Helike: the Greek City an Earthquake and a Wave Erased in 373 BCE
As the people of Helike slept, an earthquake struck the region, toppling buildings and killing the inhabitants. Then came a second calamity: a giant wave swallowed the city, and the inhabitants disappeared.
A recovery party of 2,000 men sent from neighbouring cities found no bodies. The nearby village of Bura was destroyed too. The story of the destruction of classical Helike in 373 BCE rippled out through the Greek lands.
When it was still recent history, Aristotle wrote about it in his Meterologica, a book not only about the atmosphere and weather as we would expect, but about what we could call Earth processes, including earthquakes and tsunamis.
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The wave did more than kill the city; it left nothing to bury. Two thousand men marched out from neighbouring cities and found no bodies — a disaster that denied even the consolation of graves.
That absence may be exactly why the place survived as text. Greek and Roman authors remembered and wrote about Helike for centuries, and Aristotle treated it as recent history in a book about earthquakes and tsunamis. No graves, but a remarkably long bibliography.