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Dead Bodies Filled a Mass Grave When the First Pandemic Struck This Early Medieval City. New Research Explores the Identity of the Victims
Key takeaways
- A tooth from the Jerash mass grave site Greg O'Corry Crowe In the year 541 C.E., a terrible sickness swept through the Byzantine Empire.
- A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science reveals details about the plague victims.
- In the sixth century C.E., the Byzantine Empire—the eastern half of the Roman Empire—covered most Mediterranean lands, including North Africa, southern Europe and Asia Minor.
A tooth from the Jerash mass grave site Greg O'Corry Crowe In the year 541 C.E., a terrible sickness swept through the Byzantine Empire. Now known as the Plague of Justinian, after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, the pandemic faded and resurged for two centuries, killing tens of millions of people. It was the first documented outbreak of plague.
A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science reveals details about the plague victims. Lessons about how their society worked and who was most vulnerable when disaster struck are still relevant to our modern health crises, the researchers say.
In the sixth century C.E., the Byzantine Empire—the eastern half of the Roman Empire—covered most Mediterranean lands, including North Africa, southern Europe and Asia Minor. One of the plague’s epicenters was the city of Jerash, a crossroads of trade in present-day Jordan. About half the city’s 20,000 people died, and quickly.