Today, he is known only by the inscription on his burial stone: “This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence.”
That brief detail provided a tantalizing clue for historian Philip Slavin, an associate professor at the University of Sterling in Scotland. He wondered if Sanmaq—along with 117 other people buried with him in 1338 and 1339 at cemeteries in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan—could have been killed by the bubonic plague. Emerging in full force in Europe around eight years later, that pernicious pandemic claimed as many as 200 million lives across Europe, Asia and Africa during the 14th century.
