Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. Today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
Speaker 1: the article I began last time, entitled Extreme Birding at
Speaker 1: the End of the World by Tom Kleines. In between
Speaker 1: the many hours of field work, the researchers enjoy moments
Speaker 1: of play, ultimate frisbee, beach, volleyball, guitars, and bonfires under
Speaker 1: the never ending twilight of Alaska summer nights. After three
Speaker 1: seasons on the island, I can confidently say that the
Speaker 1: place is sacred, says former crew leader Sierra Ni nisanie
Speaker 1: E Pete. I think about it every day. The cool science,
Speaker 1: the grueling physical days, and the lifeline friends I made.
Speaker 1: Middleton humbles people in the best ways. Next The Buried
Speaker 1: Treasure That Might Have Changed History by Julian Sancton. Two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, the Roman Army embarked on a far
Speaker 1: flung hunt for silver. Thanks to a persistent dark yell
Speaker 1: the gi buff we're now learning how close they came
Speaker 1: to finding an empire altering fortune. The passage is easy
Speaker 1: to miss. A paragraph long anecdote in the Annals by
Speaker 1: the Roman historian Tacitus, It tells a story found nowhere
Speaker 1: else about an unpopular legate forcing legionaries into a treacherous
Speaker 1: mine at the frontier of the empire. It takes place
Speaker 1: during the reign of Claudius eighty forty one through fifty four,
Speaker 1: a time of furious expansion when Rome sought to swallow
Speaker 1: up the border lands and their resources. The location mentioned
Speaker 1: in the Tacitus pachsage is vague, described as in the
Speaker 1: district of Mattium, just outside of Roman occupied Germania Superior,
Speaker 1: but the goal is clear, to find more of a
Speaker 1: metal that powered the realm. Silver trickled down from pratitious patricians, officers,
Speaker 1: and soldiers to the rest of the economy in the
Speaker 1: form of coins and ingots and jewelry. Coins were not
Speaker 1: merely currency, stamped with the profile of the emperor, each
Speaker 1: one served as a symbol of his power as it
Speaker 1: circulated across the land. The bulk of Rome's mined silver
Speaker 1: had until then come from Hispania modern days Spain and Portugal,
Speaker 1: but prospectors had long sought other deposits across the dominion.
Speaker 1: In Tacitus's stelling, the legionaries were worn out by the arduous,
Speaker 1: dirty and dangerous task of mining, of digging out water
Speaker 1: courses and constructing underground workings, which would have been difficult
Speaker 1: enough in the open, let alone in the stifling darkness,
Speaker 1: broken only feebly by the glow of oil lamps. To
Speaker 1: voice their displeasure, the legionaries rode letter to the Emperor
Speaker 1: asking him to recognize the efforts of their unpopular commander,
Speaker 1: courteous Rufus, with triumphal honors. Such an acknowledgment, they hoped,
Speaker 1: would permit Rufus to drop the largely fruitless effort. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the search for silver was abandoned and the army's encampment destroyed.
Speaker 1: Tacitus's story long intrigued classical scholars, who could find no
Speaker 1: evidence nor any other mention of such an undertaking. Some
Speaker 1: scholars dismissed it as a colorful but unverifiable aside. Alfred
Speaker 1: Heart of the University of Liverpool, a specialist on Rome's
Speaker 1: economy and mining operations, called it an example of so
Speaker 1: called mirabelia, which are these kind of wondrous stories that
Speaker 1: are being told just to regale readers. But a recent
Speaker 1: discovery that as electrified the archaeological world suggests that Tacitus
Speaker 1: was outlining a real episode. Rufus and his men indeed
Speaker 1: searched for silver, it seems, but decamped before hitting the motherload.
