[Fred Nerks]

About 3,500 years ago, the eastern flank of the mountain experienced a catastrophic collapse, generating an enormous landslide in an event similar to that seen at Mount St. Helens in 1980. The eruption which is thought to have caused this collapse was recorded by Diodore of Sicily,...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Etna

[SunkenCiv]

Diodorus wrote later (Roman times I think) so he must have been recording a then-current tradition, x number of years before such and such a king, I'll try to check that out later on (Diodorus' surviving work is pretty large if memory serves, probably is online somewhere).

"the Phoenician alphabet was used in some form in early Etruscan and Greek, and also influenced the writing systems of Hebrew and Aramaic. The only known alphabet of the Sicanians was essentially Phoenician."

This may wind up in the epigraphy and language header of the digest this week. :')