While Latin and Byzantine Greek texts treated the disease as a generic pestilence (, ), only later did Arabic writers term the condition ṭāʿūn (to some extent interchangeable with wabāʾ, 'plague'). In Syriac, both bubonic plague and the buboes themselves are called sharʿūṭā. The Chronicle of Seert makes this term synonymous with Arabic ṭāʿūn. Often, however, Syriac writers referred to an outbreak simply as a pestilence or mortality, mawtānā, equivalent to Arabic wabāʾ. In Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor's Historia Miscellanea, the clarifying combined form mawtānā d sharʿūṭā (plague of tumors) is found. The Chronicle of 640 of Thomas the Presbyter dates the<unk>  plague" (mawtānā qadmayā) to the year AG 854 (AD 542/3).
First plague pandemic
Third plague pandemic
Second plague pandemic
Native American disease and epidemics
Pandemic
Spillover infection
Breakthrough infection
Western African Ebola virus epidemic