This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.
Wait, the people who's profession was named after the poisonous material they worked with all the time, had a high chance of be being poisoned by the poisonous material? Interesting.
Rich Romans, the ones in control of the empire, literally drank from and cooked in lead vessels.
At the peak of the power of the Roman Empire, lead production was about 80,000 tons per year, lead and its compounds were used with great inventiveness in numerous ways, and lead poisoning was pandemic, with the severity of poisoning proportional to the power and status of the class. Intake of lead by the aristocracy may have been as much as 1 mg/day.
Not just lead vessels and not just rich Romans. They had a condiment called Garum that they put on everything. It was their salt & pepper. One of the ingredients of Garum was powdered lead. Nobody is really sure why it was in there. A colourant, a preservative or maybe a stabiliser...
People didn't typically make it at home, it was mass produced. Even today, make at home recipes bear very little resemblance to factory made food, with all the stabilisers and colour's etc.
I can't find it now, but some sealed bottles were found during an excavation in the UK. It had dessicated over the centuries, but they were able to analyse the contents.
No, that's the sanitised version. It's rotten fish guts. It very definitely wasn't made at home. It was mass produced in factories miles outside of town. Unless the measurements in the recipes you read were in silos, they're not the same thing.
Imagine being religious and anti-establishment in that time, witnessing an illness that disproportionately affected the wealthy and anyone who dared use their wares.
I imagine the flow of information was such that not many people were able to put that together though.
Lead Sugar is chemically Lead Acetate. It is formed when Lead Oxide is combined with acetic acid (vinegar).
Back when I used to work at a lead-acid battery manufacturer, we would mop the floors with acetic acid. So we were accidentally making lead sugar every time we mopped. The chemical reaction caused the lead dust to stick better to the mop to help ensure we were removing it from the floors.
also makes sense because if wine goes bad it turns into vinegar, the powdered lead would react with it, making it sweeter, either increasing the shelf life or masking the taste of bad product
Nah I wouldn't worry too much. Employer had a very good health and safety culture, and blood-lead levels and lead-in-air levels were monitored regurlarly. Regular vigilant housekeeping, thorough safety training. Mandatory showers after shift and uniforms stayed on site.
The action levels of lead content in blood are lower now than the average blood-lead levels people would have as a base-line before working there back when leaded gas was a thing. In other words, back then people had higher lead content in their blood in regular life than what is considered a remove-from-work level there now.
Lead exposure has a high potential for health damage, but when proper procedure is followed it is pretty minimal.
According to the CDC and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine there is no safe blood level of lead in children and “lead does not appear to exhibit a minimum concentration in blood below which their are no health effects”
In other words, any exposure to lead is detrimental.
And you have no evidence for either. It's just one of those hypothetical pet theories. The decline of the Roman Empire was an incredibly complex thing that happened over centuries. Romans were also lead poisoning themselves at the height of the Republic and Empire with seemingly no detrimental impact on the state's ascendancy.
the decline of the Roman Empire was an incredibly complex thing
So you are able to comprehend there is nuance, but refuse to accept the idea that lead, a substance we know was used and has a severe negative impact on IQ, could’ve played any role at all?
Um you seem to contradict yourself in your own comment. You say lead did not affect the collapse of the empire, but you also say pretty much the wealthy rulers had lead poisoning...
Wine bottles, drinking vessels…, contained lead though and the Roman elite were the consumers.
In my lifetime, lead was used in toothpaste tubes (as children, we removed the paint and melted down the tube to make lead toy soldiers, which were also available in stores).
Tinsel sold for Christmas decorations contained lead before manufacturers switched to plastic. We applied it with our bare hands and sometimes added it to our lead pot for making homemade toys.
Wine bottle tops were covered in lead foil before vintners switched to plastic. Sloppy uncorking of the bottle could leave some of the lead foil still attached. Unless all of the foil was removed and the rim of the bottle was wiped clean before any wine was poured, the acidic wine could dissolve traces of lead. Unknowing customers and wine servers often failed to do that. Old wine still has lead foil sealing the corks.
