Vulnerable India by Kapur Anu

Author:Kapur, Anu.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications India Pvt, Ltd -- eBooks

SUCCESSIVE THEORIES OF NATURAL DISASTERS IN EUROPE—A CASE OF EARTHQUAKES

The religious tradition concerning seismic events in the Mediterranean basin goes back to more than three or four millennia. Seismic phenomena were attributed to divinities such as Poseidon or Zeus or to mythological figures such as the Giants or even to heroes and ‘holy men’ in a tradition that led right up to the legends of the Christian saints. In ancient Greece, the phrase ‘the god shook’ was used to indicate an earthquake in exactly the same way as was ‘divine wrath’ in the Byzantine chronicle. Ancient earthquake theories were much affected by the particular image of the earth created by natural philosophers. Whatever be the school of thought, the cause of shaking of the earth was related to an element. It could be water, fire, air or a combination of elements. The Aristotelian theory held sway for 1,700 years, a record indeed in the history of scientific theories. According to Aristotle's Meteorologica, there are two types of exhalation, the damp one is called vapour and the other is dry is called pneuma. The latter is the common factor in earthquakes and winds. Thus, when the earth is warmed by the sun and its internal fire, it produces a large quantity of pneuma both internally and externally. When the pneuma comes out of the earth, it gives rise to winds, but when it travels downwards into the earth, it collects and causes earthquakes. In the De Mundo, which some schools attribute to Aristotle, four types of earthquakes are identified—those that cause tilting, shaking, collapsing and splitting. It was Isodore of Seville (570–636), one of the earliest and most famous medieval encyclopedists, who propounded a theory different from Aristotle's. He stated that earthquakes were caused by internal collapse and subterranean water movement and not by the movement of winds. But the theory of winds was more acceptable. In fact the scriptures found an appropriate allegorical expression in the theory of winds. The wind that blows violently from the bowels of the earth was a symbol of the spirit of God that will come to judge the world at the end of time. In all, it was the religious rather than the naturalistic view that increasingly held sway. But there was parallel thinking that earthquakes are caused by the natural and the prodigious. In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) proposed a theory that moved research to another level. Influenced by experiments with firearms and mines, he suggested that there did exist subterranean fires that have a complex relation with masses of water. It is the fire and water that were responsible for earthquakes and volcanoes (Selley 2004).

From the mid-sixteenth century, classical theories were undermined by new empirical observations and experiments in metallurgy. New techniques of warfare with gunpowder and other explosive devices encountered a new attitude towards seismic phenomena. The first new development in earthquake theory was worked out by the German scholar, George Bauer (1494–1555). A single empirical observation

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