Smallpox in the Arabic Annals.
For our purpose the evidence on the antiquity of smallpox in China and India may be accepted, and for the rest left out of account. The Arabian influence is nearer to us, and is the only one that practically concerns us. Coming, then, to the history of smallpox in its prevalence nearest to Europe, we find a definite statement of the disease appearing first among the Abyssinian army of Abraha at the siege of Mecca in what was known as the Elephant War of A.D. 569 or 571. The best of the Arabic historians, Tabari[871], writes: “It has been told to us by Ibn Humaid, after Salima, after Ibn Ischâg, to whom Ja‘gûb b. Otha b. Mughira b. Achnas related that one had said to him, that in that year the smallpox appeared for the first time in Arabia, and also the bitter herbs,—rue, colocynth [and another].” The tradition is by word of mouth through several, after the Semitic manner, but it need not on that account be set aside as worthless. So far as concerns the bitter herbs, it is said to be against probability; but as regards the new form of epidemic sickness, there is no such objection to it.
The Arabic legend, as given by Tabari is as follows: “Thereupon came the birds from the sea in flocks, every one with three stones, in the claws two and in the beak one, and threw the stones upon them. Wherever one of these stones struck, there arose an evil wound, and pustules all over. At that time the smallpox first appeared, and the bitter trees. The stones undid them wholly. Thereafter God sent a torrent which carried them away and swept them into the sea. But Abraha and the remnant of his men fled: he himself lost one member after another.” In a former passage, the calamity of Abraha is thus given: “But Abraha was smitten with a heavy stroke; as they brought him along in the retreat, his limbs fell off piece by piece, and as often as a piece fell off, matter and blood came forth.” To illustrate this account by Tabari, his recent editor, Nöldeke, cites the following from an anti-Mohammedan poem: “Sixty thousand returned not to their homes, nor did their sick continue in life after their return.” One of the elephants which dared to enter the sacred region is said to have been also wounded and afflicted by the smallpox.
In this narrative of Abraha’s disaster, says Nöldeke, there is a mixture of natural causation and of purely fabulous miracle; a real and sufficient account of the cause of the Abyssinian leader’s discomfiture, namely, an outbreak of smallpox, had been blended with legendary tales. That the disease was smallpox is made probable by the continuity of the Arabic name; under the same name Rhazes, the earliest systematic writer, describes the symptoms, pathology and treatment of what was unquestionably the smallpox afterwards familiar in Western Europe. Why it should have originated on Arabian soil in an invading army from Africa, is a question that would require much knowledge, now beyond our reach, to answer conclusively.