The current debate about lead poisoning's potential role in the downfall of the Roman Empire dates back to a 1983 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by Jerome Nriagu, who was studying ...

Lead poisoning: Widespread exposure to lead led to the poisoning of many Romans, although it was primarily the wealthy, who used lead pipes and utensils, that suffered.

Some historians have argued that Roman elites and emperors who purportedly displayed odd, often violent behavior like Caligula and Nero were actually suffering from lead poisoning, and thus that ...

Scholars have debated lead poisoning’s impact on Roman history for decades. Some have even argued that lead poisoning played a role in the downfall of the Roman empire. Most of those arguments have ...

Silver fueled the rise of the Roman Empire. But the ancient process of mining and extracting silver was also making the air thick with lead, scientists found.

Unlike the 20th century, when lead poisoning was primarily due to exposure to leaded gasoline fumes, Roman-era lead exposure was predominantly a byproduct of silver mining.

Its author, a chemist named Jerome Nriagu, was probably the first to claim lead poisoning precipitated the Roman Empire’s fall. There’s little evidence to back up his claims, ...

But compared to the amount of lead that the Roman empire used 2000 years ago, or even the amount of lead that we used a hundred years ago, we're using very little.

There was a lot of lead in Roman Empire." Lund and his colleagues are now proposing an alternative theory to lead poisoning for the demise of the empire.

Use of lead acetate as a sweetener was a thing, but wasn't a common practice. Certainly not to the degree that the fall of an empire can be ascribed to it. Click to expand... Direct use of lead ...