Poseidon's Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

In light of the accumulated evidence now published, the oft-denigrated suggestion that major earthquakes took place in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean areas during the late 13th and early 12th centuries bc must be reconsidered. A new study of earthquakes occurring in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean region during the 20th century, utilizing data recorded since the invention of seismic tracking devices, shows that this area is criss-crossed with major fault lines and that numerous temblors of magnitude 6·5 (enough to destroy modern buildings, let alone those of antiquity) occur frequently. It can be demonstrated that such major earthquakes often occur in groups, known as “sequences” or “storms”, in which one large quake is followed days, months, or even years later by others elsewhere on the now-weakened fault line. When a map of the areas in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean region affected (i.e. shaken) by 20th centuryad earthquakes of magnitude 6·5 and greater and with an intensity of VII or greater is overlaid on Robert Drews' map of sites destroyed in these same regions during the so-called “Catastrophe” near the end of the Late Bronze Age, it is readily apparent that virtually all of these LBA sites lie within the affected (“high-shaking”) areas. While the evidence is not conclusive, based on these new data we would suggest that an “earthquake storm” may have occurred in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the years 1225–1175bc . This “storm” may have interacted with the other forces at work in these areas c. 1200bc and merits consideration by archaeologists and prehistorians.