Earthquake! How the earth shook up the past

Great earthquakes can affect the course of world history. In the 20th century, the seismic destruction of the Japanese capital Tokyo in 1923 was a key factor in the subsequent militarisation of Japan, while the devastation of the Chinese industrial city Tangshan in 1976 catalysed the end of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent economic development of China. Earthquakes must have been influential, too, in the ancient world. Yet the further back in time we look, the harder it is to detect an earthquake and its signature. Disappointingly, there is almost no clear account of seismicity in some 3,500 years of ancient Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, beginning around 3000 BC, because Egypt