The FWF-funded research project “Epidemics and Crisis Management in Pre-modern South Asia” focuses on the time of the post-vedic period (starting around 600 BCE), marked by the emergence of an urban culture in the Ganges-Yamuna region, until the fall of the Gupta Empire in the 6th century CE. This phase includes two historically extremely important epidemiological developments. The first consists of the spread throughout Eurasia of diseases that cannot be precisely determined, such as smallpox, measles, and perhaps typhoid, which reached Europe as the “Plague of Athens” (429-426 BC) and a second time as the “Antonine Plague” (165-180 AD). The second development is the spread of the bubonic plague, which culminated in Europe in the so-called “Justinian Plague” (541-542 AD). Both events probably also hit South Asia, an aspect that has been hardly researched to date. Based primarily on literary sources, the goal of the project is to understand how epidemics were conceived and countered in early pre-modern South Asia and to provide a cultural history of epidemics in the region.

https://epidemics.univie.ac.at/