New research traces plague to historic Syriac Christian community.
Up in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains, the grave markers tell the story of a bad year in a Christian community. There are 467 headstones, and 118 of them mark burials that happened in 1338 and 1339. And some of those bear a message in Syriac: pestilence.
A recent study published in Nature suggests these Christians were the first known victims of the Black Death. Philip Slavin, one of the researchers who has been studying the material that was excavated from near Lake Issyk-Kul since 2017, reported that he and his colleagues examined seven teeth excavated from the graves and three of them contained the plague bacterium.
Through an examination of the DNA, they “established that phylogenetically these strains are situated at the very beginning of the Black Death wave, before it came to Europe,” Slavin said.
This may mean that Christians, who have been accused—sometimes correctly—of spreading every disease from smallpox to COVID-19, were partly responsible for the pandemic that devastated so many in the Middle Ages.
Slavin estimates there were about 1,000 Syriac Christians in this community on the eve of the Black Death. They were part of an organized church, known then as the Church of the East, which was governed by a bishop in Baghdad—about as far from Issyk-Kul as Chicago is from Los Angeles. The faith spread along the Silk Road, the trade route that linked China with Constantinople, and drew diverse converts.
“They appear to be immigrants from other regions in Central Asia,” Slavin said, including “a rich mixture of Turkic, Chinese, Mongol, and Armenian individuals.”
Those cultural and geographical links could explain the devastating spread of the Black Death, which …Continue reading… www.christianitytoday.org
