Samples of the Black Death, which wiped out as many as 50 million people in medieval Europe, have been found in an ancient Egyptian mummy. The pandemic, also known as bubonic plague, spread quickly through the continent on the fleas carried by rats. Symptoms of the killer disease included horrific skin sores, swollen lymph nodes and a sudden high fever and it got its grisly nickname as victims’ tongues would turn black.
Recently, a team of archaeologists took samples from an ancient Egyptian mummy housed at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. Both bone tissue and intestinal content was taken from the male corpse -dating back to around 1780BC. Both samples came back with yersinia pestis - the Black Death. It is the first discovery of the disease outside of medieval Europe and Asia.
In a report by the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association, the team said: “Here, we report the presence of Y. pestis DNA in an ancient Egyptian mummy of an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. The individual, who was anthropogenically mummified, was radiocarbon-dated from the end of the Second Intermediate Period to the beginning of the New Kingdom, yet its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown.
“Bone tissue and intestinal content derived from the mummy were first subjected to a shotgun metagenomics approach. Thereby, we detected Y. pestis DNA in both samples indicating broad tissue tropism of the pathogen during an already advanced state of disease progression.
