Greco-Roman era

Charlesworth, James H. and Mark Harding. The Lord s Prayer and other prayer texts from the Greco-Roman era. Trinity Pr Inti, 1994. ISBN 1563380803... 

Any controls on lead production, use, or dispersal into the human environment were, first, historically linked to the level of development of the society wherein attempts at lead control were made. In the Greco-Roman era, little or no regulatory controls on lead accompanied the metal s use the producer or consumer of the substance basically determined its presence in commercial channels. 

Public awareness about health hazards that would logically feed a demand for regulatory measures would have arguably been spotty, rarely shared, and largely ineffectual in the period from the Greco-Roman era up to about the seventeenth century. The means for engendering public awareness... 

Some reports of lead s early history focused on a particular aspect of lead and public health, whatever their chronological reach. Examples of these are the claims of various human health hazards of lead contamination of water, foods, and beverages from the Greco-Roman era forward (Gilfillan, 1965 Needleman and Needleman, 1985 Nriagu, 1983b, 1985 Scarborough, 1984 Wedeen, 1984). 

The variety of ways that lead was extensively used in the Greco-Roman era (and afterward as well) would appear to increase the likelihood that all levels of the society at the time would have had significant lead exposure and potentially debilitating, if not always lethal, lead poisoning. 

Settle and Patterson (1980 see also Figure 3.1 in NAS/NRC, 1993) reported the estimates of annual global lead production rates from the invention of cupellation to the present. Moderate increase in annual production is estimated until around the beginning of the Greco-Roman era, where the first large boosts in lead production accompanied both demands for lead in the Roman Empire and the introduction of coinage and requirements for coinage... 

Table 11.1 tabulates some illustrative fragmented descriptions of Pb toxicity that appeared over the period from the Greco-Roman era to about the seventeenth century. Table 11.2 cites some scattered and illustrative poisoning reports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

TABLE 11.1 Illustrative Reports of Lead Poisonings in the Period from the Greco-Roman Era to ca. 1600 ... 

Greco-Roman era to ca. 200 CE Acute abdominal distress, vomiting, muscle pain, paralysis, hallucination death in extreme, untreated cases Acute lead poisoning with acute encephalopathy and peripheral neuropathic features Hippocrates Nikander Galen Vitruvius Dioscorides Pliny the Elder Major (1945), Waldron (1973), Nriagu (1983a,b 1985), Relief and Cilliers (2006)... 

Greco-Roman era to 600 CE and later Abdominal colic, motor peripheral paralysis with foot and wrist drop, seizures, death Chronic lead poisoning with chronic encephalopathic and peripheral neuropathic features Pb chronic Gl effects Paul of Aegina Seventh century Major (1945) Nriagu (1983a,b)... 

It is not apparent from available records how extensively or effectively early medical and scientific writers admonitions about lead s harmful health effects were disseminated to the political and economic leadership of peoples and nations from the Greco-Roman era up to the eighteenth century. We can plausibly assume that the social and political organizations of early cultures and empires were such that ordinary citizens and noncitizen classes (laborers, serfs, vassals, slaves, and prisoners of war) had little say in how lead was used in the broader society and equally little say in avoiding lead exposures from that use. 

---