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Tsunamis in Greek Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

T. C. Smid
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Extract

The description of a seismic sea-wave has a long history, but the understanding of it a short one. Although the ancient Greeks did not have a name for it, until recently the moderns used a misnomer: tidal wave. Now that the phenomenon is correctly understood it has acquired a Japanese name: tsunami (soo-NAH-me), but misnomers often persist even among those who know better.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , April 1970 , pp. 100 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1970

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References

page 100 note 1 Carpenter, Rhys, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge, 1966), 29Google Scholar, describes seismic sea-waves, but calls them tidal waves.

page 100 note 2 Science and the Sea (U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, Washington, D.C., 1966), 54–7.Google Scholar

page 100 note 3 Lear, John, ‘The Volcano that Shaped the Western World’, Saturday Review of Literature, 11 6, 1966, 57–66Google Scholar: concerned primarily with the investigations of Angelos Galanopoulos of the volcanic island of Santorini. In the work cited above Carpenter mentions Spyridon Marinates (27) in the same connection. However, he conjectures that the ‘cultural retrogression of Greece at the close of the Mycenaean period’ was caused by a shift northward of desiccating trade winds (presently flowing over the Sahara), the result of a small increase in the mean temperature of the region.

page 100 note 4 Under Symplegades the OCD (1949) states: ‘the Clashing Rocks through which the Argonauts had to pass into the Hellespont’. A look at the map will show that such a course was the correct one only on the return voyage, for the islands lie eastward.

page 102 note 1 Fairbridge, Rhodes W. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Oceanography (New York, 1966), 491.Google Scholar

page 102 note 2 Tsunami, The Story of the Seismic Sea-Wave Warning System (U.S. Department of Commerce, Coast and Geodetic Survey, Washington, D.C., 1966), 3–7.Google Scholar

page 102 note 3 Heck, N. H., ‘List of Seismic Sea-Waves’, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, xxxvii, 10 1947, no. 4, 269–70.Google Scholar

page 103 note 1 Fairbridge, 942.