Earthquakes on the East Anatolia Region According to the Georgian and Armenian Sources from the Late Antiquity to the 19th Century

Catastrophic Natural Disasters have always played a key role in shaping human history. Territory covering Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and the eastern part of Turkey is within the zone of high seismic activity. Analysis of the historical and instrumental seismological data shows, that strong earthquakes with magnitude up to 7.0-7.5 have occurred here. Georgian and Armenian written sources, over a long historical period, have preserved evidence of the earthquakes and other natural phenomena occurring in the region. Architectural monuments damaged by earthquakes also provide us with important data concerning the time and effects of past seismic events. The interdisciplinary project of the Georgian National Center of Manuscripts (Financial support: Shota Rustaveli Georgian National Science Foundation of Georgia) – Natural Disasters in the South Caucasus. Earthquakes and attending Natural Phenomena in Historical Sources from the Ancient Period up to the 19th century – started in 2017. Within the project historians and seismologists envisage culling information from various-language written sources about the historical earthquakes in the South Caucasus and the adjacent regions. In this paper the authors present preliminary results of a survey of the historical earthquakes available in Georgian and Armenian written sources, which occurred on the territory of East Anatolia region. In the future our project envisages to create a unifi ed catalogue and an electronic data bank (Georgian-English) of the historical earthquakes which will cover South Caucasus as well as the Mediterranean area.