Storm gods rule!

In ancient religions all over the world – Greece, Rome, Iceland, India – the chief god was the god of storms, whether it was Zeus brandishing his thunderbolt, Thor with his magic hammer, or Indra riding his multi-tusked elephant.

My new book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion) explores the fascinating stories surrounding these gods, such as how a wicked giant stole Thor’s hammer and demanded the hand of a princess in marriage as the price of its return. Thor disguised himself as the bride, and managed to escape detection at the wedding ceremony in spite of eating an ox and eight salmon. Then he grabbed the hammer and killed the giant.

The Maoris told of how the sky god made love endlessly to the earth goddess so their children could never get out of her womb. Eventually one of the young deities managed to prise them apart, but this upset the storm god Tawhirimatea who had been quite happy inside his mother, and now became an unruly presence on land and sea.

In some Slavic regions, they believed the darkness held the sun prisoner in a cell which could be opened only by lightning from the storm god, Perun, and a spring festival used to be held at which maidens would dance themselves to death in his honour. This became the inspiration for Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, while the cult 1970s British horror film, The Wicker Man, was inspired by sacrifices to the Celtic storm god, Taranis.

For much more on the role of storms in religion, see Storm: Nature and Culture by John Withington. Reaktion Books. Price £14.95.  ISBN 9781780236612.

Wisdom and plagues

A Spanish website quotes from my account of a devastating plague that hit Rome in the second half of the 2nd century AD in my Disastrous History of the World. 

http://untipodeletras.net/2014/10/08/leer-en-caso-de-ebola-no-nos-convirtamos-en-rinocerontes/

One of those carried off by the epidemic, which raged for 15 years, was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The historian Edward Gibbon considered him the last great Roman emperor before the rot set in, and begins his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with Marcus Aurelius's death. (It is also the starting point for the film, Gladiator.)

The emperor refused to see his son before he died in case he passed on the sickness, and his last words were: 'Weep not for me; think rather of the deaths of so many others.' This philosopher emperor had already written in his Meditations that the pestilence was less deadly than falsehood and evil conduct.

One thing we are not sure of is what exactly the disease was. It used to be thought that it was bubonic plague, but some scholars now believe it was smallpox.

Blaming people for earthquakes

I've just been quoted in an interesting article from Newsweek (for link, see below) about the dangers that human activities such as fracking might cause earthquakes.

I talk about two quakes - the first hit Antioch in what is now Turkey, but was then one of the biggest cities in the Roman empire, in AD 115. It nearly killed the emperor Trajan and the future emperor, Hadrian, commissioner of the famous wall.

Trajan believed it had happened because the spread of Christianity had made the old Roman gods angry, so he had the local bishop thrown to wild animals at the Colosseum in Rome. An estimated 300,000 people died in another earthquake in Antioch in 526, after which the city never recovered its former greatness.

The other earthquake I mention is the one that hit Lisbon, then the centre of a great global empire, on November 1 - All Saints' Day - 1755 (pictured). After the quake, fires burned for six days, destroying 85 per cent of the city including scores of convents, 30 monasteries, many churches and the headquarters of the Inquisition. The red light district emerged unscathed, to the amusement of many in Protestant countries.

For more details on both, see A Disastrous History of the World.

This is the Newsweek story - http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/man-made-earthquakes-are-proliferating-we-wont-admit-fault-266531.html

Bangladesh factory collapse now deadliest of modern times

The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building near the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, is now confirmed as the deadliest event of its kind in modern times.    Officials say the death toll has now reached 507, but that scores of people have still not been accounted for. 

About 2,500 people were injured as the 8-storey building fell, and rescuers say they do not know how many are still missing because they have not been able to get accurate figures from the factory owners.  Nine people have been arrested in connection with the disaster.

Ever since the Rana Plaza collapsed last week, workers in Bangladesh’s huge clothing industry have been holding protests to demand better safety standards.

Until now, the deadliest building failure of modern times was the collapse of the Sampoong department store in Seoul, South Korea in 1995, in which 501 people died. When part of the Circus Maximus in Rome collapsed during a gladiator fight some time between 138 and 161AD, it was said to have cost more than 1,100 lives.

*The second in my series of videos on Britain’s 20 Worst Military Disasters – the defeat of Boudicca.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR7U4cjenuQ

The Bologna station bomb

Just back from the lovely ancient Italian city of Bologna. In the Piazza Maggiore, there’s a simple but moving monument to the 85 people killed in a neo-Fascist terrorist bombing at the railway station on Saturday, August 2, 1980.

It was a hot morning, and the air-conditioned waiting room was packed when an unattended suitcase exploded at 1025. The blast destroyed most of the station’s main building and severely damaged a train at the platform by the waiting room. So many people were injured that a large number had to be taken to hospital in buses and taxis.

