Ammianus and the Great Tsunami

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. 16. Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun's rays. 17. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. Whilst Ammianus' description is that of an observant and well-informed contemporary, and he neither refers directly to nor has even demonstrably read any of the other, mainly Christian, sources which survive (most are in any case of a later date), his relationship to those sources deserves more attention than a passing 'cf.'. He may not allude to any other extant accounts, but he does allude both to stories and to particular providentialist interpretations found more expressly in those other texts. Ammianus' narrative is not merely distinct but consciously differentiated from these, and the passage provides a visible example of the manipulative fashion in which Ammianus alludes to his sources. I shall propose that Ammianus alludes to fabulous stories which are now preserved only in two ninth-century authors, Theophanes and Georgius Monachus (George the Monk).' Whether or not my proposal that Ammianus was aware of their original common source is accepted, it will be seen that the greater authority of his performance comes from eschewing or toning down the more incredible details of other accounts. This is not to say that Ammianus does not make the tsunami a metaphor for human events: the tsunami has plausibly been identified as a portent for the Gothic invasions which reached their climax at the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378 and ended Ammianus' history.8 Moreover, I believe that he alludes to and corrects the tendency of other, Christian, texts to see the disaster as a divine response to the reign of Julian the Apostate. But the universalizing nature of his treatment makes the metaphor at once less blatant and more satisfying...

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

“…A similar but even longer earthquake storm, punctuated by the possibly exceptionally severe AD 365 Crete earthquake, is suspected to have affected Crete and the eastern Mediterranean between the fourth and sixth centuries AD (Stiros 2001; but see Kelly 2004). According to contemporary sources, the AD 365 earthquake destroyed more than one hundred towns on Crete and caused a tsunami that flooded Alexandria and other places (Shaw et al 2008).…”

Publicity waves based on manipulated geoscientific data suggesting climatic trigger for majority of tsunami findings in the Mediterranean – Response to 'Tsunamis in the geological record: Making waves with a cautionary tale from the Mediterranean' by Marriner et al. (2017)

“…The 365 AD tsunami recorded in the Lake Voulkaria represents one of the historically best-documented tsunami events in human history as evidenced by historical accounts (e.g. Guidoboni et al 1994, Kelly 2004, Ambraseys 2009, Werner et al 2017. The same problem arises in conjunction with the geoscientific data set published by Bruins et al (2008) who found geological and geoarchaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age Santorini tsunami on Crete, as summarized in Example 2, below.…”

“…He concluded that vertical motions of the seafloor must have caused the flooding (Smith 1921, Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War 3, 89, 2 -5). Ammianius Marcellinus, a Roman historian and geographer, described in precise details the dynamics and consequences of the mega-event that struck the Mediterranean on 21 July 365 AD (Rolfe 1940, Kelly 2004. His reports strongly resemble what we could observe during and after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 in southeast Asia.…”

“…Also, the vertical and lateral distances of dislocated boulders from the present coastline and the present sea level are far beyond the reach of those storms that have been observed during the past decades (e.g. Mastronuzzi & Sansò 2000, 2004, Kelletat & Schellmann 2002, Mastronuzzi et al 2006, Morhange et al 2006, Scicchitano et al 2007, Maouche et al 2009, Mastronuzzi & Pignatelli 2012, Shah-Hosseini et al 2013, Biolchi et al 2016) -an argument often neglected by those arguing against tsunami influence.…”

Geoarchaeological evidence of Ostia’s river harbour operating until the fourth century AD

“…Impacted regions are located up to 500-600 km distant from the suggested tsunamigenic fault. Also, there are reliable historic accounts on the effects of the AD 365 tsunami on many Mediterranean coasts (Guidoboni et al 1994;Kelly 2004;Ambraseys 2009). The idea that the AD 365 tsunami wave might have affected the Tyrrhenian Sea seems unrealistic because of potential dissipation forces in the comparatively shallow waters between Sicily and the Tunisian coast.…”