LATimes, Jerusalem Post, etc: Archeo-toiletology and life among the ailing Essenes
Discovery of ancient latrines is providing to archeologists a major hint to group bathing and ritual purity as the ironic reasons for poor health among the Essenes in Israel around the time of Jesus. Members of the all-male Jewish sect are believed by many to have authored the Dead Sea scrolls. An international team recently discovered a latrine site in a location that is rougly where the scrolls suggest that the hygiene-conscious Essenes had put them. The soil is loaded with dessicated eggs of human, intestinal parasites.
A report on the work is coming out in Revue de Qumran, a journal devoted to the site, near the Dead Sea. A UNC press release calls attention to it. The scientists put together the evidence of wide parasite infection among the cult’s members with the poor health reflected in skeletons in burial areas and with the cult’s ritual purity stricture that demanded regular, full immersion in communal pools. The result is a portrait of inadvertent health catastrophe. Parasite eggs and intestinal bacteria would easily have been picked up on the feet of the latrine users and passed on to other members in the bathing pool. “It is terribly sad,” one University of North Carolina scientist told the LA Times’s Tom Maugh, “They were so dedicated….ruining their health in an effort to do what is right.” And the sicker they got, the more dedicated they may have become to their misbegotten hygiene regimen.
The NYTimes’s John Noble Wilford had a brief item on it in Tuesday’s science section. Oddly, that one ignores the health angle and focusses only on the site as compelling evidence that, in fact, Qumran was an Essene community.
Other stories:
Jerusalem Post Judy Siegel-Itzkovich; MSNBC Alan Boyle; Nature.com Katharine Sanderson; Charlotte Observer April Bethea; The Independent (UK) Andrew Gumbel;
Grist for the Mill: UNC-Charlotte Press Release;
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