The Earliest Known Human Civilizations Formed in Earthquake Country, From
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Why the Earth Shakes: Pre-Modern Understandings and Modern Earthquake Science A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jamie Rae Bluestone IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Carla Rahn Phillips, Adviser December 2010 © Jamie Rae Bluestone 2010 Acknowledgements It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child. The same holds true for a research and writing project like this one. I am profoundly grateful to the many villagers who have helped bring this dissertation to fruition by offering support of one kind or another along the way. First, most sincere thanks to the faculty and staff in the University of Minnesota‘s department of history, my professional home over the past eight years. It is doubtful there is a more collegial, competent, and encouraging department anywhere in academics. In particular, I am grateful to the three successive directors of the Center for Early Modern History – Edward Farmer, William Phillips, and Sarah Chambers – for the privilege of working under their supervision. My tenure as part of the CEMH staff was deeply rewarding, both personally and professionally. Numerous friends helped to sustain me on my journey, especially during the times when the going got tough. Thank you to Tovah Bender, Sara Cammeresi, Sarah Crabtree, Amy Fisher, Cindy McCoy, Rachel Neiwert, Jack Norton, N‘Jai-An Patters, Maggie Ragnow, Kira Robison, Marianne Samayoa, Aeleah Soine, Kate Staples, and John Wing. Special gratitude goes to Ted Farmer for the countless lunches of great food and even better fellowship. I was fortunate to receive financial support at different points while researching and developing this project. Sincere gratitude is due to the Center for Early Modern History, the University of Minnesota‘s College of Liberal Arts, the University of i ii Minnesota‘s department of history, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain‘s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. The generous funding provided by these entities was made all the more rich by the skillful, effective, and patient assistance offered by the many archivists and librarians in Spain and the U.S. who helped me make the most of short-term research trips. My final defense committee was easily the best ever assembled. Thank you to Giancarlo Casale, David Fox, Carla Rahn Phillips, William Phillips, and Alan Shapiro for their time and for challenging me with insightful comments and thought-provoking questions. My dissertation is a more solid piece of scholarship because of them. I also wish to thank Alex Jassen, who was unable to serve as a formal committee member, but who nevertheless graciously provided useful feedback on the religious content in Chapter Two. I would not be the scholar I am today without the guidance and mentorship of my adviser, Carla Rahn Phillips. She is the quintessential scholar and professional, and it is a tremendous honor to be considered her intellectual daughter. I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity to have studied under her tutelage. More personally, both Carla and her husband, William (Wim) Phillips, have grown very dear to my heart. They have touched my life in ways that words cannot adequately express. My parents Jim and Jean, also known as the traveling nannies, were indispensible to my being able to finish this project. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for helping me iii negotiate the challenges of graduate school and motherhood, and for suffering through being grandparents so I could realize the dream I began pursuing so long ago. On the home front, hugs and high-fives to my son, Quin, who was born during the middle of this project. Being his mom has helped both to keep me grounded and to restore my perspective when it was lost. Last, but by no means least, I am grateful to my husband, Scott, for the dark humor, for always keeping me on my toes, and for hanging with me to the very end. I could not have done it without you. Abstract Using historical sources comprised of earthquake stories of multiple genres – personal anecdotes, prayers, sermons, natural histories, philosophical treatises, poems – as well as texts about modern scientific theories, this project demonstrates how unpredictable and incompletely understood phenomena like earthquakes both expose and challenge the boundaries of knowledge. The process of European expansion to the Americas in the early modern period provides some geographical and temporal structure to the broad scope of this project, which discusses stories that come from across the globe and cover the period from roughly the eighth century BCE to the present. Special attention is paid to scientific or natural philosophical views of earthquakes, and to religious and mythological stories about the phenomenon, in order to show how a fuller understanding of earthquakes requires expanding beyond traditional limits of knowledge. So far, no individual explanation for why the earth shakes – whether ancient or modern, religious or scientific – has proven to be complete. Until such time as we have complete knowledge—if that time ever comes—a diversity of perspectives can help us to frame our understanding of earthquakes and their impact on human history. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Ancient Earthquake Knowledge 33 Chapter 2: The 1580 Earthquake in London: A Case Study of Three Writers‘ Reactions 68 Chapter 3: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and the New World: Breaking the Boundaries of Knowledge 115 1 Chapter 4: Deep Seismic Events and Views of Spain‘s Earthshaking Empire 158 Conclusion 201 Bibliography 203 v INTRODUCTION Earthquakes have been terrifying and fascinating people for millennia. Since at least 2000 BCE, Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians and other Pacific islanders, natives of the Americas, residents of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, and myriad other groups have been telling stories about uncontrollable and unpredictable earthshaking events.1 Some of these stories have been preserved in written form, while others have been passed on orally. In many cases, the stories have not only been handed down to subsequent generations, but have been transmitted across cultures and geographies as well. Indeed, the prevalence of these earthquake stories and their preservation across the globe for over four millennia is tantamount to a cult following of sorts. Earthquakes, it seems, have their own culture. More precisely, of course, it is the people narrating and perpetuating the stories about earthquakes that fashion an earthquake culture. The people come from all walks of life, regardless of the era or region in which they live, for earthquakes do not discriminate. Race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, nationality, and level of education do not matter. Earthquakes happen anyway and affect individuals of every background. The act of the earth shaking is a common experience that binds together 12000 BCE is a conservative chronological estimate. There are textual references to earthquake events purported to reach as far back as 6500 BCE. See, for example, Appendix A (―The Hittite and Armenian myths as potential sources of information about natural disasters of the ancient time‖) of ―Evidence of historical seismicity and volcanism in the Armenian Highland (from Armenian and other sources),‖ by Arkady Krakhanian and Yelena Abgaryan, Annals of Geophysics 47 (April/June 2004), 793-810. As will be seen in Chapter 3, there is not consistent scholarly agreement about archaeological evidence supporting the existence of earthquakes before 2000 BCE. After 2000 BCE, however, there is a higher quantity and quality of mutually reinforcing evidence about earthquake narratives. 1 2 seemingly disparate people. That bond is reinforced in a multitude of ways as individuals and groups share stories about the event, stories that circulate in many forms: personal anecdotes, firsthand accounts, news reports, poems, letters, diaries and journals, treatises and essays, sermons and religious texts, philosophical and scientific works, popular literature, plays, films, folklore, myths and legends, memoirs, and chronicles and other histories. An expanded network of earthquake connections is created as these stories reach beyond persons immediately affected by the initial event, to others outside of that earthquake zone who either have minimal firsthand experience with earthquakes or have their own earthquake event to which they can compare the new earthquake story. Stories about earthquakes are told and retold, exponentially increasing their reach across time and geography. Not surprisingly, the geographical origins of earthshaking tales are found in highly seismic regions of the globe where earthquakes not only repeatedly occur, but also tend to have the strongest magnitude. These places can by and large be identified topographically by their vicinity to volcanoes, island chains, or mountains, especially mountains found along a continental coast. A notable example is the almost continuous series of volcanoes, islands, and mountains that lines the perimeter of the Pacific Ocean Basin. Known in modern parlance as the Pacific Ring of Fire, this region is home to almost three-quarters of all known volcanoes and the place in which about 90 percent of 3 the world‘s earthquakes occur.2 This horseshoe-shaped ring extends along the entire west coast of the American continents from the southernmost tip of South