Speaker 1: We now know there was enough silver in the region
Speaker 1: to have altered the course of the empire, but the
Speaker 1: enormity of their near miss would not become clear until
Speaker 1: millennia later, after a persistently curious German hunter put all
Speaker 1: the pieces together. On a crisp evening in April twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: a seventy two year old former paratrooper named Urgen Eigenbrut
Speaker 1: was stalking bore in the hills around the historic spa
Speaker 1: town of bod Ems in Rhineland Palatinate. He noticed an
Speaker 1: unusual pattern in a grain field, two parallel yellowish strips
Speaker 1: cutting across a blanket of green. Few other passers by
Speaker 1: would have made anything of it. They were too wide
Speaker 1: to have been trunk or tank tray tracks. Conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: might have suggested an extraterrestrial origin Eisenbrodt knew better. He
Speaker 1: had served with the Blue Helmets in Somalia and as
Speaker 1: a defense attache until eve, but since retiring from the
Speaker 1: German military in two thousand three, he had turned his
Speaker 1: attention to going zon closer to home. A far distant
Speaker 1: in time, Eigenbrout had become fascinated with the archaeology and
Speaker 1: history of the bad Ms environs, and had even led
Speaker 1: a number of small scale excavations of the Lawn Valley
Speaker 1: as a volunteer amateur. Though he was he recognized the
Speaker 1: crop marks as the sure sign of a human made structure,
Speaker 1: keeping in mind a core tenet of archaeology there are
Speaker 1: no straight lines in nature. Something beneath the ground had
Speaker 1: changed the density of the soil, causing the visitation at
Speaker 1: the service to mature at a different rate. But what
Speaker 1: to get a clear view? He asked his old friend
Speaker 1: Hans Joachim de Roy, a retired frigate captain and fellow
Speaker 1: history buff, to photograph the field from above with his drone.
Speaker 1: The ariel shot revealed that the parallel lines made a
Speaker 1: right angle turn. The corner was rounded like a playing card.
Speaker 1: Eisenbrodt's pulse quickened when he viewed the image, he had
Speaker 1: seen depictions of such configuration before. There it was only
Speaker 1: one thing it could be. The markings were the unmistakable
Speaker 1: traces of the defensive double trenches Roman troops commonly dug
Speaker 1: around military camps at the fringes of their empire. Eigenbrodt's
Speaker 1: work had only just begun. He had to convince the
Speaker 1: archaeologists of Rhineland Palatinate in Koblenz to do some digging,
Speaker 1: and fortunately he did it like a pain in the ass,
Speaker 1: said de Roy. It was like the work of Sissyphus
Speaker 1: worn down by Eigenbrot. The state's archaeology department eventually agreed
Speaker 1: to conduct a geomagnetic survey of the surrounding area on
Speaker 1: what is known as the Erlich Plateau, measuring infinitesimal variations
Speaker 1: in the Earth's magnetic field. The survey revealed several other
Speaker 1: stretches of the double trench, confirming that had marked the
Speaker 1: perimeter of a nineteen acre Roman encampment with fortifications of
Speaker 1: soil and wood. Excavation of the Erlich Camp began in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, led by the archaeologist Thomas Mauer and supervised
Speaker 1: by Peter Heinrich of Rhineland State Museum in Trier and
Speaker 1: Marcus Schultz of Gerta University in Frankfurt. They initially believed
Speaker 1: the site to be from the time of Augustus twenty
Speaker 1: seven b BC through a d fourteen, perhaps one of
Speaker 1: countless temporary marching camps Roman troops erected while on the move.
