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his experience as a professional architectural engineer who, in the first quarter
of the 20th century visited many sites of earthquakes. He is one of the first
in Europe to test models of buildings on shake-tables. However, his catalogue
contains many errors and duplications in entries and gives little indication of
his sources of information. It is well illustrated with maps but nevertheless, this
highly inaccurate work has for many years been regarded as a standard reference
on the subject (Sieberg 1930, 1932).
Stepanian
's annotated catalogues of earthquakes in Greater Armenia are a use-
ful set of documents. They are based on a considerable number of primary
published Armenian sources. These Armenian catalogues of Stepanian are lit-
tle known; they are accurate and methodical, and contain about 800 events
(Stepanian 1942, 1964).
Byus
' book of earthquakes in the Caucasus and adjacent regions is a systematic
compilation of information from previous catalogues, in some cases critically
selected, as well as from local Georgian, Armenian and Russian sources, includ-
ing local newspapers and reports. This 600-page long work contains a wealth of
information about events in the Middle East (Byus 1948).
Rethly
's book of earthquakes in the Carpathian region and central Europe is
a serious piece of work. It includes extracts from original sources and is fully
referenced. This work is invaluable for the identification of events that affected
southeast Europe (Rethly 1952).
Ambraseys'
three-volume Corpus of Documents of early earthquakes in the
Near and Middle East, is a collection of little-known Greek, Arabic, and Syriac
sources of information, compiled for UNESCO during the period 1961-1970
(Ambraseys 1970).
The survey of the seismicity of the Balkan region carried out by UNESCO in
the mid-1970s, contributed a summary of the material available at that time for
the assessment of regional seismicity. Isoseismal maps for a few events before
1900 and a parametric catalogue were published, but they must now be used with
caution (
Shebalin, K arnik and Hadzievski
1974).
The catalogues of earthquakes in the Middle East and along the Dead Sea Rift
by
Ben-Menahem
(1979, 1991) contain information extracted from earlier cat-
alogues of varying quality and from secondary works. These lists, which include
a parametric catalogue going back to 2050 BC, must be used with very great
caution.
The earthquake catalogue of the former USSR covers a large geographical area
for the period before 1977. It is based chiefly on secondary sources but in-
cludes a detailed procedure for the systematic quantification of historical events
(
Kondorskaya and Shebalin
1977, 1982).
The catalogue of
Poirier and Taher
(1980), covers the seismicity of the Mid-
dle East, listing nearly 200 events up to 1800. It summarises information taken
from a thorough survey of Arabic source material, presented in Taher's doctoral
thesis, Sorbonne (1979). References are properly identified and cited. Though
the catalogue contains various errors and duplications, this is a considerable im-
provement on earlier works. A more extended summary of this primary data,
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