effects of the plague. He says nothing of this in his Annals. But the
prayer translated above leaves no doubt that, in Mursili’s view at
least, there was a direct link between the devastating impact the
plague was having on his land and the encouragement this
provided to Hatti’s former allies to defect from it, and for all its
enemies to renew their attacks upon it.
Unfortunately, though the Plague Prayers tell us about the
consequences of the plague, they say nothing about its symptoms
or manifestations. So what actuallywasthe plague? There are a
number of possible candidates. One is that it was an early form of
tularemia.^3 Do you have any other suggestions? Mine, for what it is
worth, is that it was bubonic plague, one of the forms of the‘Black
Death’(pneumonic and haemorrhagic plague were other forms)
which devastated the Byzantine world during Justinian’s reign in
the sixth centuryAD, Europe, Asia and Africa during the fourteenth
century, and England in the seventeenth century. And that was not
the end of it. In my home city Brisbane, Australia, there were
outbreaks of this plague, carried byfleas on rats, in 1900 and every
year after that until 1909, and again in 1921, with 115 cases and 63
deaths in total. (A small number, of course, compared with the vast
numbers killed by it in the Byzantine and medieval eras.)
According to the World Health Organization, bubonic plague is
still killing people around the world. In 2013 there were 750
reported cases worldwide, with 128 deaths.
The name comes from the Greek word‘bubon’meaning‘groin’
and reflects the most common physical manifestation of the disease
- swellings in the groin area and swollen lymph nodes. In Old
Testament tradition, the plague of festering boils, one of the ten
plagues of Egypt inflicted by God on the country of the pharaoh
who refused Moses’request to let the‘children of Israel’go, is quite
possibly a biblical reference to bubonic plague (Exodus 9:9). Again
in Old Testament tradition, the affliction the Philistines suffered by
way of divine vengeance for seizing the Ark of the Covenant is
described as‘an outbreak of tumours’or‘tumours in the groin’
(1 Samuel 5:9). The actual cause of this affliction is indicated by the
advice the Philistine priests and diviners gave for curing it: the ark
was to be returned to the Israelites, along with a‘guilt offering’,
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