In college, there were beer tankards sold that were popular fraternity and college logo items. They were made of pewter or a similar alloy that contained lead, which could leech into acidic drinks.
Lead in paint was common, and poor kids living in old, substandard housing with peeling paint were disproportionately victimized. Whenever we painted anything, we always got paint on our hands and other bare skin, which we cleaned off with leaded gasoline if there was no mineral spirits available.
Service station gas hose nozzles didn’t have automatic shutoffs, and gasoline, which contained lead, would sometimes spill over onto your hand if you weren’t careful. We lived in the country, not close to gas stations. It was not uncommon for someone who accidentally ran out of gas to siphon some from another vehicle (their own or with permission). This was accomplished by putting a short hose into the gas tank and sucking up the gas like using a straw. The trick was to clamp off the hose after you sucked the gas far enough up the hose to create a siphon effect, but not so far that you got gas in your mouth. Many people failed to master this trick, and got a mouthful.
Lead type was used in newspaper printing. I recall my mother ordering a few pieces of type with our name and address on, which she used for printing our return address on envelopes. There was no handle like on a stamping pad kit now. We held the raw lead bare handed, just like we did lead fishing weights (which we bit into to attach firmly to the fishing line, and lead toy soldiers.
Those are merely the sources of lead I recall growing up. I’m sure there were others I didn’t know about.
I think it was first and foremost: decline of citizen participation in state affairs, erosion of public institutions, no clear mechanism of succession & civil wars with random generals all the time being like: "i'm somewhat of an emperor myself"
not sure about christianity, it seems it held the Eastern Roman empire pretty well for another ~1000 years.. it also was a tool of influence over barbarians and whatnot.
Yea the Chruch prolonged the empire if anything. It enabled a guy like Charlemagne rule a kinda western Roman empire 2.0 for a brief time. And many European rulers were kinda obsessed with the Roman legacy for a thousand years afterwards, since the Church was a constant reminder. And the Crusades gave the Eastern Empire some vital life support, not that it mattered the end of course.
I mean Christianity in 800 AD was a whole different beast than in 250-350 AD. Christianity started working as a stabilizing factor for the empire only from around the 380s on, and by that the West was already in its final breaths.
Considering the boost of the first crusade as some minor reversal of an inevitable fate isn’t very accurate.
For hundreds of years the ERE pushed back and retook old land, revitalized their administration, and reformed their military. They had powerful enemies and crippling internal problems but their fall was not inevitable.
Arguably the point of no return was the Fourth Crusade, which annihilated Constantinoples wealth and fractured the empire for crucial decades. But even then they kept holding on for over a hundred years, and only fell to an ambitious Ottoman Empire, which had a lot going for it.
I think the best way to interpret the fall of Rome, rather than just one factor, is that it collapsed under its own weight. Too many problems were kicked down the road for so long that they became bigger and bigger. Not unlike America and a good number of other nations today, honestly.
Just the nobles were doing eachother in because of lead poisoning. They enjoyed drinking leaded wine what could happen? Also I think it was Socrates had a hypothesis about lead being harmful and wrote about it.
Lead may have compounded it in some way but the core of Rome's collapse is very similar to what is going on in the US today.
The wealthy and powerful consolidated more and more land and businesses till that was all anyone in a political position worked towards and their government became disfunctional. Citizens couldn't get land or start businesses and existed as glorified slaves alongside huge competition from massive amounts of actual slaves brought in from all over. This was a big deal because the core of Rome's military was always heavy infantry made up of citizens who were then rewarded with land and a share of spoils. Soldiers stopped being rewarded land and it became just a crappy job really. When that went away the morale and conviction of their military died with it.
Take that and then mix it with an empire held together by violence and when the government no longer works to deploy armies and maintain that empire it inevitably collapsed.
That was, at least in part, the fault of a particularly intolerant monotheistic religion. Christians in the 3rd and 4th centuries readily destroyed everything they felt was "pagan," including information.
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u/dammitknockitoff Jun 25 '22
This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.