Earthquake of Dabil

In Dhu al-Hijja of the year 280 a letter came from Dabil in Arminiya reporting that the moon had been eclipsed in Shawwal on its fourteenth night and had cleared again at the end of the night. Its people woke to a world in darkness, and the darkness lasted until the afternoon, when a strong black wind rose and blew until a third of the night had passed. Then the city was struck by earthquakes, and by morning it had been levelled; only about a hundred houses survived. By the time the letter was written, thirty thousand souls had been buried and were being dug out from under the rubble, and after the collapse there were five more tremors. It was said that a hundred and fifty thousand dead were taken out from beneath the rubble. ¹

The news came by way of the postal dispatches, as news from the frontier regions usually did in Baghdad: an eclipse, then a morning darkness, then a black wind, then an earthquake that buried the city. Within a single year Dabil became a report that the people of Iraq passed on about a city on the edge of the frontier. ¹