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.
![[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]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/26/19/93500671-14228001-image-a-29_1735240344373.jpg)
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.'.
![[Above, a computer illustration of Plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) showing its oval or 'ovoid' shape with a bipolar staining technique]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/26/19/93500661-14228001-image-a-30_1735240358468.jpg)
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.
![[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]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/26/19/93500665-14228001-image-a-31_1735240400995.jpg)
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.'.
