A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries.
The findings, published in February’s Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is a rare empirical window into the mobility, urban life and vulnerability of citizens affected by the pestilence.
DNA taken from bodies at a mass burial ground at Jerash in modern-day Jordan show the grave represented “a single mortuary event”, instead of the normal, gradual growth over time of a traditional cemetery, according to the team that last year identified Yersinia pestis as the microbe that caused the plague.
The new research focused on the victims, how they lived, their susceptibility to the disease and why they were in Jerash, a regional trade hub and the epicenter of the pandemic that raged from AD541 to AD750.
“Earlier stories identified the plague organism. The Jerash site turns that genetic signal into a human story about who died, and how a city experienced crisis,” said Rays Jiang, the study’s lead author and associate professor in the University of South Florida’s department of global, environmental and genomic health sciences.
A tooth from the site in Jerash. Photograph: Greg O’Corry/FAU-Crowe
“Pandemics aren’t just biological events, they’re social events. By linking biological evidence from the bodies to the archaeological setting, we can see how disease affected real people within their social and environmental context.
“This helps us understand pandemics in history as lived human health events, not just outbreaks recorded in text.”
A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, historians and genetic experts from the University of South Florida, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Sydney produced the paper, with Jiang and her researchers looking at DNA extracted from teeth.
They found that a diverse demographic range of victims, which she said showed that a largely mobile population was together and effectively stuck in the same place by the disease, similar to how travel shut down during the Covid pandemic.
“People move. They’re transient, and vulnerable, and normally they are disturbed, dispersed. Here, they were brought together by crisis,” Jiang said, adding that ancient pandemics thrived in densely populated cities shaped by travel and environmental change.
Rays Jiang of the University of South Florida College of Public Health. Photograph: Torie Doll/University of South Florida
Excavations revealed more than 200 people were buried in the grave at the hippodrome in Jerash, known as the Pompeii of the Middle East for its preserved Greco-Roman ruins. Jiang said they were a mix of men and women, old and young, “people in their prime, and teenagers”.
“At that time there were slaves, mercenaries, all sorts of people, and our data is consistent with this being a transient population. That’s not a new thing,” she continued.
Jiang said the research exposed other parallels in more modern pandemics, particularly Covid, dismissed by Donald Trump in its early days as “a hoax”.
“There’s a whole school of thought that says the first pandemic did not happen,” she said. “The denialists argue that if you look at census data, the population did not collapse like the Black Death, if you look at economic tracking, you don’t see anything, if you study residence density maps you don’t see a disruption. And plus, no one had found a mass grave.
“But the first plague is actually much easier to untangle than Covid. We have Yersinia pestis as the microbe; we have a mass grave, and bodies, hard evidence that it happened. Whether society or institutions collapsed is a separate matter. You can have a disease rampage through and don’t have to have a revolution, a revolt, a regime change to prove that it did.”
