The University of Exeter’s Pustules project joined forces with the University of Copenhagen’s From Catastrophe to Culture: Understanding Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia and the University of Vienna’s Epidemics and Crisis Management in Pre-modern South Asia for a conference panel titled ‘Pestilence and the Weather: The Environmental Framing of Epidemics in Global Antiquity.’ The session was organised by Pustules Principal Investigator Rebecca Flemming.
Bringing together expertise from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and South Asia, the panel explored how past societies understood and explained epidemic disease through environmental factors such as climate, weather patterns, geography, and celestial phenomena.
The climate (seasonal changes and weather patterns) played an important role in ancient explanations and predictions of largescale and serious disease outbreaks which might affect humans and animals. These connections are articulated across a range of ancient writings—from medical treatises and historical narratives to divinatory handbooks and religious records—in a range of different cultures and societies in ancient Afro-Eurasia.
The panel explored these themes in three, interrelated, historical societies—ancient Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire and early South Asia. The papers examined issues of epidemic causation, predictability, regularity and control through sets of relevant sources. The speakers considered questions of cultural exchange, of the movement and adaptation of ideas between these contexts, and delved more deeply into the ancient environmental and cosmic framings of disease and pestilence in specific cases. These framings brought, of course, a set of wider associations in interconnected worlds, into which divinity was intricately interwoven, along with certain kinds of conceptual location in the workings of the world, and a set of suggested human responses. The panel discussed what was distinct and what shared across these societies, how the different forms of evidence shape our understandings, and whether these ancient perspectives illuminate current concerns about climate change and disease.
The panel was chaired by Calloway Scott (University of Cincinnati) and featured three papers:
- Troels Pank Arbøll (University of Copenhagen), “A Waterless Flood: Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia”
- Rebecca Flemming (University of Exeter), “Forecasting Plague: Astrology and Epidemics in the Roman Empire”
- Vitus Angermeier (University of Vienna), “Wind, Water, Place, and Time: Epidemics in Ancient India and Greece”
Despite being scheduled in the final session of the conference’s last day, the panel attracted a large and engaged audience.
We look forward to sharing news of future collaborations, events, and research developments as these conversations continue to grow.
