Introduction

Abstract

Through the last 300,000 years, at least, men of various ethnics and from different parts of the globe have explored their world for living space, food, shelter, and later also for various materials to accommodate their increasing living needs. The environment was—with temporary exceptions—generally favorable, and nature generally provided mankind with all that people needed and wanted. Human society was gradually developing and its living conditions were steadily improving. However, from time to time, nature showed its less friendly face, and from the very beginning, the human society was confronted with adversities of various kinds, among them are natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Just remember that a “mega-colossal” super-volcano eruption at Lake Toba in Indonesia some 74,000 years ago allegedly wiped out almost all of the global human population, reducing it from at most 60 million to less than 50,000–60,000. Primitive people did not understand these natural manifestations, just as they did not understand many other mysteries of the surrounding world. They passively accepted all the catastrophic events as certain inflictions and imputed them to the will of their deities. This universal perception did not change much in the course of the millennia which followed; it was only very recently that the modern science disclosed the fundamental principles of natural hazards. The individual catastrophes, which presented important events for mankind, were often assigned as certain milestones in the human history and as such remembered, retained in traditions, and later recorded in verbal form and sometimes also depicted.