A bonfire where many of the victims of an ancient epidemic in the ancient city of Thebes in Egypt were ultimately incinerated. Credit: Photo by N. Cijan © Associazione Culturale per lo Studio dell’Egitto e del Sudan ONLUS.
A lime kiln built to produce enough lime disinfectant to cover the human remains of victims from the epidemic in the ancient city of Thebes. Credit: Photo by N. Cijan © Associazione Culturale per lo Studio dell’Egitto e del Sudan ONLUS.
The survivors, hardened their immune system and 1,200 years later; depopulated the Americas.
That would be a particularly nasty little surprise for the tomb robbers, wouldn’t it? Interesting that they knew that lime would act as a disinfectant without knowing why. Some of the symptoms actually sound a little like cholera but what the heck do I know?
A nasty way to go....
“Cyprian left a gut-wrenching record of what the victims suffered before they died. “The bowels, relaxed into a constant flux, discharge the bodily strength [and] a fire originated in the marrow ferments into wounds of the fauces (an area of the mouth),” he wrote in Latin in a work called “De mortalitate.” The “intestines are shaken with a continual vomiting, [and] the eyes are on fire with the injected blood,” he wrote, adding that “in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off by the contagion of diseased putrefaction …”
Very interesting. I wonder if it’s possible they can test the remains to conclude what a lot of researchers seem to believe, namely that it was a smallpox epidemic.
This plague coincided with the Crisis of the Third Century, a time the Roman Empire nearly collapsed. There were twenty-something claimants to the title of Emperor and the Empire split up. Diocletian ended the anarchy, but the Empire was never again as strong.