In 1988, four neo-fascists were gaoled for life for their part in the bombing, though two were later freed on appeal. A third person was gaoled for 30 years in 2004, but he continues to maintain his innocence.

The attack came on the same day that a Bologna court sent 8 men for trial following a neo-fascist terrorist bomb on the Rome-Brenner express in 1974 that killed 12 people.

The Great Fire of Rome

On this day….1,945 years ago, one of the worst fires in history devastated Rome. Flames first appeared in a row of shops at the Circus Maximus, the main stadium for chariot races. Fanned by the wind, they quickly swept through the closely packed wooden buildings that made up most of the city. Some people managed to escape into the countryside, but many were overtaken by the flames.

When I was at school, I was told the famous story that the emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. It could not have been true, because the violin was not invented until the sixteenth century, but stories swept Rome that he had sung or played the lyre while his capital burned.

The story gained credence from two things. First, it was known that Nero hated the slums and haphazard layout of the city and would have loved the chance to rebuild it. The second was that mysterious gangs of thugs roamed the streets preventing fire fighters from tackling the blaze, and using torches to keep it going, though, of course they may just have been looters who wanted to profit from the disorder.

It was nine days before the flames were extinguished. Of Rome’s 14 districts, three were levelled to the ground, and another seven were, in the words of the great historian Tacitus “reduced to a few scorched and mangled ruins.” Thousands of people had lost their lives.

Nero had actually played an energetic part in fighting the fire, and provided generously for the tens of thousands made homeless, but suspicion still clung to him. His excesses grew more and more extreme, and four years after the Great Fire, he slit his own throat. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Malaria - new hope against old enemy?

A new anti-malaria drug is being developed by researchers in the United States. When mosquitoes feed on human blood, they produce a substance called haem that can poison them. The new medicine prevents them getting rid of the haem, and it can also enhance the effectiveness of traditional anti-malaria drugs like chloroquine and quinine, to which mosquitoes have been developing resistance. It could be a decade, though, before the treatment comes into general use.

Malaria has probably been around much longer than human beings. The parasite that causes it goes back perhaps 30 million years. The disease was described by Hippocrates in ancient Greece 400 years before Christ, and it may have killed Alexander the Great.

Its name comes from the Medieval Italian for “bad air”, and some historians believe that recurrent epidemics reduced the birth rate in Italy at the time of the Roman Empire, making it more dependent on “barbarian” auxiliaries to defend its frontiers, and eventually leading to its decline and fall. On the other hand, fear of the disease may have halted Attila the Hun in 452 when he seemed on the point of sacking Rome.

It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that a British army medical officer, Major Ronald Ross, proved the disease was spread by mosquitoes, and today malaria still kills nearly 900,000 people every year – mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Italian earthquakes

At least 27 people have been killed by an earthquake that struck the Italian Mediaeval city of L'Aquila about 70 miles from Rome in the early hours of this morning. A hundred thousand people have fled their homes.

Italy is often prey to earthquakes because of two fault lines – one that runs the length of the country from north to south, and another that crosses the centre from west to east. In 2002, 25 people were killed in the southern town of San Giuliano di Puglia, while five years earlier, a quake demolished part of the famous church of St Francis at Assisi, with its frescos by Giotto. The death toll was ten.

Italy’s deadliest earthquake in recent years came in 1980, when 2,700 people were killed at Eboli about 50 miles south of Naples, while the deadliest the country has ever seen had its epicentre under the Straits of Messina that divide Sicily from the Italian mainland.

It struck on the morning of December 28, 1908, and flattened much of Messina on Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the mainland. Some estimates put the number of people killed at more than 150,000, and martial law had to be imposed when gangs of looters descended on the stricken areas. Ships in the harbour at Messina were turned into floating hospitals for the injured, and Russian sailors in particular won praise for their courage in helping to free people trapped under the rubble.

Bird strikes and an anniversary

It seems that a bird strike brought down the US Airways passenger jet which the pilot managed to land with such skill on the Hudson river in New York City yesterday. Mercifully no one was killed. America’s Federal Aviation Administration says it received nearly 76,000 reports of bird strikes between 1990 and 2007, and the incidents resulted in a total of 11 deaths. Last November, a Ryanair 737 had to make an emergency landing at one of Rome’s airports after birds had been sucked into one of the engines. There were only minor injuries.

The worst accident involving a bird strike came in 1960 when an Eastern Airlines flight hit a flock of starlings just after take-off from Boston in the United States damaging all four engines. It crashed into the sea killing 62 people out of 71 on board.

On this day......647 years ago. On January 16, 1362, the Grote Mandrenke or “great drowning of men” carried off at least 25,000 people, as a massive Atlantic gale caused floods in England, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.