Archaeology Magazine - March/April 1985 - 55

(Left) The copper alloy lampstand and lamp after
cleaning. Height , 30 centimeters. (Above) Conservator Jane Carpenter of the Fogg Art Museum excavating the copper alloy lampstand and marble
table top fragments in the courtyard .

elements the altered face of the
earth revealed marvellous sights.
For the great mass of waters, returning when it was least expected,
killed many thousands of men by
drowning; and by the swift recoil of
the eddying tides a number of ships,
after the swelling of the wet element
subsided, were found to have been
destroyed, and the lifeless bodies of
shipwrecked persons lay floating on
their backs or on their faces. Other
great ships, driven by the mad
blasts, landeçl on the tops of buildings (as happened at Alexandria),
and some were driven almost two
miles inland, like a Laconian ship
which I myself in passing that way
saw near the town of Motho, yawning apart through long decay." Ammianus Marcellinus 26, 10, 15-19
(Loeb translation).
For decades the epicenter of this
quake has been sought by scholars.

The coin evidence from the earlier
excavations had never been studied
from the point of view of stratigraphy. The coin contexts had never
been published, but the more I reviewed Daniel's notes for earthquake
affected strata, the more the same
pattern emerged- coins of Valens
and Valentinian I, and no coins of
the emperor Gratian whose issues
commenced in A.D. 367 , were always
present. The problem, now, was to
find an area which had not been
either built over or previously
excavated.
The Sanctuary of Apollo did
contain small areas of sealed earthquake debris, such as the West
House, and there was abundant evidence that the massive walls of the
Temple of Apollo had been hurled
down to the north and east by the
earthquake's primary wave. The
upper third of the temple had been
sheared off and soon buried while
the rest of it fell prey to stone robbers in the years that followed the
destruction. It was also clear that
the source of the earthquake lay in
the opposite direction, namely the
southwest, in the same offshore
areas that are still quite active today.
By 1981, after three years of
examining the records of the earlier
excavation and excavating small
preserved pockets of sealed quake
debris, I published the following
hypotheses about the end of ancient
Kourion: First, the earthquake oc-

curred sometime at or after A.D. 365
and before A.D. 372 and it destroyed
much of southwestern Cyprus. Second, the epicenter was about 30
miles southwest of Kourion and
about 20 miles south of Aphrodite's
Rock (Petra tou romiou). Third, objects tended to fall to the northeast.
Fourth, loss of life was heavy and
the magnitude was at least nine on
the modified Mercalli Scale. (This is
a scale for measuring destruction
when seismographs are not used and
it relies on simple observations.
Evidence of caverns opening up in
the ground, total destruction of
buildings with high loss of life and
realignment of the surface could be
seen as falling somewhere between
9 and 12 on the scale. ) And fifth,
the shocks went on for years and
forced depopulation of southwest
Cyprus. A Christian community
was not established over the ruins
until much later in the fourth
century.
I3y 1984, more and more archaeologists were becoming convinced
that the new earthquake theory
might be true. Some nagging criticisms still remained. Why were there
no bodies yet recovered from such a
major disaster? What was the extent
of the quake and was it really the
same event described by Ammianus?
One important key to the puzzle
was found in the archives of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum
with the help of Roger Edwards. In
1934, Daniel, then 23 years old, conducted a long, narrow probe trench
on the western part of the cliff of
Kourion. A tantalizing note by his
M^K/AnP;i
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Archaeology Magazine - March/April 1985

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - March/April 1985