ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pestilence and the Weather: The Environmental Framing of Epidemics in Global Antiquity

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

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.

This panel explores these themes in three, interrelated, historical societies—ancient Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire and early South Asia. Three papers will examine issues of epidemic causation, predictability, regularity and control through sets of relevant sources. They will consider questions of cultural exchange, of the movement and adaptation of ideas between these contexts, as well as delving 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. All these questions will be examined, and put into dialogue, in this panel. What was distinct and what shared across these societies, how do the different forms of evidence shape our understandings and do these ancient perspectives illuminate current concerns about climate change and disease?

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Calloway Scott, University of Cincinnati

Individual Presentations

• A Waterless Flood: Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia - Troels Pank Troels Pank Arbøll, University of Copenhagen

• Forecasting Plague: Astrology and Epidemics in the Roman Empire - Rebecca Flemming, University of Exeter

• Wind, Water, Place, and Time: Epidemics in Ancient India and Greece - Vitus Angermeier, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Session Organizer

• Rebecca Flemming, University of Exeter