Aftermath of 1881 Chios earthquake, engraved by Charles Barbant - (Wikimedia)
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
Sources:
Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī. A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years. NYU Press, 2021.
Barber, Malcolm. The Crusader States. Yale University Press, 2012.
Dols, Michael Walters. The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Ellis, Richard. Imagining Atlantis. Knopf, 2012.
Modern, John. Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Script:
There were strange events in those years of misfortune as Abd al-Latif looked on in Egypt. There were strange events, and he was not even referring to the prevalence of cannibalism, to the extremes that the ordinary was stretched to include as the waters on which this society depended simply did not rise as they should.
There was, in 597, the birth of a baby that had two heads though it does not appear that Abd al-Latif actually saw the baby in question, or at least, it doesn’t say that he did.
He does feel it worth saying that he saw a baby that had been born with white hair, but then he didn’t really think that baby’s hair to be the white of old age, for there was “a touch of reddishness to it,” unusual for that time and place perhaps, but hardly a sign of the end times.
He does say that aside from these human births there was that of a mule, normally thought not to be able to reproduce, which gave birth to a stillborn. He says that in 598 there was a baby lamb which produced milk, and that for this reason it was presented in the residence of the prefect on more than one occasion.
There were, Abd al-Latif writes, “several freakish happenings [that] occurred” in those years when the Nile ran low and the stars spoke clearly of violent disorder down below, among all of which he felt these events, these births, worthy of attention, emblems that, if you weren’t already aware, told of how very wrong things had gone and were going.
Today, we’ll get into how they were going in the Islamic year of 598.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that travels through history in the footsteps of the people who made those journeys, whether they were merchants or envoys, friars or physicians. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, where you can put in a monthly amount of your choice and access early, extra, and ad-free listening, and you can do all of that patreon.com/humancircus.
It has been a bit of an on-again off-again flow with the podcast for me recently. It’s been a year when health, work, and life have frequently got in the way and I haven’t been on here as often as I’ve liked, so before we get going I just wanted to say thank you for your patience and to assure you that the podcast is not, as it may appear, being abandoned. It’s just taking something of a long overland route with all the logistical difficulties and potential for surprises that entails: bad weather, bandits, something like that.
And now, back to the story, back to the conclusion of the story of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, or at least, as you’ll hear at the end of this episode, the conclusion of his story for now.
Last time out we covered that particularly terrible year that was 597 on the Islamic calendar. This time, we turn the page to 598, not that it would turn out to be any kind of figurative turning of the page on what had come before. The new year, as is so often the case, failed to bring new beginnings.
The markets were in no better shape than they had been during the previous year. If anything, the prices were higher for what was to be found.
Chickens had all but vanished from the city entirely, their continued existence credited by Abd al-Latif to a particular man who had imported 60 and then sold them to the poultry breeders, slowly bringing eggs back into the markets and very gradually bringing down their prices..l
Bakeries struggled not only to find flour but also, as I mentioned last time, fuel. From landowners who could find no occupant or renter, they would buy up the timbers, doors, and other wooden fixtures, leaving but a ruined shell behind. Sometimes, they would purchase a whole house for next to nothing and burn its wood before buying again. Sometimes, they would, or at least “certain bakery proprietors” would, quote, “slip out at night and snoop about the houses, gathering firewood, without coming across anyone to scare them off.”
Against these realities, owners who could no longer find anyone to rent to, sought to bar their doors, to seal up every possible way of entry or else go to the expense of hiring a guard who would live on the property, not that I would think the expense would be much under the circumstances. Even in the city centre, where tenants were still found, the rents had plummeted, and Abd al-Latif had specific numbers to relate here: 20 dinars or so for a compound that had once gone for 150 a month, just over a single dinar for one that had been 16.
Abd al-Latif lists district after district where, quote, “All you would see was the townspeople’s houses, fallen in upon their own roof beams, and many of their occupants dead inside the ruins.” The rural suburbs and out into the country were left a wasteland. Beyond larger towns like Damietta or Alexandria, “a traveller might journey in any direction for days and not come across a living creature—only the remains… .”
Halfway through the year, the deaths did at last begin to decrease, the mortality rate to decline along with the incidences of cannibalism and of food theft in the markets. Our guide does speak of a woman in Fustat arrested for cutting a boy’s throat in order to eat him and a man who violently assaulted an elderly physician he knew out of hunger, leaving him, quote, “with his testicles pounded to a pulp and his two front teeth broken,” but such incidents now stood out for being much rarer than they had been, for being, one might say, appropriately unusual.
