Remembering Earthquakes in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean (original) (raw)
Related papers
Natural Disasters and the Crusades: Framing Earthquakes in Historical Narratives, 1095-1170
2017
This thesis explores perceptions of earthquake causality in the accounts of twelfth-century Syria and the ways that medieval views of natural disasters influenced historical writing. Examining the perceived causes, effects, and significance of cataclysmic seismic events provides insight into shared elements of faith perspectives, the role of nature in medieval worldviews, and how chroniclers framed accounts of natural disasters to reflect their religious and political prejudices. Medieval writers believed that natural phenomena were indicative of important world events and imbued with spiritual significance. Chroniclers perceived earthquakes as omens of future disaster or the apocalypse, and associated them with a need for repentance due to their belief that seismic disasters were divine punishment for moral failings. In addition, Christian and Muslim sources utilized these perceptions on divine causality to criticize the failings of political leaders and rival religious communities. These patterns of portrayal possess great significance in the context of the major conflicts and cultural convergences in the twelfth-century Near East. In addition to the theological perspectives and political criticism present in the sources, terrestrial and astrological explanations for earthquakes were prevalent in the twelfth century and often used to complement, not disprove, perceptions of divine causation. Apocalyptic sentiment and crusading spirituality also influenced portrayals of earthquakes, particularly in the Christian sources. These intellectual patterns are evident in earthquake accounts from the period irrespective of religious and cultural differences, but were firmly grounded in the political realities of the Levant during the Crusades. The sources’ methods of portraying seismic disasters, therefore, provide important insight into the worldviews of medieval chroniclers and the broad effects of earthquakes amidst the complex dynamics of twelfth-century Syria.
LEST WE FORGET. A PRELIMINARY MAP OF THE COLLECTIVE EARTHQUAKE RITUALS OF ITALY
2006
Fear and the need for reassurance -feelings as old as humankind -find cultural expression in countless visible ways: beliefs and behaviour patterns, rules and rituals, good and bad habits. However, there is also an invisible "non-way" to express them, by dismissing from the mind and forgetting as soon as possible whatever it was that made us afraid and needing reassurance. In the case of communities living in "earthquake country" this kind of reaction does seems a predictable, indeed almost an obligated one: how could people go on living in places that were repeatedly and tragically affected by seismic disasters, unless by getting used quickly to forget the worst of their past sufferings? But is the tendency to remove and forget an hereditary trait of humankind, or the results of specific stimuli (more likely to occur in some social environments than in others)? The traditional popular culture of Italy, as outlined by the preliminary results of a survey of collective rituals connected with earthquakes, appears to have been much keener on remembering past disasters than on removing their memory: so keen, in fact, that it still does preserve the memory of earthquakes that no seismic catalogue has recorded so far. The educational value and potential uses of this patrimony of shared memories are very interesting indeed.
Lest we forget. A preliminary map of collective earthquake rituals of Italy
First European Conference on Earthquake …, 2006
Fear and the need for reassurance -feelings as old as humankind -find cultural expression in countless visible ways: beliefs and behaviour patterns, rules and rituals, good and bad habits. However, there is also an invisible "non-way" to express them, by dismissing from the mind and forgetting as soon as possible whatever it was that made us afraid and needing reassurance. In the case of communities living in "earthquake country" this kind of reaction does seems a predictable, indeed almost an obligated one: how could people go on living in places that were repeatedly and tragically affected by seismic disasters, unless by getting used quickly to forget the worst of their past sufferings? But is the tendency to remove and forget an hereditary trait of humankind, or the results of specific stimuli (more likely to occur in some social environments than in others)? The traditional popular culture of Italy, as outlined by the preliminary results of a survey of collective rituals connected with earthquakes, appears to have been much keener on remembering past disasters than on removing their memory: so keen, in fact, that it still does preserve the memory of earthquakes that no seismic catalogue has recorded so far. The educational value and potential uses of this patrimony of shared memories are very interesting indeed.
