquake in decades ahead as seismologists expect, its repercussions will surely make the global financial system tremble. Were it to strike at a time of economic depression, its effects might be globally catastrophic.

Apocalypse focuses mostly on the ancient world, with a distinct emphasis on biblical archaeology. It discusses earthquake evidence from the Middle East, including Jericho, Megiddo (Armageddon), Jerusalem and Qumran, the location of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the caves at Qumran, Nur has considerable field experience, which he deploys to illuminating effect. He was part of an expedition from Jerusalem's Hebrew University that excavated the rubble in the Cave of Letters, in the hope of finding a previously glimpsed skeleton and other evidence of habitation buried by the collapse of the roof in an ancient earthquake. Nur is convinced — a little like Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings — that there remain sealed caves that were not looted by the Bedouin who first reported the scrolls' existence in 1947. “These places, undisturbed since their destruction by earthquakes, may provide the means to unravel the complicated and emotionally charged story of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Apocalypse is a winning combination of cautious interdisciplinary investigation and interpretation, writing suitable for a general readership, and excellent illustrations (including a striking photograph of Nur's own crushed office chair). Although it will deliberately irritate many archaeologists, it should also provoke a serious reconsideration of the archaeological record. As with the evidence for human activity in climate change, the evidence for earthquakes in prehistorical change may be staring archaeologists in the face.