THE fortress city of Megiddo, which guarded a strategic valley on the route
between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, was built on 鈥渢he San
Andreas of the Middle East鈥�, a geologist at Stanford University has discovered.
Amos Nur told a Seismological Society of America meeting last week in San Diego
that the town was destroyed 30 times in more than 2000 years. He thinks this may
have contributed to the collapse of the late Bronze Age civilisation.
Although invaders undoubtedly did cause some of the damage to the town,
earthquakes caused a lot more, says Nur. 鈥淲hy would they destroy the walls and
the stables and the gates and then immediately rebuild them?鈥�
Such was the scale of the damage that the town is still a popular byword for
massive devastation鈥攗nder its biblical name of Armageddon.
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