Speaker 1: Such camps have been found across Europe, often thanks to
Speaker 1: Krop marks, but Frederick Auth, a doctoral student supervised by Schultz,
Speaker 1: put it bluntly. As archaeological finds go, they were not
Speaker 1: so spectacular. However, Eigenbrot wondered whether Erlich might not instead
Speaker 1: have been a more noteworthy encampment. He was familiar with
Speaker 1: the enematic passage from Tacitus. The mention of the Matisichi
Speaker 1: was an early clue, as they were a Germanic tribe
Speaker 1: who had settled near bod Ems. Eigenbrodt, who knew that
Speaker 1: the surrounding area had long been mined for silver, grew
Speaker 1: ever more convinced that the camp he had discovered was
Speaker 1: related to the mining operation. Tacitus noted perhaps it was
Speaker 1: where the disgruntled legionaries had been stationed. He thought to
Speaker 1: the professional archaeologist, Eisenbrodt's hypothesis reflected the touching naivete of
Speaker 1: a dambler. The archeologist told the enthusiast, this wasn't how
Speaker 1: the discipline worked in real life. It's quite difficult to
Speaker 1: connect archaeology and historical literature, ath said, and we tend
Speaker 1: to be very careful to not overinterpret that literature, because
Speaker 1: Tacitus has never seen Roman Germany. The hunter's undiminished enthusiasm
Speaker 1: nourished the excavation, literally, as he kept the workers fed
Speaker 1: with home made boar sausage. Those sausages are quite the
Speaker 1: legend of the student's oath, recalled, I was giving a
Speaker 1: talk in bot Ems, and my monetary compensation was actually
Speaker 1: more sausages from sad Bore. The dig unearthed, among other artifacts,
Speaker 1: a brass ring from a horse's harness, iron nails, and slag,
Speaker 1: but precious little that might have allowed a precise date
Speaker 1: for the site. The archeologist's best clue was a heavily
Speaker 1: corroded bronze coin depicting a barely decipherable profile of Emperor Caligula,
Speaker 1: evidently minted in Rome in thirty seven or thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Then a coin of copper alloy from the subsequent Claudian
Speaker 1: period was discovered at the bottom of a former well.
Speaker 1: Coins could circulate for a long time, especially during Claudius's
Speaker 1: reign when few were minted, making it difficult to narrow
Speaker 1: down the time frame, But when combined with recovered shreds
Speaker 1: of pottery, including plates and drugs characteristic of the mid
Speaker 1: first century, the finds led the team to date the
Speaker 1: early camp to the forties or Ela, in other words,
Speaker 1: smack in the period Tacitus was writing about in the Annals.
Speaker 1: Eigenbrodt's theory wasn't yet vindicated. The time frame of Erlich
Speaker 1: may have aligned with Tacitus, but without evidence of a
Speaker 1: contemporaneous Roman silver mine, it could have merely been an
Speaker 1: intriguing coincidence. Finding such evidence would not be simple. The
Speaker 1: area around bod Ems had been mined for various metals
Speaker 1: from biblical times up until the Second World War, and
Speaker 1: is consequently riddled with pits, shafts, and tunnels, several of
Speaker 1: which are still accessible. Some of these pits may be
Speaker 1: of Roman origins, says Schultz, but they were reshaped in
Speaker 1: medieval times or during the last few centuries. In addition,
Speaker 1: the region had been heavily bombed in the war, making
Speaker 1: it difficult to distinguish craters from ancient minds. We're quite
Speaker 1: glad that Eigenbrot was ex military, so he can tell
Speaker 1: them apart set oth. Rather than ampt to find an
Speaker 1: undiscovered mine in a landscape full of holes, Eigenbrought insisted
Speaker 1: that the archaeologists shift their efforts to a nearby Roman
Speaker 1: site that had been known about for a long time,
Speaker 1: the remains of a small fortification on a barren hilltop
Speaker 1: less than a mile and a half away called Bluskof
Speaker 1: literally bear Head. The site had been the subject of
Speaker 1: an eighteen ninety seven study by retired lieutenant Colonel Otto Dam, who,
Speaker 1: like Eigenbrot, had thought he'd found the elusive silver mine
Speaker 1: mentioned by Tacitus. Dom concluded that Bluskov had indeed been
Speaker 1: a smelting facility if he dated back to the end
Speaker 1: of the second century, far too late for Tacitus. At
Speaker 1: Eigenbrodt's urging, auth took another look at Bluskof. He found
Speaker 1: that Dom's nineteenth century publication was pretty much full of errors,
Speaker 1: showing feufines and methodologically sloppy, with far more archaeological rigor
Speaker 1: and technology unknown in Dom's day, including lidar to map
Speaker 1: the underground. Outh led a new excavation that unearthed a
Speaker 1: pair of coins from the time of Claudius or earlier,
Speaker 1: and none from the following reign of his adopted son Nero.