However, even this was hardly a sign of anything particularly uplifting or otherwise positive, any cause for celebration. These lower numbers, of deaths and otherwise, seem much more the unfortunate product of how very many people had already died and simply could not die again, could not desperately attempt to avoid death by killing and eating those around them.
Those who had been most vulnerable, who had been driven to theft and worse, had died at a horrible rate or else had tried to leave, “and had all but disappeared from the city.” Prices, finally, did fall, not because of any newfound plenty, but for want of mouths to feed in Cairo and Fustat.
The city was a shadow of its old self, reduced in every way and within every profession and practice. Of the 900 workshops for woven rush mats that Abd al-Latif was told had operated there before, now there were only 15, and it was the same for “vendors, bakers, druggists, cobblers, [and] tailors,” the same or else worse.
For the span of 22 months from late 596 through mid 598, Abd al-Latif saw the records of those who had died, “were provided with shrouds … and were received in the place of ablution,” and he reported the number at just under 111,000. It was an appalling number, considerably higher than the roughly 60,000 thought to have lived in Cairo at that time, though, as Mackintosh-Smith points out, this may well have been due to the numbers of people who had initially come in from the countryside, fleeing for shelter from drought and famine which the city could not provide.
Abd al-Latif’s number was absolutely an appalling one, but he insists that it was not exhaustive in quantifying the scale of the tragedy, that it was orders of magnitude away from anything of the sort. This is how he puts it.
“Huge though this figure [of 111,000] is, it is insignificant when compared with the number of people who perished in their houses, or on the outskirts of the city … . The combined total, in turn, is insignificant compared with that of the dead who perished in Old Fustat and its environs; the total so far is itself insignificant in comparison with the number of people eaten in the two cities; and the sum total of all those figures is exceedingly insignificant when compared with the numbers of those who perished or were eaten in the rest of the country districts, in the provinces, and on the roads, particularly the Levant route. Of the persons arriving from one or another of the provinces whom I questioned about the roads, all without exception related that they were fields planted with dismembered corpses and bones. The same was true of the roads I myself covered.”
With each category, each widening circle out from Cairo, the degree of the disaster worsened in scope, and this was not even the summary of a crisis in its conclusion. The bad times were not over, for Abd al-Latif’s next words were not to continue with a post-mortem. They were, in translation, “The next crisis to come about…,” which was not reassuring.
That next crisis to come about was, quote,” “a massive outbreak of fatal pestilence” because of course it was. Naturally when you were limping through drought and the resultant dreadful famine, the next thing you needed was for highly contagious disease to take hold, and for ominous reports to pour in from Faiyum, al-Gharbiyyah, Damietta, and Alexandria.
As the seasonal cycles of agricultural labour went on, those doing the work might complete one task or phase but then be dead when the time came for the next. They might be sent out to a job, but only the news of their death and the need for more hands would return. They might, one after the other, “die working in succession at one and the same plow.”
From Alexandria, and from trustworthy sources, Abd al-Latif heard of how a man had died there, leaving his property, and how his property had then been passed down and inherited 14 times during only one month, each new heir all too quickly dying and releasing the property anew. He heard of one particular imam on one particular Friday leading prayers for 700 dead from just that day or the night before.
It was “a great dying,” wrote ibn al-Athīr, a historian alive at the time, but perhaps it was not the plague. One 15th-century Egyptian historian insisted it was not, and Michael Walters Dols, in his book The Black Death in the Middle East, suggests typhus or typhoid. Curiously, our own doctor/guide actually gives us no symptoms to know it by, an odd absence in the book, given that he was a physician and you might expect him to remark on such matters, but then with all the mentions of reports coming into the city from elsewhere, maybe he didn’t have a good opportunity to examine those symptoms for himself. Maybe he just had other things competing for his attention. He had even managed to continue teaching during these troubled times, for ordinary life, at least for those who still had it, did need to go on.
Abd al-Latif had a group of students in his charge, and this group had made it as far as The Book of Anatomy, by which Mackintosh-Smith figures he probably meant Galen’s Anatomical Procedures. They were, however, stuck there, the students having trouble making progress and he, the teacher, having his own in trying to satisfactorily explain the material and move them forward. Words were just not sufficient for certain concepts, but helpfully for them in this case, the kinds of real-world examples they needed were not hard to come by.
Someone told them of a place, of a hillock, where human remains were to be freely found. From portions of his report, I would not have thought this set the place much apart from your average city street or alleyway, but when they went to this place, they found it was not just a hillock on which those remains had been deposited, but rather a large mound composed largely of those remains.
