[Covenantor]

Using the Batavia 650 cargo tonnage vs 1200 ton displacement ratio that Roman 300+ ton Obelisk ship would have had a 600+ ton displacement. Impressive for the times.

Of course that doesn’t taken into account the gross weight of all the rats on board....which leads to question y.pestis plague outbreaks, were there any contemporaneous reports of such?

[SunkenCiv]

There’s no DNA evidence for yersenia pestis, which differs from the various European outbreaks since the Middle Ages. A smallpox outbreak may have been a factor in the Crisis of the Third Century. Earlier, during the Spartan siege of Athens, typhus apparently carried away a big chunk of the Athenian population.

Hauling a 300+ (hmm, sez here 350+) obelisk would indeed require a larger displacement for the freeboard. Same goes for their grain haulers. From the descriptions that survive for their Indian trade, those ships may have been enormous, larger than the Med ships, which had to ply a lot of small ports.

Lionel Casson cites a Roman-era grain ship which due to foul weather had to ride it out in the Piraeus of Athens. It was not a place that saw such ships by that time (and Hellenistic vessels of any size would have been military rather than commercial), and everyone in town came by to gawk. Casson writes that the grain haulers were really only practical at large ports, like Alexandria (Egypt was the source of much of Rome’s grain supply), Rhodes, Athens, and Rome.

In general, Roman-era vessels pushed the envelope for size, and exceeded what has in more recent centuries been considered the practical limits for wood vessels.

The ships of the yavanas referred to in Tamil literature do not (as the ancient astronaut astronuts claim) refer to UFOs, but to the Greeks’ and Romans’ vast ships, which were a spectacle each time they arrived, and due to the reliance on the monsoon winds, they arrived in great numbers during a relatively short window of time.

There’s a Roman mosaic showing an orangutan, which is from much further east, and a Han court reference to the arrival of a Roman trader from the time of Marcus Aurelius.

It’s no surprise that one classical scholar referred to the simultaneous heyday of the Roman, Satavahanan, and Han empires as the happiest period of human history.

[SunkenCiv]

“There’s no DNA evidence for yersenia pestis, which differs from the various European outbreaks since the Middle Ages.”

Boy, I didn’t word that one well.

There is DNA evidence of The Plague in actual plague victim remains from the Middle Ages, but no such evidence exists from Roman remains.

Of course, there aren’t that many Roman inhumation remains — they mostly did bury their dead — that have survived to the current day. The largest cache of Roman dead are from 79 AD, Bay of Naples, but that volcano was the culprit. :^)

[SunkenCiv]

I got thinking about the Justinian Plague, and since I live on Failing Memory Lane, tried a search on Justinian Yersinia Pestis, and hit the following link. Apparently the pest’s DNA has shown up in 6th century remains. I’d look in past GGG topics, but I don’t wanna know just how forgetful I am.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(13)70323-2/fulltext

Yersinia pestis and the Plague of Justinian 541–543 AD: a genomic analysis
David M Wagner, PhD
Jennifer Klunk, BS
Michaela Harbeck, PhD
Alison Devault, MA
Nicholas Waglechner, MSc
Jason W Sahl, PhD
et al.
Published:January 28, 2014

and, there’s Neolithic evidence as well, if the guy at the next linked YT vid can be believed.

[SunkenCiv]

What caused the Neolithic Decline in Europe? Was it the first great plague in history? And if so, did it cause a Neolithic apocalypse?

In the 4th Millennium BC, Neolithic Europe experienced a sustained decline. By about 3000 BC Western Steppe Herders like the Yamnaya and related groups migrated west into Europe, changing the genetics and culture forever, and bringing about the Bronze Age.

The male lineages of Neolithic Europe came to an end as the steppe herders had offspring with the Neolithic farmer women. Did this only happen because the settled farmers had already been brought to their knees by waves of plague?

In this video we look at the first recorded samples of the plague - Yersinia Pestis - the same bacterium that caused the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian and Bronze Age plagues.

Did the disease first become dangerous in the vast proto-cities of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in Eastern Europe?

The First Great Plague: A Neolithic Apocalypse?
Dan Davis Author | Aug 15, 2021 | 54,580 views

[SunkenCiv]

Infectious disease modeling study casts doubt on impact of Justinianic plague
EurekAlert! | May 1, 2020 | University of Maryland
Posted on 5/4/2020, 10:12:49 PM by SunkenCiv
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3841767/posts

https://freerepublic.com/tag/justinian/index