Page 6 - My FlipBook

Plagues in Civilization’s Early Cradles
In the centuries following the emergence of farming and settled
communities, the first large-scale civilizations appeared. They
were nestled along the banks of large rivers in Mesopotamia (now
Iraq), Egypt, India, and China, and modern historians call them
the “cradles of civilization.” In those and nearby areas, epidem-
ics of certain diseases repeatedly returned in cycles, generating
understandable fear among local populations. In the late 1300s
BCE, for example, in ancient Hatti (land of the Hittites, part of
what is now Turkey), a scribe wrote, “What have you done O
Gods? You have allowed a plague to enter the land of Hatti and
all of it is dying! Now there is no one to prepare food and drink
offerings for you! No one reaps or sows the gods’ fields, for the
sowers and reapers are all dead! . . . The cowherds and shep-
herds are all dead!” 8
The disease that caused that long-ago outbreak is unknown,
as is that of another epidemic that struck China in the century
that followed. A surviving Chinese document from the 1200s BCE
worriedly asks, “Will this year have pestilence and will [there] be
9
deaths?” Meanwhile, the Hebrew Old Testament, composed in
the Middle East in the first millennium BCE, is filled with referenc-
es to diseases afflicting society. Typical is the warning that those
who disobey God will suffer from such ailments in a passage from
Deuteronomy: “The Lord will smite you with consumption [tuber-
culosis] and with fever, inflammation, and . . . [these ailments] will
pursue you till you perish.” 10

The 430 BCE Athenian Plague
Very little detail about diseases and their symptoms in such
early ancient epidemics has survived. The first large-scale dis-
ease outbreak that was extensively documented by a Greek
historian was the so-called plague that struck the Greek city-
state of Athens in the fifth century BCE. That historian was the
Athenian chronicler Thucydides, who recorded the events of the

11