Alireza ALINAGHI - Assistant Professor, IIEES, Tehran, Iran

Iran has a long history of devastating earthquakes which have claimed lives of hundreds of thousands of people both in ancient and modern times. In fact Iran is high on the list among 10 countries with earthquake fatalities both in terms of the absolute number of casualties and the number of deaths divided by population (Figure 1-a). Moreover, in terms of the number of significant earthquakes in documented history Iran tops the list (Figure 1-b).The focus of this study is Qumis earthquake of 856 AD with reported death toll of 200,000 (Ambresseys and Melville, 1982, NOAA). It is among the top 10 deadliest earthquakes in human history (Figure 1-c). But, the question is whether this death toll and magnitude can be ascertained by inspecting archaeological remains and historical records? Answering this question is important because it has tremendous bearing on seismic hazard assessment and the potential of Astaneh fault, the reported causative fault of the earthquake (Hollingsworth et al., 2010) for generation of an earthquake with such a magnitude. To answer the above question we have examined both documented history and archaeological monuments already discovered and mapped in the area. First of all it must be stated that the greatest loss of lives in Iranian earthquakes which has been attributed to Qumis earthquake stems from references to Yaghubi history (Mathew et al., 2019). The account of this earthquake like many other reports of events in his writing is accompanied by gross exaggeration. Therefore, basing the number of fatalities and hence the magnitude of the event solely on such evidence does not seem plausible.

Archaeoseismology, Archaeology, Historical earthquakes, Qumis, Astaneh