Earthquakes instead of bold warriors
Most archaeologists have blamed hordes of seafaring warriors for the fall of the legendary cities of Troy and Jericho, and about 40 other Bronze Age cities. These invaded the relevant areas in the 12th century BC. Now this popular theory has been questioned. A scientist announced on December 11 at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting that another force may have brought down these ancient cities, or at least made them more vulnerable to attack: earthquakes. A few years ago, when Amos Nur, a geophysicist at Stanford, visited several ruined Bronze Age cities in Greece and Israel, he noted that what appeared to be dozens of the walls and structures had collapsed simultaneously, burying both people and gold artifacts.“We don't bury our dead under rubble,” says Nur. Also, he adds, invaders would never have left precious metals behind.
Because Nur believed the destruction was more likely to be the result of an earthquake, he began researching the seismic history of the region. He drew a map of all earthquakes greater than 6.5 on the Richter scale that have struck the eastern Mediterranean region since 1910. When he entered the cities destroyed, Nur discovered that almost all of the cities were in the zone of the strongest earthquakes of the 20th century. This suggests that massive tremors may have destroyed the cities at least enough to make them easy prey for enemy armies.
The theory sounds very plausible, says Yossi Mart, an archaeologist at Haifa University in Israel. No one had considered this explanation for the decline of Bronze Age cities, Mart claims, simply because archaeologists know little about geophysics.
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