Speaker 1: The coins confirmed it the large Erlich Camp and the
Speaker 1: smaller Bluskoff outpost were in fact contemporaneous and most likely related.
Speaker 1: What's more, the Bluskoff structure lay in an area now
Speaker 1: known to be a rich source of silver. Roman prospectors
Speaker 1: probably would have used several ques in the landscape to
Speaker 1: determine that Bluskov could be a fruitful place to mine.
Speaker 1: The larger Erlich Camp most likely served as the main
Speaker 1: Roman base in the area, which supplied the legionaries who
Speaker 1: worked to the Blushkoff mine and manned the outpost. Based
Speaker 1: on this suspicion, Outh brought Eisenbrot to the tunnel that
Speaker 1: pierced through Bluskof Hill along with Roman mining specialist Marcus Helfert,
Speaker 1: who confirmed it was almost certainly of Roman origin. This
Speaker 1: was enough for the archeologists to admit that Eigenbrot had
Speaker 1: been right all along. These were likely the places Tacitus
Speaker 1: was writing. About Several weeks into the Blushkov excavation, auth
Speaker 1: and his team made a discovery that corroborated yet another
Speaker 1: passage from Roman history. In one pit, nearly six feet down,
Speaker 1: athen As team found what looked like the spiky backbone
Speaker 1: of a prehistoric monster. They cleared the reddish earth around it,
Speaker 1: revealing a series of sharpened wooden stakes jutting out at
Speaker 1: staggered angles and embedded in the bottom of a trench
Speaker 1: that once surrounded the outpost, designed to thwart any would
Speaker 1: be attackers. The obstacle appeared analogous to a defense Julius
Speaker 1: Caesar had described in his writings on the War and
Speaker 1: Gaul a century before the Bluskov fort built. Whoever entered
Speaker 1: within them were likely to impale themselves on very sharp steaks.
Speaker 1: Caesar's troops called the spikes chipi Oth and his colleagues
Speaker 1: would call the version they found pila posata, or trench steaks.
Speaker 1: Such dangerous devices are believed to have surrounded camps around
Speaker 1: the Roman world, but they have never been found in
Speaker 1: situ before or since. Just as thrilling as the discovery
Speaker 1: of the steaks was the miracle of their preservation for
Speaker 1: too millennia. The dense, oxygen poor soil had remained just
Speaker 1: moist enough to keep the stakes water logged and structurally stable.
Speaker 1: The Pila fosata were extracted in twenty nineteen and may
Speaker 1: have been conserved, according to auth just in time. Increasingly
Speaker 1: dry soil, he said, would have caused the wood to
Speaker 1: finally begin decaying, eventually destroying this precious testament to Roman
Speaker 1: ingenuity and ruthlessness. One can imagine the murderous spikes protecting
Speaker 1: the camp indefinitely. The empire not abandoned its mining effort.
Speaker 1: The likely confirmation of Tacitus account raised the question how
Speaker 1: much silver had rufous Men missed. Oth's study of Blushkov
Speaker 1: revealed that the Romans got tantalizingly close to a source
Speaker 1: of silver bearing ore that may have rivaled the richest
Speaker 1: minds of Hispania, the so called emser gangzug or ems Vane,
Speaker 1: which spans ten miles from the north of bod Ems
Speaker 1: to the Rhine River. It is estimated that more than
Speaker 1: two hundred metric tons of silver were extracted in the
Speaker 1: modern era before mining operations in bod EM's were finally shuddered.
Speaker 1: In the last weeks of World War II. If they
Speaker 1: had known about the silver, and if they had found
Speaker 1: the right spot, Auth noted, the Romans would have had
Speaker 1: the opportunity to exploit the bod Ms silver for around
Speaker 1: two hundred years until they abandoned their possessions on this
Speaker 1: side of the Rhine. Altogether, Roman forces had a secure
Speaker 1: hold on jru Germania Superior, but not on Blushkov itself.
