In the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains in what is now Kyrgyzstan, tombstones in the Kara-Djigach cemetery with Syriac inscriptions showed that the village’s death rate skyrocketed over a two-year period. Phil Slavin, a historian at the University of Stirling in Scotland, says that “out of a total of 467 stones that are precisely dated to the period between 448 and 1345, 118 actually turned out to be dated to the years 1338 [and] 1339.”
An 1890 publication covering the tombstones drew Slavin into their mystery, he said in a press briefing yesterday. Ten of the gravestones from those two years had longer inscriptions memorializing the persons and their cause of death—pestilence. This made Slavin wonder whether the site might help settle a long debate about the origins of the Black Death pandemic that arrived in Europe around 1347 CE. Knowing he’d have little chance of finding enough written ...
