Introduction: relationships between volcanoes, society, and culture in time and space
A volcano is not made on purpose to frighten superstitious people into fits of piety, nor to overwhelm devoted cities with destruction.
James Hutton (1788)Throughout history volcanoes have fascinated humanity. Even before they were observed by literate observers, eruptions were depicted in art, remembered in legend, and often became incorporated into religious rituals: volcanoes being perceived as agents of benevolence, fear, or vengeance depending on their state of activity and the society involved (see Blong, 1982, 1984; De Boer and Sanders, 2002). In the ancient Near East, the earliest known record of a volcanic eruption is a wall painting from the Neolithic town of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia (Mellaart, 1967). It shows a Strombolian eruption with an ash cloud and the spasmodic eruption of bombs and blocks (Polinger-Foster and Ritner, 1996), but it is only much later, in Mesopotamia from the 3rd millennium BCE, that volcanoes became part of the written record (Foster, 1996).
As far as written records of eruptions are concerned, even today these are incomplete. It is sobering to recall that:
if a list of … volcanoes had been continually kept, it would, at the time of Christ, have contained only the names of 9 Mediterranean volcanoes and West Africa's Mount Cameroon. In the next 10 centuries the list would have grown by only 17 names, 14 of them Japanese. The first historic eruptions of Indonesia were in 1000 and 1006, and newly settled Iceland soon added 9 volcanoes to help swell the list to 48 by 1380 AD … The list has continued to grow, with several important volcanic regions such as Hawaii and New Zealand being completely unrepresented until the last 200 years. […]