Ashley Morgan
Ancient Epidemics is a personal passion project of mine, alongside my main work leading One Health Security and The BioChain.
My day-to-day work is about biosecurity, infectious disease and data integrity in the present and future. But I’ve always been just as drawn to how people in the past dealt with exactly the same problems — plague, contagion, uncertainty, fear, and the very human business of trying to govern and understand something you can’t see.
Ancient societies didn’t have germ theory, but they weren’t ignorant either. They built quarantine systems, public health responses, religious and civic institutions, and explanatory frameworks — miasma theory among them — that shaped how they lived through epidemics. Some of that thinking was wrong. A surprising amount of it still holds up. Ancient Epidemics is where I get to explore that properly, outside of my day job, for anyone else who finds the history as interesting as I do.
A quick note on the name: we use “ancient” loosely here, covering prehistory through to the medieval period — a broader window than the strict definition, but the span of history this project actually covers.
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Major events in this story.
Earliest known plague
Ancient DNA recovered from Bronze Age burials shows Yersinia pestis infecting humans thousands of years before the first written accounts of plague.
Plague of Athens
An unidentified epidemic swept Athens during the Peloponnesian War, killing a large share of the population — described firsthand by the historian Thucydides.
Antonine Plague
A pandemic, likely smallpox, spread through the Roman Empire after returning troops carried it home from campaigns in the East.
Plague of Justinian
The first recorded Yersinia pestis pandemic struck the Byzantine Empire and spread across the Mediterranean, recurring in waves for roughly two centuries.
The Black Death
The second great plague pandemic killed an estimated one-third to one-half of Europe's population within a few years.
Recurring waves
Plague continued to return to European towns and cities for centuries after the Black Death, shaping public health responses well into the medieval period.
A few things people ask.
What time period does "ancient" cover on this site?
We use the term loosely — everything from prehistory through to the medieval period, rather than the stricter classical-only definition.
Who runs Ancient Epidemics?
It's a personal project of Ashley Morgan, alongside her main work leading One Health Security and The BioChain.
Is Ancient Epidemics affiliated with One Health Security?
They're run by the same person, but Ancient Epidemics is a separate, personal passion project rather than an official One Health Security initiative.
What company operates this website?
Ancient Epidemics is an initiative of Noviota Limited, a company registered in Northern Ireland. See the Legal page for full details.