Plague: Did you mean...?

This amulet is covered with a quotation from a poem, the Akkadian Erra Epic, thought suitable to ward off plague. From Ashur, Northern Mesopotamia, Iraq. Neo-Assyrian Period, 800-612 BCE. (The British Museum, London)

In 540 CE, Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I had great ambition of regaining Western Roman territories. His goal was to restore the Eastern Roman empire to what it was before the Roman empire dissolved. However, just a year later Emperor...

Nergal (also known as Erra and Irra) is the Mesopotamian god of death, war, and destruction. He began as a regional, probably agricultural, god of the Babylonian city of Kutha in the Early Dynastic Period I (c. 2900-2800 BCE). As his temple...

Water is Changed into Blood, the first of the ten plagues of Egypt, watercolor by James Tissot, before 1903.

Illustration from a medieval manuscript Giovanni Boccaccio, Le Decameron. Translated from the Italian by Laurent de Premierfait Bruges, Master of 1482 and follower (illuminators); c. 1485 CE Manuscript reference: The Hague, KB, 133 A 5...

Bonaparte Visiting the Pesthouse in Jaffa, oil on canvas by Antoine-Jean Gros, 1804. Louvre, Paris.

The king’s evil (from the Latin morbus regius meaning royal sickness), more commonly known as scrofula or medically tuberculous lymphadenitis, was a skin disease believed to be cured by the touch of the monarch as part of their inherited...

Why didn't the Europeans get sick when they made contact with the American Indians?

Galen (129-216 CE) was a Greek physician, author, and philosopher, working in Rome, who influenced both medical theory and practice until the middle of the 17th century CE. Owning a large, personal library, he wrote hundreds of medical treatises...

Oedipus the King (429-420 BCE), also known as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Tyrannos ('Tyrannos' signifies that the throne was not gained through an inheritance) is the most famous surviving play written by the 5th-century BCE poet and dramatist...