Damghan Earthquake

While the earthquake was centered on Damghan and destroyed most of that city, damage to neighboring areas extended east and west over a two hundred mile stretch of countryside. Every village in this area was destroyed. One third of the town of Bustam, about fifty miles east of Damghan, collapsed. In mountain areas close to the center of the earthquake the surface of the ground parted in several places. Overall, 200,000 people lost their lives. The memory of the event was so vivid that, two generations later, detailed memories of all that had happened were still being recounted.

Iran has always been known as a place of earthquakes because of its location along fault lines and between two major tectonic plates that are always colliding. In earlier times, news of earthquakes in this remote region east of Mesopotamia was almost nonexistent. Not until the early Islamic Period, after 622, was it possible to locate reliable records of events. Of the significant earthquakes reported after 622 and before 922, Damghan was the most powerful. There were about forty others within this period with magnitudes ranging from 5 to 7. At this early stage of scientific thinking, explanations for earthquakes among the more educated Muslims were based on Aristotle’s thinking, a sort of philosophy of nature based on mathematics or on orderly patterns observed in nature. Unfortunately, earthquakes are anything but orderly. We know their causes but not theirtiming. For the vast majority of people in 856, earthquakes were viewed with awe and their origins attributed to the actions of a supernatural power.

Even in modern times, this theological interpretation of earthquakes is a common view. One group regards them as punishment from their god for bad behavior. Another sees them as omens of contemporary political events; that is, they indicate what is about to happen in a particular country. This view is so common in China today that the government of that country delayed for three years the detailed reporting on an earthquake that came in 1976. In the case of Iran, there was a fairly large earthquake in that country on the sixteenth of January 1979, in which several hundred people were killed. That particular day happened to be the one on which Shaw Pahlavi departed from Iran, leaving the government of the country in the hands of the theological leaders who replaced him. To many people in the country, the earthquake was evidence of the behavior of their god in rearranging the nation’s government. With our present knowledge of the causes and outcomes of earthquakes, Iranian patterns can be identified across time and space, some because of local records and traditions seen to be repeating every thousand or even every five thousand years.