Please join us for November’s Inner Asian and Altaic Studies Lecture on Wednesday, November 19th, when we welcome Prof. William McGrath from New York University. We hope you can join us in person or virtually!
Abstract:
Plague is endemic to the Tibetan plateau and most of its neighboring regions. With ongoing but demographically limited outbreaks of the bubonic and pneumonic plague in these areas, scholars have long speculated that a Central Eurasian endemic plague zone was the origin of the Black Death (1346–1353) and perhaps even other plague pandemics that took place in the Mediterranean world. Supporting this hypothesis, recent bioarcheological evidence has demonstrated a genetic link between the plagues of fourteenth-century Asia and Europe. Rather than illustrate timeless and endemic origins, however, Tibetan narratives about and instructions for treating and preventing widespread disease that were composed over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reveal that a devastating plague outbreak also took place in Tibet. Prophetic scriptures like the Vase of Ambrosia, for example, describe a widespread disease called the Black Collapse (Nag po rgyug ’gyel) that will take three out of every four lives, and Tibetan treatises composed in the first half of the thirteenth century similarly describe deadly fevers and pustule diseases that spread to Tibet from Nepal and India. Rather than confirm the assumed Oriental origins of Occidental plagues, therefore, a consilience of genetic and literary sources from Central Eurasia demonstrates that the Black Death and the Black Collapse were just two branches of a pan-Eurasian plague pandemic.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
1:15 pm-2:30 pm ET
In person: Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room, S050 CGIS-South
Virtual: Zoom registration
For information about the 2025-26 IAAS Lecture Series, visit https://iaas.fas.harvard.edu/pages/iaas-lecture-series.
Inner Asian and Altaic Studies | Harvard University
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