Speaker 1: They retreated west over the Rhine around two sixty two,
Speaker 1: centuries before the fall of the Western Empire. It is
Speaker 1: tempting to imagine how such a silver bonanza could have
Speaker 1: extended the reach or duration, or even hastened the decadence
Speaker 1: of Rome. Such counterfectuals are a perennial parlor game for historians,
Speaker 1: speculative as they may be. Had the legionaries succeeded in
Speaker 1: extracting all the silver that lay beneath their sandals, it
Speaker 1: would not have sufficed to fund the whole Roman Empire
Speaker 1: for centuries, but it certainly would have made a difference,
Speaker 1: said Auth. He cautioned that the silver bearing ore was
Speaker 1: likely too deep for Roman technology of the time. The
Speaker 1: Roman authorities would have had no reason to linger in
Speaker 1: an area, if they didn't find a resource they could
Speaker 1: easily exploit. If we don't succeed effectively, Schultz summarized Roman thinking,
Speaker 1: then we drop it and go elsewhere. Yorgen Eigen and
Speaker 1: Wrought died of a heart attack in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: less than a week after a flurry of breathless press
Speaker 1: reports focused on the irony of the overlooked silver and
Speaker 1: mother load. He lived to bask for a few short
Speaker 1: days in the glory of his contributions to archaeology and history.
Speaker 1: Just as the Romans had two thousand years before. He
Speaker 1: had gazed upon the land with an eye for the
Speaker 1: wealth that lay beneath. But unlike them, he had found
Speaker 1: what he'd been looking for. A difficult, dangerous job, mining
Speaker 1: at Blushkov was carried out by Roman soldiers who were
Speaker 1: accustomed to foraging materials and building forts, but not the
Speaker 1: backbreaking work of digging underground, filled with threats from floods,
Speaker 1: noxious fumes, lack of air, and cavens. Mining was typically
Speaker 1: the work of civilian laborers silver processing in the Roman era,
Speaker 1: mining workers used iron tools to chip away pieces of rock,
Speaker 1: which were taken out, crushed, washed, sordid and roasted before smelting.
Speaker 1: If gallery walls were especially hard, laborers could build fires
Speaker 1: to weaken their surface smelting. Next, the metal ore and
Speaker 1: charcoal were placed in a furnace bellows pumped in air,
Speaker 1: causing the temperature to rise and melt the lead, which
Speaker 1: flowed out into a mold coupilation. The lead was placed
Speaker 1: in a couple and heated to more than eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit one thousand degrees celsius. The metals separated as
Speaker 1: lead was oxidized, impurities were absorbed, and silver was collected.
Speaker 1: Next television. When Jaws hit theaters fifty years ago this summer,
Speaker 1: filmmaker Laurent Bossureau was a thirteen year old budding cinophile
Speaker 1: in suburban Paris whose obsession with Laden de la Maire
Speaker 1: The Teeth of the Sea set him on his career path.
Speaker 1: My bedroom was basically wadewall Jaws, says Bossureau, whose new
Speaker 1: national geographic documentary Jaws at fifty The Definitive Inside Store
Speaker 1: features a wide range of voices weighing in on the
Speaker 1: film's impact. We hear from Stephen Spielberg, of course, also
Speaker 1: Hollywood types from director Guillermo del Toro, to actress Emily
Speaker 1: Blunt and locals on Martha's vineyard, where the movie was shot.
Speaker 1: Most surprising are the scientists who say they see Jaws
Speaker 1: driving interest in sharks and marine habitats today, years after
Speaker 1: provoking trophy hunts, that this movie can still be celebrated
Speaker 1: in inspire careers, not only in film, but in ocean
Speaker 1: and shark conservation. Bozerro says, I can't think of any
Speaker 1: other film that has that kind of power. Next article
Speaker 1: is from National Geographic History magazine Epidemics. A constant plague
Speaker 1: to Rome from its founding to its imperial heyday, Rome's politics, religion,
Speaker 1: and eventual decline were shaped by the ravages of disease.
