It is a great relief to see this monumental work finally printed. Professor Ambraseys has towered over research into historical earthquakes for 50 years. He didn't invent the subject, but he certainly demonstrated how it should be done to standards that make it effective, with a level of scholarship that very few people can match. That it is important is beyond doubt: earthquakes repeat on particular faults only every few hundred or thousand years, even in places that are moving quickly, like California. The modern, high-quality, instrumental record of earthquakes provided by seismology is only about one hundred years long, and is clearly inadequate to see longer-term patterns.
Ambraseys has been pointing this out for years: thus, for instance, the Dead Sea fault system, from Aqaba to Antioch, has been very quiet in the 20th century, but was the site of several enormous earthquakes over the previous thousand years, some of which are well-documented by historical sources in crusader times. The last 100 years are simply not representative of the longer period, and give a completely misleading and unrealistic view of the true earthquake hazard.
In 1982 Cambridge University Press published Ambraseys & Melville's book A History of Persian Earthquakes (re-published Reference Ambraseys and Melville2005), which was widely admired and used by seismologists, engineers and tectonic geologists. It is an extraordinary work of scholarship and absolutely iconic, setting a standard in this area of research that has not, in my opinion, been equaled since. It is so good because they returned to original literary sources and assessed them with a modern, well-informed eye. This requires a prodigious range of skills: an exceptional linguistic ability, able to take on ancient Aramaic as well as mediaeval Persian and Arabic; a profound historical knowledge of the region, able to tell whether documentary silence from a place was really because there were no earthquakes, or because trade-routes had switched, places had declined in importance through disease, invasion etc.; the knowledge of a well-informed modern seismologist, able to interpret the historical accounts in a realistic way, allowing for the inevitable hyperbole in a way that is physically realistic and possible; and finally the eye of an engineer who is familiar with indigenous building styles and building performance in earthquakes, and can interpret the historical accounts accordingly. To cap it all, Ambraseys has spent a huge amount of time in the field, visiting and assessing the sites of these earthquakes, and in many cases identifying the faults responsible for the earthquakes themselves. Ambraseys has all these skills, and no-one else does.
This new book is a distillation of Ambraseys's research in the area 28–44°N, 18–44°E, roughly from Romania to Egypt and from Albania to Iraq, drawing on and acknowledging his collaborations with others, especially with Charles Melville, Caroline Finkel and Dominic White, who supplied specialist knowledge in arcane languages. The bulk of the work is 750 pages containing evaluations of earthquakes prior to 1900, most of them over the last 2000 years. The accounts summarize key primary documentary sources (in English), correcting errors in previous compilations and discussing different modern interpretations of some of the more important large events. This is an invaluable core of knowledge and scholarship, and it is a great achievement to render it accessible in a single volume.
Shorter chapters discuss the nature and evaluation of the historical and macroseismic data sources, the evaluation of 20th century instrumental seismic data (important in providing the calibration between instrumental and macroseismic measurements necessary for a realistic estimation of pre-instrumental magnitudes), patterns of long-term seismicity, and the tectonic setting. All of these are balanced, sensible and useful in the high-quality and reliable tradition of all Ambraseys's immense published output. The preface of the book is particularly interesting, containing the author's quite freely-expressed, almost philosophical conclusions and perspectives on seismic hazard in developing countries, after a long, distinguished and widely admired career. They are also rather gloomy and pessimistic, concluding that people quickly forget lessons in how earthquake effects might be mitigated, and become resigned or fatalistic to their consequences. Many places in the region that have been destroyed by historical earthquakes, with (by modern standards) relatively little loss of life because of their small populations at the time, are now occupied by megacities with no significant improvement in the building stock. The outlook for such cities is bleak. The contrast between places like California and Japan, where earthquakes of moderate size are mostly stories about money, and much of the developing world, where earthquakes of the same size kill large numbers of people, is one of the most chilling realities of the modern world.
Cambridge should be congratulated for publishing this book; such should be the purpose of an academic publisher. This book will never go out of demand, though that demand will be slow, steady, and professional: for libraries, researchers, consulting engineers and the insurance industry. It will not be a student textbook, and its substantial price is probably inevitable. Ambraseys and Melville's 1982 book was out of print for a number of years, but was in constant demand, with second-hand copies much sought-after and coveted: it is pleasing to know it is now re-issued in paperback.
