US researchers have discovered the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s first proven pandemic, the Plague of Justinian (541-750 AD), which killed millions of people in the Byzantine Empire.
The team identified a mass grave at the Jerash hippodrome containing more than 200 people.
According to findings published in the Journal of Archaeological ScienceUnlike traditional cemeteries, DNA analysis confirms that these people were buried at the same time, indicating a sudden and catastrophic pandemic.
DNA from the victims’ teeth confirmed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the same microbe that caused the Black Death.
But the recent research shifts the focus from the perpetrator to the ‘human story’ of the victim, showing their lifestyle, reasons for living in Jerash and their vulnerability to the disease.
“Previous stories identified the plague organism. The Jerash site turns that genetic signal into a human story about who died and how a city went through a crisis,” said Rays Jiang, the study’s lead author.
The research will also construct pandemics not as biological events, but also as social events, as this perspective will help researchers understand how disease has affected real people within their social and environmental contexts.
Jiang continued: “This helps us understand pandemics in history as living human health events, and not just as outbreaks recorded in text.”
According to the study, pandemics have flourished in densely populated cities due to rampant travel and environmental changes.
The study also refutes “plague denial” and provides a scientific counterargument to historians who argued the exaggerated nature of the Justinian plague due to a lack of evidence regarding mass graves.
According to Jiang, “But the first plague is actually much easier to untangle than Covid. We have Yersinia pestis as a microbe; we have a mass grave and bodies, hard evidence that it happened.”
“Whether society or institutions collapse is another matter. You can go through a disease and you don’t need a revolution, uprising or regime change to prove that it is so,” she added.