“The quantity of earth in it was almost less than the quantity of the dead,” Abd al-Latif wrote, describing layers on layers, from the most recent on down, perhaps as many as 20,000 he thought, though I don’t know that it’s all that easy to eyeball estimate a mound of human bodies in that way. As for his Galenic students, it was exactly the kind of grim educational supplement they needed, and Abd al-Latif seems to have been absolutely in his element, examining bones and their joints in the fullest possible variety, gathering knowledge, he wrote, “that we could never gain from books.” Even all the skills and powers of Galen, with all his attention to bodily detail, could not provide a truer picture than one’s own senses, which were, he wrote, occasionally “at variance with what was said in the books.”
That was the case, for example, with the lower jawbone, agreed by everyone—by which Abd al-Latif apparently meant “asserted by Galen”—to be two bones joined at the apex. However, he and his students found it to be only a single bone. “We examined it God knows how many times,” he wrote, “inspecting numerous individual examples—over two thousand skulls—by various methods of examination, and we never found it to be anything but a single bone, in all aspects.” Further examination of ancient burials would not change their mind.
Later, he and his students went into Old Fustat. They walked along well established streets and great marketplaces that had once teemed with busy throngs of people but were now all but empty, with just the occasional person passing by. One felt alone in those depopulated places, among only the corpses and scattered bones.
They walked until they came to a place where the ground was covered with bodies in various states of dismemberment or decay. There, he wrote, struggling again to convey the scale of the thing, “The dead had taken over the hillocks … so completely that they covered every spot, and almost exceeded in quantity the dust of those hummocks.”
Looking down into one enormous hollow, they saw skulls piled high. Like “a newly cut crop of watermelons,” he wrote, “heaped together at harvest.” By the next time he passed by, they would be scorched by the sun and would put him more in mind of ostrich eggs.
“When I saw how empty of people were those neighborhoods and marketplaces,” he wrote, “and how crowded those wastes and hillocks, an image came to mind—that it was a band of travelers who had departed, vacating one place to occupy another.” All that remained in that eerie scene, were the signs of their passing.
We’ll have a quick break and then return, for the year was not done with Egypt and its people.
…
This had, just to recap, been a time of drought, famine, and disease, possibly, though not definitely, plague. Things could hardly have gotten worse, for this catalogue of crises was surely now complete, or so one would very much hope.
The night before it happened had been cold, unusually so, but the weather was about to turn. Hot temperatures were about to bring a “pestilential wind that left one short of breath and choking.”
That’s when the earthquake happened.
The earthquake struck in the morning, before daybreak on the 21st of May, catching people unawares and still in their beds. They panicked, leaping up and crying out in fear and supplication to God.
Abd al-Latif describes the earthquake’s movement “like the shaking of a sieve, or the beating of a bird’s wing,” Its concluding salvo, three especially violent shocks, sent doors slamming shut, buildings rocking, and beams and other wood to creak.
Taller structures cracked open, as did those that had already suffered damage, many more than would ordinarily be the case, what with all the emptied buildings that had fallen into disrepair or been plucked of wood. And then later in the day, came the aftershock, the earth repeating its performance though not with nearly so much drama.
It was, Abd al-Latif judged, an earthquake of rare force for Egypt, and it did not affect Egypt alone. Reports poured in, their arrival according to their distance from the city, each of an earthquake occurring at that same hour and day.
From them, we can look over his shoulder as he traces the event up to Damietta and Alexandria, along the coast and breadth of the Levant, as far as Akhlāt, in eastern Turkey if it’s the same one, as far as Cyprus, where quote, “the waves of the sea piled up and raged, and … pleasant vistas turned ugly … the sea parted, and the wave crests rose up like great mountains; ships ended up aground, and the sea cast many fish upon its shores.”
Jerusalem was secure and hardly harmed. “The damage … wrought in the lands of the Franks,” on other hand, he noted to be “much greater than that in the lands of Islam,” though I’m not sure the earthquake, felt from Sicily to Iraq, showed any such discrimination.
What our source was describing here was what you’ll find referred to as the 1202 Syria earthquake. The Templar grandmaster of the time would write that, quote, “We suffered the sort of earthquakes not seen since the creation of the world.” The Hospitaller grandmaster recorded his own concern for the damage to his fortresses, though as the earthquake occurred during a truce between Sultan al-Adil and King Aimery, he had time to repair and rebuild. The 14th-century historian ibn al-Dawadari wrote of how no wall was left standing in Nablus, how the quake had washed across Damascus and Aleppo, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and al-Jazira. The, quote, “number of people left dead in the country under the ruins was said to have reached a thousand thousands and one hundred-thousand,” an extraordinarily high number, too high really.
As for our writer/physician, Abd al-Latif received letters about the earthquake, and luckily for us, he recorded two of them.