Speaker 1: The plague that spread across the Eastern Mediterranean in AD
Speaker 1: four five forty two was unlike any scene before. It
Speaker 1: was a pestilence by which the whole human race came
Speaker 1: near to being annihilated, wrote the Byzantine historian Procopius, a
Speaker 1: calamity impossible to express in words. A human race. Procopius meant,
Speaker 1: of course, the world he knew, the Eastern Roman empires
Speaker 1: centered around Constantinople today's Istanbul. But the horror that abused
Speaker 1: Procopius's account was no exaggeration. The plague of Justinian, as
Speaker 1: it became known, was likely bubonic plague, whose sufferers developed
Speaker 1: swollen lymph nodes and vomited blood. It killed more than
Speaker 1: twenty five million people in the region. Since the rise
Speaker 1: of Rome as a republic over a millennium before and
Speaker 1: its rapid growth as an intercontinental empire after the first
Speaker 1: century A, d Romans had always lived closely with deadly epidemics.
Speaker 1: For Roman leaders, plague was as feared as civil war
Speaker 1: or a natural disaster. Outbreaks of pestilence devastated the economy
Speaker 1: and triggered widespread famines, civil unrest, and political turmoil. Plague
Speaker 1: would later be a key contributory factor to the Western
Speaker 1: Roman Empire's collapse in the mid fifth century and just
Speaker 1: after Dustinian, the waning of power in the East punishment
Speaker 1: from the gods founded after the expulsion of the last
Speaker 1: Roman kings in five O nine BC, the Roman republic
Speaker 1: was repeatedly battered by epidemics. Historians rely on two principal
Speaker 1: sources for early Roman history, written by Livy and Dionysius
Speaker 1: of Halicarnassus. Both were writing in the early Empire under
Speaker 1: Emperor Augustus, who supported efforts to chronicle the history of
Speaker 1: the Long Roman Republic. In Book ten of Roman Antiquities,
Speaker 1: Dionysus of Halicarnassus described the terrible consequences of an outbreak
Speaker 1: during the eighty second Olympiad calculated to be four fifty
Speaker 1: one BC. All the enslaved people in half the citizens
Speaker 1: of Rome died. The plague raged for a year, wiping
Speaker 1: out whole families, either from illness or the secondary effects
Speaker 1: of famine. When it abated the following year, official acts
Speaker 1: of thanksgiving were made by the Roman authorities in the
Speaker 1: hope that pestilence would not return. A few years later,
Speaker 1: it did. The grim Psycho was repeated, and the authorities
Speaker 1: came under pressure to act. Lacking a modern understanding of
Speaker 1: the role of microorganisms in the origin and spread of plagues,
Speaker 1: their causes were attributed to moral and supernatural forces. A plague,
Speaker 1: it was decided, was the punishment that the gods inflicted
Speaker 1: on the city because it had failed to maintain the
Speaker 1: paxt deorum, the peace between gods and humans dependent on
Speaker 1: following religious rituals with the utmost rigor. The city of
Speaker 1: Rome in a sudden visitation of divine displeasure was ravaged
Speaker 1: by disease. Livy wrote in his account of one of
Speaker 1: the fifth century Bass pestilences, this belief in causation could
Speaker 1: have cruel consequences. In four seventy two BC, for instance,
Speaker 1: a wave of infectious illness proved especially deadly for pregnant women.
Speaker 1: Dionysius described how the root cause of the disaster was
Speaker 1: deemed to be the loss of the virginity of Urbinia,
Speaker 1: was a vessel virgin sworn to chastity and service to
Speaker 1: vesta goddess of the hearth. As punishment, Urbinia was buried alive.
Speaker 1: The plague abated. When a new epidemic swept through Roman
Speaker 1: three ninety nine BC, the senators devised a ritual of
Speaker 1: religious atonement to be performed in the capitolium. According to Livy,
Speaker 1: this rite, known as the Lecternium, was a banquet offered
Speaker 1: to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. In three sixty five BC,
Speaker 1: as plague raged again, the Lysisternium failed to appease the gods.