Digital Workshop 7 July 2023 9:00 – 17: 00 (CEST) Organizers: Sabine Neumann (Marburger Centrum Antike Welt, University of Marburg) – Andrew Lepke (University of Muenster) Earthquake disasters strike the Mediterranean region today as they did in ancient times. The study of archaeologically and historically documented disasters are of great importance because they allow long-term analyses of the response to recurrent natural phenomena and offer insights into resilience of the population. In our workshop we cannot fully address this research desideratum. In our Workshop we would like to stimulate reflections on historical and archaeological methods of earthquake research. We will focus on the interrelationship of historic earthquakes - and their evidence - and the for the most part literary narratives they are embedded in. The complex dynamics by which ancient actors dealt with and responded to devastating earthquakes and how they remembered these events, led to conditions that (could) trigger changes in society.
Millennium, 2021
This contribution analyzes the rhetoric surrounding natural disasters in historiographic sources, challenging our assumptions about the eschatological nature of late antique and medieval historical consciousness. Contrary to modern expectations, a large number of late antique and medieval sources indicate that earthquakes and other natural disasters were understood as signs from God, relating to theophanic encounters or divine wrath in the present time. Building on recent research on premodern concepts of time and historical consciousness, the article underscores the fact that eschatological models of time and history-that is, the relentless linear, teleological progression of time towards the End of Days-was not how premodern people perceived the relationship between past, present, and future. The textual evidence presented here is supported by a fragmented and littleknown illuminated historiographic text, the Ravennater Annalen, housed today in the cathedral library in Merseburg. This copy of a sixth-century illustrated calendar from Ravenna contains unique depictions of earthquakes in the form of giants breathing fire. Like the textual sources, this visual document should not be read as a premonition of the End of Days, rather it visualizes the belief that divine agency and wrath caused natural disasters.
Actas de Arquitectura Religiosa Contemporánea, 2020
Seismic events demonstrated the high level of structural vulnerability of Italian ecclesiastical heritage. This paper investigates liturgical reordering applied (or not applied) in the post-earthquake reconstruction of churches. The aim is to analyze if the tragic circumstance of a post-earthquake reconstruction has been taken as an opportunity to renovate the sacramental space as a whole, and above all, to evaluate in which way the memory of the disaster and mourning may have influenced the celebratory aspects. The paper focus on the several criteria that may support choices for churches reconstruction, with or without the assimilation of the liturgical modifications introduced by the Second Vatican Council. If fifty years later, the process of the liturgical modification continues to be problematic in churches with a high heritage or historical value, the issue is event more complex for those buildings affected by catastrophic event and where communities are wounded by traumatic event as an earthquake.
Studies of the sociology of contemporary earthquakes have emphasized the potentialities created by these disasters: earthquake-induced destruction, while traumatic, can also clear the way for large-scale infrastructural and architectural development programs with the potential to reshape aged urban environments and better reflect changing societal values and priorities. This chapter offers a survey of earthquakes as non-human change agents in the Roman and Late Antique Mediterranean, with special focus on the cities of Pompeii, Ephesus, Antioch, and Phrygian Hierapolis. While contemporary Roman sources tend to describe urban rebuilding after earthquakes in a symbolic manner, with a generic picture of cities "rebuilt" or "restored" and state-directed support sent for finance or labor, these literary images rarely correspond with the archaeological evidence for earthquake events in Roman cities, whose records leave little that speaks to the immediate challenges of search and rescue or mortalities but which also provided opportunities for the implementation of altogether new urban schemes. The geological forces that create earthquakes are so colossal in scale and time that they are nearly incomprehensible from the perspective of our own short human lives. Yet the extraordinary violence of earthquakes transpires in mere seconds, with effects that permanently alter societies and communities. Earthquakes have always been and remain unpredictable, despite pre-modern efforts to understand