From Hamāh, he read the following.
“Before daybreak on Monday 26 Sha’ban, an earthquake occurred that all but set the ground off tripping and the mountains rearing and dipping. Every single person had the same thought—that it was the earthquake of the Last Hour. On this occasion, it came in two shockwaves: the first wave lasted for the space of an hour or more; the second was shorter but more violent, and some castles suffered from its effects. … .
Next, on Tuesday 27 Sha’ban, at the time of the midday prayer, there occurred another quake. It made itself known equally to those asleep and those awake, and left those sitting and those standing all ashake. It then struck again, this same day, at the time of the afternoon prayer.”
And from Damascus, there was this.
“Your obedient servant informs you that an earthquake occurred in the early hours of Monday 26 Sha’ban, at the time when dawn was beginning to break. The tremor went on for a period which, according to one of our companions, was the time it took him to recite the Chapter of the Cave [from the Qur’an]. One of the shaykhs in Damascus commented that he had never before experienced an earthquake like it. The damage it caused in the city included the collapse of sixteen pinnacles from the cresting of the Mosque, and of one of the Mosque’s minarets; the other minaret was cracked, as was the lead dome. … The Mosque was cracked in many places, and a number of houses in the city collapsed.”
The letter went on to give an account of the Muslim towns, saying that part of Bāniyās had fallen and that Safad had too, leaving, but for the children of the lord, only the dead. At Bayt Jinn, even the foundations had caved in, and the damage was of a similar scale across the region of Hawrān so that, to quote the somewhat circuitous language of the letter, “there [was] no known locality in the region of any town there, of which it might be said, ‘This is the village of Such-and-Such,’” because, to put the matter more succinctly, there was nothing there standing. Of the city of Acre, the letter writer had heard it had mostly collapsed, and of Tyre that nearly a third of it had done the same.
“Finally, reports tell of Jabal Lubnān, which is a place people enter by passing between two mountains, and where green rhubarb is gathered. It is said the two mountains closed together, trapping the people who happened to be between them, and that the number of victims amounted to nearly two hundred men.
People have given numerous such accounts of the earthquake. For four days after that first tremor, it kept recurring, day and night. We pray to God for his benevolence and providence: He is sufficient for us and a most excellent protector.”
That was how Abd al-Latif’s correspondent concluded. As for how he himself concluded, he gave one more account of the Nile and its movements though not in so much detail as before. There was the now familiar gloom over the river’s failure to rise at the usual pace and time, its depleted state low enough to allow people and pack animals to easily ford it. There were questions as to whether its headwaters, its source, might have suffered some accident, maybe during the earthquake, and if there was ever to be any rest for them. “But then the river surged with enormous force, one rise following hard upon another, mountains of water all churning together in a spate,” until, on the 2nd of September, “it reached its maximum—one finger-breadth short of sixteen cubits.”
The river recovered, and Egypt recovered too. Its buildings had, in large numbers, been damaged or brought down to their very foundations. Its people had suffered terrible losses, with entire neighbourhoods and towns emptied out. They had been pushed into cannibalism as a not uncommon last resort. But Egypt did not fall apart. The Ayyubid Sultan, Salah ad-Din’s brother, al-Adil, held his sultanate together, ruling for nearly 20 years. Though everything had fallen apart, Egypt would retain at least some semblance of stability in the years to come, though how this was experienced by the vulnerable populations which Abd al-Latif gives us a look at, is hard to say.
On the final page of the translation I’m reading, you find these words:
“Written in the hand of its author
and in hope of the mercy of God the Exalted
by ‘Abd al Latīf ibn Yūsuf ibn Muhammad al Baghdādī
in Ramadan of the year 600 in Cairo.”
Written in 600 or, by the Gregorian calendar, in May of 1204. Abd al-Latif had weathered the storm of those very early 13th-century years and stayed on in Egypt for a few more.
He had also continued working on this book. He’d apparently only wrap it up in Jerusalem in the spring of 1207, making the text that has come down to us something of a work in progress, a draft. And he was an author known to rework and revisit his writing, on one occasion 26 years after he had started it.
As for the manuscript itself, the surviving copy of the text presented as being written in Abd al-Latif’s own hand, though some have expressed doubt about that, the manuscript itself has had its own interesting history, and its contents’ path to publication has been a bit of a tortuous one.
When Abd al-Latif died in late 1231, his books were sold in Aleppo, this manuscript seemingly among them. It remained there as Aleppo fell first to Hulagu in 1260 and then to Timur in 1400. It remained there until the 1630s when it was purchased in that city by Edward Pococke, chaplain to the English trading company there and soon-to-be Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford.
