First plague pandemic: Difference between revisions

 

==Plague in Africa and South Arabia==

 

Early Arabic sources record that plague was endemic in Nubia and Abyssinia.<ref name=Sarris>{{citation |author=Peter Sarris |chapter=Bubonic Plague in Byzantium: The Evidence of Non-Literary Sources |title=Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 |editor=Lester K. Little |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2007 |pages=119–132}}, at 121–123.</ref> The testimony of [[Procopius]], who says that the plague began in [[Pelusium]] in the east of the [[Nile Delta]] and then spread to [[Alexandria]], is consistent with an introduction from the [[Red Sea]] region, possible via ship-borne rats if the [[Canal of the Pharaohs]] was still open. The plague could have originated in [[Indo-Roman trade|commercial links with India]] or in growing Roman religious links with Nubia and Aksum.<ref name=McCormick>{{citation |author=Michael McCormick |chapter=Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic |title=Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 |editor=Lester K. Little |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2007 |pages=290–312}}, at 303–304.</ref> A link with India is rendered less likely by the fact that the plague arrived in the Roman Empire before arriving in Persia or China, which had closer links with India. According to Peter Sarris, the "geopolitical context of the early sixth century," with an Aksumite–Roman alliance against Himyar and Persia, "was arguably the crucial prerequisite for the transmission of the plague from Africa to Byzantium."<ref name=Sarris/>