One of the oldest known cases of the ‘Black Death’ plague has been uncovered in the ancient DNA of a 3,290-year-old Egyptian mummy.
The cvirus Yersinia pestis, or the bubonic plague, is known for the havoc it wrought in medieval Europe — where the fatal disease wiped out nearly 50million people from 1346 to 1353 in a historic deadly pandemic.
While teams of archeologists and geneticists previously located traces of Y. pestis in the remains of 5,000-year-old human skeletons unearthed in what is now Russia, the new find marks the first discovery of the disease outside Eurasia.
The infected mummy gives new clues as to how the deadly plagued first spread west and provides ‘molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt.’
Previous studies over the past few decades have offered hints the bubonic plague spread down through trade routes along ancient empires in north Africa before hitting Europe, countering prior theories that it simply drifted east to west.
One ancient Egyptian medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus, dated to 1500 B.C., describes a ‘Black Death’-like illness that ‘produced a bubo’ of tell-tale ‘petrified’ pus.
Then in 2004, British archeologists found evidence of the disease in millennia-old Nile rats and fleas, suggesting its presence without proving any human infections.
While the DNA samples the team in Italy took of the plague-infected mummy showed ‘an already advanced state of disease progression,’ the evidence is only the beginning of an exploration into whether ancient Egypt faced its own ‘Black Death.’
The oldest known case of the ‘Black Death’ west of Eurasia has been uncovered in the genome of a 3,290-year-old Egyptian mummy, thanks to researchers in Italy working with a mummy held by Museo Egizio in Turin. Above, another mummy held in Museo Egizio’s collection
Radiocarbon-dating techniques place the ‘Black Death’-infected mummy as having lived somewhere around Egypt’s New Kingdom era, between 1686-1449 BC. Above, coffins that also date back to the New Kingdom era unearthed in Tuna el Gebel district of Minya, Egypt last year
‘We cannot infer how widespread the disease was during this time,’ the 12-person team explained in their academic conference presentation to the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association.
But, however infectious this mummy may have been, the interdisciplinary team of archeologists and viral paleontologists do believe it was mummified by hand.
Radiocarbon-dating techniques place the mummy as having lived somewhere around Egypt’s New Kingdom era, between 1686-1449 BC, although they admitted that ‘its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown.’
The technique measures traces of carbon atom isotopes in once living tissue, specifically the radioactive version of carbon, carbon-14. Animals absorb carbon-14 when they breathe, but slowly lose it all as the centuries pass after their death.
The team’s ancient mummy was an adult male, sourced from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, which is home to finds from ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom Tombs of Kha and Merit, among other valued specimens and artifacts.
Both bone tissue and intestinal content were sampled from the mummy for a kind of DNA testing known as ‘shotgun metagenomics’ — which tests unknown samples of genetic material for any and all of the known biological organisms it may contain.
Once they had clues of bubonic plague from this method, the samples were further processed focusing on getting ‘low coverage genome-wide data of both the human host and the Y. pestis pathogen.’
The team is now using that viral DNA map to explore how Y. pestis evolved and varied between its time in ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages and the modern day.
Above, a computer illustration of Plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) showing its oval or ‘ovoid’ shape with a bipolar staining technique
Above, a close-up of one of the New Kingdom mummies discovered in Tuna el Gebel district of Minya, Egypt last year, on October 15, 2023
‘Yersinia pestis ,’ the team noted in their presentation, ‘ravaged humankind with three historically documented pandemics.’
And one of those plagues happened in between the era of Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Black Death that befell 14th century Europe.
Historians know it as the Eastern Roman Empire’s Plague of Justinian, which spread through the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Near East in the 6th century AD.
China and Mongolia had their own brush with the bubonic plague more recently in the middle of the 19th century.
The new research, presented this August, may upend past research that suggested the plague spread to Europe via Silk Road traders.
Bubonic plague is the most common form of plague and often spreads via the bite of an infected flea. Human-to-human transmission of bubonic plague is rare, with the vector typically being ‘flea-bitten’ animals, like rats and dogs.
The infection greatly impacts immune glands called lymph nodes, causing them to become swollen and painful, progressing to open sores in untreated patients.
People infected with plague usually develop acute febrile disease with other non-specific systemic symptoms — like sudden onset fever, chills, head and body aches, weakness, vomiting and nausea — after a one-to-seven day incubation period.
Fortunately, the bubonic plague is easily treated today with antibiotics, when not avoided via preventative measures.