In England, Pococke began but never finished work on a printed edition of his find. There is an odd story about the university press’s Arabic type being set aside for another man’s project, to Pococke’s apparent project-ending vexation, but it was also only one among many manuscripts that he had acquired, and he did have other things to be working on, and only so much time. It may instead have been his son, Edward the Younger, who actually put the work in, on a Latin translation and a printed edition, but if so, he set it aside when his father died in 1691. Young Edward did not, as he anticipated, inherit his father’s professorship, and he withdrew his work from the press out of disgust and disappointment.
The man who would be made the next Laudian Professor of Arabic, Thomas Hyde, started his own Abd al-Latif project, but he died in 1703, leaving it unfinished. Thomas Hunt, holding the same Oxford position, also tried, in the mid 1740s, but abandoned the work for lack of support, and in the 1780s, yet another holder of the very same professorship, Joseph White, brought an Arabic edition all the way up to the proofs stage before setting it aside out of unease over the typography. Finally, in 1789, White’s work was published in Germany and followed up with a German translation. White did intend to bring out an English translation, but again, he did not.
In 1810, a French translation of Abd al-Latif’s writing was published, the work of Silvestre de Sacy which he dedicated to Napoleon. Mackintosh-Smith describes it as a “rather loose” translation but can only praise Sacy’s notes, citing as an example the 25 pages on the labakh tree alone, 25 pages after which the writer could not decide what precisely the labakh was.
Though Abd al-Latif had first sailed for England with Pococke in the 1630s, it was not until 1965 that he would be published in English, a book with the title The Eastern Key by Judge K. Hafuth Zand along with Ivy and John Videan. It was a book most notable for the claim it was completed at the urging of our author Abd al-Latif himself.
And no you did not mishear. Our Abd al-Latif was, in the 20th century, entering a surprisingly active phase some seven centuries after his death, finding new voice among the growth of spiritualism and seances.
You find him in 1928’s lengthily titled Healing Through the Spirit Agency: by the great Persian physician Abduhl Latif, “the man of Baghdad”, and information concerning the life hereafter of the deepest interest to all inquirers and students of psychic phenomena. You find him regarded as, quote, “a Universal Master who leads and directs a band of workers on and around the earth.” You find him speaking through the celebrity medium Eileen Garrett, speaking to many people, one the most famous of whom was the creator of Sherlock Holmes among other characters, Arthur Conan Doyle. The novelist, an enthusiastic spiritualist and writer on the subject himself, was there to do a little fact checking, to ask Garrett/Abd al-Latif if he could give an approximate date for the sinking of Atlantis, for he was writing an adventure book about visiting that city. Abd al-Latif, going a bit outside his realm of expertise when alive, was said to have replied:
“Many people will tell you that Atlantis disappeared so quickly. That is not true. There was a series of three cataclysmic eruptions that caused the gradual disappearance of the land. There are great monuments, tombs to be opened, there will also be cataclysms that will bring up to you that which I swear in the name of almighty God to be true.”
I don't know if Doyle found that response useful or not.
You also find Abd al-Latif in Ivy Videan’s introduction to The Eastern Key.
Quote:
“Our first meeting with ‘Abd al-Latif was in August, 1957, when he spoke to my husband and to me during a conversation with a sensitive, Mrs. Ray Welch, in London. Since then we have had very many long talks with him, through Mrs. Welch and also through Mr. Jim Hutchings. It was not unexpected, therefore, that he should tell us in 1960 that he wished my husband to make a photographic copy of the Bodleian manuscript of the Kitāb al-ifādah for presentation to the British Museum in London, where it would be more easily accessible to a wider public. ‘Abd al-Latif promised to prepare the way for the accomplishment of this plan, adding later that he would send a translator from Baghdad.”
Abd al-Latif had apparently felt he needed to intervene if his work was to be widely read in English. Given the somewhat difficult, centuries-long road to publication, it would be hard to argue with him on that.
That is, for now, the end of the Abd al-Latif story, though with this late-career resurgence in the 20th century, his story may have more chapters yet. I’ll wrap up this episode, and this series, with some words from the translator Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
Quote:
“We live in a time when the temperament not just of a river and a land, but of the entire global climate, is increasingly unbalanced; when epidemic becomes pandemic in a few short months. Only rarely do we have the evidence of the past to warn us of what happens when things go out of kilter; historians are so often deaf to the poor, the usual victims of catastrophe, that we seldom hear the most urgent warnings, let alone heed them. So when the past speaks, as it does here, in the voices of the victims, we should listen… .”
Thank you, as always, for listening. I’ll be back soon with a new episode, and a new series, and I’ll talk to you then.