17/06/2014 18:16
Cyprian Plague victims unearthed in Egypt
From 250 to 271 AD around 5,000 people died every day in Rome not from war and famine, but from a deadly pandemic that would later be known as the Plague of Cyprian.
According to the Daily Mail, now archaeologists have found the remains of what appears to be victims of the widespread disease, in a pit in Luxor, Egypt.
Kilns used to produce lime to cover the victims were also found, alongside a bonfire where stricken people were burned in order to stop the spread of the highly infectious disease, dubbed the 'end of worlds' pandemic.
The find was made by the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor (MAIL) team, reported Live Science.
The team, led by Francesco Tiradritti, excavated the tomb, known as the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru, from 1997 until 2012.
The monument had been built for an Egyptian grand steward named Harwa in the 7th century BC and it was continually used until it became a plague-burial site in the 3rd Century AD - and was then never used again.
Writing in the Egyptian Archaeology magazine, Tiradritti said using the tomb to dispose of infected corpses ‘gave the monument a lasting bad reputation and doomed it to centuries of oblivion until tomb robbers entered the complex in the early 19th century.’
The Plague of Cyprian raged until 2071, by which time it claimed a quarter of Rome’s population - and countless lives elsewhere.
It spread across what is now modern-day Europe and into Africa.
Now believed to have been caused by smallpox, the plague was so devastating that it led the bishop of Carthage at the time, Saint Cyprian for whom the pandemic is named, to lament that it could signal the ‘passing away of the world.’