Читать книгу The End is Always Near - Dan Carlin - Страница 16

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,[37] but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980[38]—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades. Those who didn’t succumb to the illness were often left blind, and severely disfigured by scarring. Mercifully, we don’t deal with smallpox anymore, but the illness goes back millennia. When the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V (r. 1149–1145 BCE) was examined, the body revealed smallpox scarring. (He may have died from the disease.)[39] Smallpox killed multiple reigning European monarchs and five Japanese emperors, and it was likely the cause of many early plagues of history, such as the one in ancient Athens in 430 BCE.[40] Smallpox was also one of the main killers of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia after first contact, the majority of whom may have died from the disease before the Europeans who first transmitted it across the oceanic disease barrier actually encountered them.[41]

Just as it is difficult for most of us today to imagine the food insecurity that was common in most human populations in most eras, it’s difficult to conceptualize the range of illnesses and diseases against which earlier cultures had no defense. Pretty much nothing separates us more from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. We are still victimized by illness and disease of all kinds, but unlike in the distant past, we now have so many more ways to fight back, and such a better understanding of the underlying reasons for maladies. Real plagues—a common experience in all of human history—are thankfully rare today. Some of our greatest modern fears over disease are simply that we might ever again have one plague as bad as any average plague in earlier eras.[42]

Sources make it sound as though Hattusa (the Hittite capital) was dealing with both famine and plague in this general Bronze Age era.[43] Two successive Hittite rulers succumbed to one plague in around the 1320s BCE. There are reports of plague in the Levant, Cyprus, and Egypt. Several regions in Greece saw depopulation during this era that might have been related to an outbreak of disease.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse often ride together, though, and just as famine and pestilence are interconnected with each other, they are often also linked with war.