In antiquity, the walled city of Jerash in present-day Jordan was known for its pottery. Skilled artists made delicate ceramic bowls painted with figures that had wide, expressive eyes.
KAREN HENDRIX: Jerash was well-known from documented accounts to be a Roman Byzantine urban center embedded in a very vibrant regional trade network.
DETROW: Those trade routes also made Jerash vulnerable when plague enveloped the region in the seventh century. As Durrie Bouscaren reports, a new study of a mass grave helps shed light on this ancient world.
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: Jerash was no stranger to the plague, says University of Sydney archaeologist Karen Hendrix. It swept the eastern Roman Empire in waves after the year 541.
HENDRIX: The population of Jerash had fallen to around 10,000 people.
BOUSCAREN: About half of what it was in its heyday. The hippodrome once used for chariot races and gladiator fights had been converted to ceramic and textile workshops. Then around the year 650, the plague returned.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) There was a pestilence by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated.
BOUSCAREN: The plague came and went for about 200 years. Those are the words of the Greek historian Procopius describing the plague in sixth century Constantinople.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) No longer able to keep up with the number of the dying, they mounted the towers of the fortifications of Sycae, and tearing off the roofs, threw the bodies there in complete disorder.
BOUSCAREN: Geneticist Rays Jiang of the University of South Florida saw the same intensity in genetic samples she studied from a mass grave from seventh century Jerash.
RAYS JIANG: A single string of plague can spread so fast and kill so many.
BOUSCAREN: The genetic uniformity of the plaque microbes recovered from Jerash show that the outbreak happened rapidly. People were infected and they died before the bacteria had a chance to significantly mutate. Jiang says Jerash was so overwhelmed that those workshops under the hippodrome were converted into a huge grave site.
JIANG: That was filled within days, hundreds of bodies. And there's no ceremony. There's no grave goods. And it's a bare minimum to get the body disposed of and away from the city.
BOUSCAREN: Jiang and Hendrix coauthored a study that appears this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The team analyzed dozens of human teeth excavated from under the hippodrome to better understand who the victims were and how they died. First, an isotope analysis revealed information about their diets.
JIANG: And they had a very different childhood. They drank water, some from wells, some from cisterns, some from mountain streams.
BOUSCAREN: Meaning they likely came from places that were far from Jerash. They could've been visiting merchants, foreign workers, even enslaved people. Nukhet Varlik of Rutgers University is an expert in ancient pandemics.
NUKHET VARLIK: And it shows you a moment of crisis, right?
BOUSCAREN: She says the study's genetic analysis of the tooth samples illustrates a pattern seen in later pandemics, where people would move back to cities after an outbreak because there weren't enough workers.
VARLIK: Immigrants would come to the city looking for employment, and then the pandemic hits. They're among the most vulnerable population.
BOUSCAREN: DNA extracted from the teeth show that the men, women and children had ancestral ties to faraway places like central Africa, Eastern Europe and Anatolia.
VARLIK: But coming to the same city to die from the same disease, it shows us the diversity of experiences of pandemics. Again, a universal experience for humanity.
BOUSCAREN: Varlik says it's a reminder that they were real people who lived full lives.
For NPR News, I'm Durrie Bouscaren, Istanbul.
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Curated by Prof. Michael Zhang
