PARIS — The epicenter of last week's horrific 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude sequential earthquakes that have hit Turkey and Syria this month, is located at the triple junction of the Dead Sea transform, the African and Arabian plates, and the Arabian and Anatolian plates — superseding seismology and geopolitics.

Since the beginning of recorded history, the area has been struck by devastating temblors roughly every 150 years. Two were especially infamous. On Dec. 12, 115 CE, a magnitude 7.5 quake killed at least 250,000 people in Antioch — modern-day Antakya, or Hatay. The city was crowded because Roman emperor Trajan and his successor Hadrian were wintering there, during their military campaign against the Parthians of Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq).

In late May 526, another 7.0 magnitude quake destroyed Antakya for good — it had been the second-biggest Byzantine city, after Constantinople — with an estimated 250,000 casualties again. The region fell into lawlessness, as fleeing inhabitants were robbed and killed.

Such a dire historical setting says volumes to put the present disaster into perspective. In the past two weeks, foreign rescue teams had to be relocated because of insecurity, even on the Turkish side of the threefold border with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and jihadi groups in the Idlib province. Little foreign aid went into Idlib because of the danger to rescuers. The exception was a convoy of trucks labeled “Qatari aid,” as the gas-rich emirate has been an all-out patron of militant Islamists of all persuasions.