2023-05-26 03:05:03
Researchers from the University of Cambridge rescue remains of ‘Giardia duodenalis’ in two latrines made for the elite in the times of the Kingdom of Judah
A research team led by the University of Cambridge has just discovered diarrhea in two high-end latrines in Old Testament Jerusalem. From the Bible we already knew that it existed, although with less popularity than scabies, leprosy or tuberculosis, but now we have remains, specifically of the unicellular microorganism Giardia duodenalisa common cause of dysentery, which makes it the oldest in the history of humanity.
“The fact that these parasites were present in the sediments of two cesspools from Iron Age Jerusalem suggests that dysentery was endemic in the Kingdom of Judah,” says lead study author Dr. Piers Mitchell of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, who has just published the study in the journal Parasitology.
“Dysentery is transmitted by feces contaminating drinking water or food, and we suspect that it might have been a big problem in early cities in the ancient Near East due to overcrowding, heat and flies, and scarcity of water available in the summer,” Mitchell describes.
The fecal samples for the investigation came from sediment under toilet bowls found in two excavated building complexes south of the Old City, dating to the seventh century B.C. C., when Jerusalem was the capital of Judah. During this time, Judah was a vassal state under the control of the Assyrian Empire, which at its height stretched from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, incorporating much of present-day Iran and Iraq. Jerusalem would have been a flourishing political and religious center estimated to have had between 8,000 and 25,000 residents.
Both toilets had carved stone seats of nearly identical design: a shallow curved surface for sitting, with a large central hole for defecation and an adjacent hole at the front for male urination. “cesspool toilets from this era are relatively rare and usually they were only made for the lite“, pointed out Mitchell.
One was of a richly decorated estate in Armon ha-Natziv, surrounded by an ornamental garden. The site, excavated in 2019, likely dates to the time of King Manass, a client king of the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-6th century.
The other bathroom was in what was known as the House of Ahiel, a domestic building made up of seven rooms, which housed a high-class family around the 8th century BC. C. Its destruction is dated with security in 586 a. C., when the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar IIaccording to the Bible, brutally sacked Jerusalem for the second time after its citizens refused to pay their agreed tribute, ending the Kingdom of Judah.
The team investigated decomposed feces from the 2,500-year-old biblical period by applying a biomolecular technique called “ELISA,” in which antibodies bind to proteins produced only by particular species of single-celled organisms. Earlier work has also shown that users of ancient Judean baths were infected by other intestinal parasites, such as whipworms, tapeworms and pinworms.
Dysentery was already described by some ancient doctors, such as Hippocrates, who lived between the IV and V centuries BC. Previous investigations have dated traces of the parasite Entamoebawhich also causes dysentery, in the Greek Neolithic more than 4,000 years ago.
Ancient medical texts from Mesopotamia during the first and second millennium B.C. C. describe the diarrhea that affected the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. An example says: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and later has stomach cramps, he has cramps and intestinal discharge.”
The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhea was with si-s. Some texts also included recommended incantations to recite that increased the chances of recovery.
Saint Paul heals her, literally, in the Acts of the Apostles: “He had fever and dysentery, and was in bed. But Paul went to see him and, after praying for him, laid his hands on him and healed him.“.
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