"The land of Egypt shall be a desolation and a waste; and they shall know that I am Yhwh”.
Four thousand years ago, a series of natural disasters hit Egypt in quick succession. It is rare that a natural disaster is remembered in such detail let alone celebrated quite like these plagues have been in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These ‘plagues’ have fascinated religious scholars, historians, Egyptologists and scientists for years. The plagues are believed to have occurred in the ancient city of Memphis on the mouth of the Nile Delta - the seat of the Egyptian Middle and Early New Kingdoms, during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II and were significant spiritually, socially and culturally.
At the start, the Nile River, an important source of fresh water and fish for the Egyptians, turned red like blood and after a few days millions of frogs were spawned. This was at approximately the same time as the Santorini volcano erupted in Greece spewing lava and ash across the entire Mediterranean region, including the Nile and contaminating the fresh water supply. The aquatic, phytotoxic algae blooms in salty and brackish water and it is supposed that the emergence of this type of algae produced toxins in the river, killing the fish and forcing the frogs onto the land in their thousands. The stinking, decaying flesh of the frogs and river of blood is believed to have fostered the mass breeding of flies and midges, leading to the third plague ‘lice’. These flies would have encouraged in-migration of other flies, most probably sandflies, which fed off the vegetation along the Nile and bitten humans. Without potable water to wash in, the sweat on the animals and humans would have promoted further infestation, and infections. Specific types of African flies and ticks have been known to carry a range of diseases including anthrax, babesiosis, surra, rinderpest, Rift Valley fever, East Coast fever and staphylococcal-streptococcal infection which would have nearly obliterated the livestock resulting in the fifth plague ‘death of livestock’. Both anthrax and staphylococcal-streptococcal infection are highly contagious, airborne diseases that can cause extreme, bacterial skin infections when they come into contact with human flesh - the sixth plague ‘boils’.
In the temperate and tropical worlds, collisions of supercooled water in cumulonimbus clouds may produce seasonal flurries of hail, which are made even more likely to occur after a volcanic eruption and thus would explain the seventh plague ‘hail’. The larger the hail storm, the more destruction it would wreak on a crop. With so much devastation already present from the infestation of flies and disease, it is no small wonder that the remaining crops were wiped out by a swarm of Schistocerca gregaria, a desert locust specific to Africa, the Middle East and India which move in huge swarms annually – the eighth plague ‘locusts’. The ninth plague ‘darkness’ may well also be related to the volcanic eruption with the widespread ash blocking out the sun. This seems unlikely given the time; rather, it would be more plausible that the darkness was caused by a khamsin, a hot, southerly Egyptian wind coming from the Sahara and bringing fine particles of sand that would have created a massive sandstorm which blocked out the sun. Such sandstorms were not uncommon in the Northeast Africa at the time, nor, indeed, are they today.
Given all the plagues that had preceded the tenth plague, it is conceivable that at the end of this series of natural disasters, little food was left. As the eldest son in each family was given preferential treatment, a state common in many patriarchal societies throughout time, they may well have been fed from the remaining vegetation. It is plausible that such foodstuffs had been contaminated by one of the many earlier plagues. When the firstborn ate, they were inadvertently poisoned, resulting in their sudden death, or the tenth and final plague ‘death of the firstborn’.
Regardless of the causes of the ten plagues, many historical documents regard the drastic effects that each in sum had on altering the course of the great Egyptian society, in time leading to its downfall and the birth of the Jewish celebration ofPasach – Passover, the day of feasting to celebrate the escape of the Israelites from the many plagues, which is celebrated on 29th March – 5th April this year.
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