Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Read Online Free PDF

nor
Arvicanthus
is averse to invading human settlements, and would therefore have come into direct contact with nonimmune
Rattus rattus
—the black rat, a species that specializes in infesting human environments, including farms, storehouses, houses, villages, towns, markets, ports, and ships.
     

     
    In good climatic conditions, one pair of black rats (also known as house rats and ship rats) can produce thousands of descendants each year, especially if their slower-breeding predators are rarer than normal (due to, say, a recent drought). The species is aggressive, highly adaptive, and able to eat virtually anything—insects, seeds, meat, bones, fruit, even each other!
    Once the starving fleas had jumped in their billions from gerbil and multimammate to
Arvicanthus
and on to the black rat, it would have been only a matter of days, even hours, before the first humans started contracting the plague. 14
    Transported by ships from port to port,
Rattus rattus
carried the plague bacterium from community to community. The archaeological evidence suggests that as the disease rolled northward up the Red Sea to Egypt, in its wake a whole way of life collapsed in East Africa and probably in southern Africa as well. The metropolis of Rhapta was inhabited by early Iron Age Bantu people, and the other ports of Opone, Essina, and Toniki were probably inhabited by late Neolithic Cushites, or possibly early Iron Age Bantu people. 15 At the time of the plague, as already noted, these ports seem to have virtually disappeared. Apart from Opone, their precise locations are not even known.
    Inland, Bantu agriculture seems to have declined, and the Bantu appear to have rapidly and increasingly adopted from the Cushites both the latter’s cattle-based pastoral economy and their particular style of pottery. In the seventh century (i.e., after the plague had started), this cattle-based pastoral tradition began to spread south and supplant cereal growing all over southern Africa.
    Two questions remain, however. How did the plague give an advantage to pastoralism (a livestock-based economy) over agriculture (a crop-based economy)? The answer lies in the number of rats and other plague-carrying rodents attracted to the two different economic systems. Food crops—whether in fields or in storage—attract rats. Food sources on four legs—in this case, cattle—do not. It was this difference that appears to have given pastoralism an advantage over agriculture at this critical time.
    The second question is, what were ships carrying between East Africa and the Roman Empire? Ivory was one of the most valuable commodities needed by the empire. Demand for magnificent ivory chairs, exquisite ivory children’s toys for the rich, ivory writing tablets, religious relic boxes, and countless other ivory works of art had generated a trading system that no doubt stretched deep into Africa. Well before the sixth century, the elephants of Eritrea, on the Red Sea—used in antiquity as beasts of war—had all been hunted to extinction. So East Africa (modern Kenya and Tanzania) became virtually the only source for the vast quantities of ivory the Roman Empire desired.
    Up until the plague and its destruction of the East African ports, the Roman Empire imported up to 50 tons of ivory every year from East Africa. This level of ivory trade necessitated the killing of up to five thousand elephants a year. In terms of cash, the merchandise was worth up to 220,000 gold
solidi
(equivalent to around $400 million today) to the Arab and Greek merchants who controlled the trade. 16
    In East Africa, the trade sustained not only a series of ports but also a series of coastal chieftaincies, which must have exercised disproportionate amounts of local power through the trade goods and imported weaponry at their disposal. After the plague had substantially reduced the population and destroyed the ports, the ivory trade virtually ceased.
    Between the year 400 and the eve of the