Speaker 1: According to Livy, Roman statesmen recalled a ceremony in which
Speaker 1: a pestilence had once been allayed by the driving of
Speaker 1: a nail by a dictator. Lucius Manlius Imperiosus, was consequently
Speaker 1: appointed as a temporary dictator to re establish the peace
Speaker 1: with the gods. He drove the ritual nail into the
Speaker 1: wall at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The pestilence
Speaker 1: apparently ceased. Despite the widespread belief in the divine causes
Speaker 1: of epidemics, some Roman writers reflected on the practical first
Speaker 1: century b C. Philosopher Lucretius believed as seas was spread
Speaker 1: through seeds in the air. The Augustine writers were aware
Speaker 1: of the role of poor hygiene in prolonging an epidemic.
Speaker 1: In his account of a fifth century b C. Plague,
Speaker 1: Dionysius asserted that the pestilence did not quickly abate because
Speaker 1: of the way in which they cast out the bodies
Speaker 1: into the river. Livy also linked on sanitary conditions to transmission.
Speaker 1: During an election, he wrote, the city filled with people
Speaker 1: from the countryside, increasing the virulence of the disease. This
Speaker 1: conflux of all kinds of living things distressed the citizens
Speaker 1: with its strange smells and mere contact. Spread the infection
Speaker 1: plague on the empire. Although accounts of plagues were to
Speaker 1: Libyan Dionysius, part of the fabric of Rome's republican history.
Speaker 1: Epidemics also deeply marked the imperial period. The idea of
Speaker 1: Rome's imperial greatness played major emphasis on the civilizing influence,
Speaker 1: in part by spreading the building of washing facilities fed
Speaker 1: by aqueducts. Imperial Rome boasted hundreds of public baths and
Speaker 1: two hundred public toilets. Rome officials understood the link between
Speaker 1: hygiene and health, while also acknowledging that the gods played
Speaker 1: a role. Statues were placed near public conveniences to ward
Speaker 1: off pestilence. Neither gods nor baths, however, could have the
Speaker 1: epidemics that scourged the later Empire. Although aqueducts brought clean water,
Speaker 1: another key piece of imperial infrastructure, the road system, facilitated
Speaker 1: the rapid spread of disease with the movement of goods, troops,
Speaker 1: and merchants. At the end of the second century AD,
Speaker 1: the Antennine plague killed up to five million people. It
Speaker 1: hampered operation of the Roman army, who had brought the
Speaker 1: disease into the Empire. Roman troops returning from battles in
Speaker 1: Asia picked up the infection likely carried from China by
Speaker 1: merchants along the trading routes of the Silk Road. Described
Speaker 1: by the Roman Greek physician Galen, who witnessed its ravages,
Speaker 1: The Antennine plague struck its victims with coughing, internal bleeding,
Speaker 1: and ulceration. Epidemiologists think it and Cyprian plague of the
Speaker 1: next century were caused by smallpox or measles, but the
Speaker 1: exact ailment has not yet been identified. The effect of
Speaker 1: recurrent epidemics led to a lower population, contributing to a
Speaker 1: series of cycles that reduced the empire's tax base, agricultural output,
Speaker 1: and military force, among other factors. Epidemics played an important
Speaker 1: role in the eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: In the mid fifth century, the center of Roman power
Speaker 1: shifted east to Constantinople, the upper center of the Justinian
Speaker 1: plague that to Procopius felt like the death of the
Speaker 1: human race. Many factors led to Byzantine decline, but the
Speaker 1: ravages of the Justinian plague lowered the empire's preparedness when
Speaker 1: the Great Armies of the Islams swept in triumph through
Speaker 1: the Byzantine lands in the seventh century, epidemics and pandemics
Speaker 1: continued to cause catastrophic upheaval even after the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: when scientists discovered disease causing microorganisms. This concludes readings from
Speaker 1: National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marcia.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a
Speaker 1: great day.