8 Brutal Diseases That Erased Ancient Egyptian Empires Overnight

8 Brutal Diseases That Erased Ancient Egyptian Empires Overnight Number eight: The Plague of Amenhotep. Around thirteen hundred and fifty BCE, during the reign of Amenhotep the Third, a catastrophic sickness swept through the Egyptian court and its subject territories with a speed that the most powerful administration in the ancient world had no language to describe. The dead accumulated faster than the priests could perform the rites meant to protect them. We know this not from Egyptian records, which carefully avoided acknowledging weakness, but from the Amarna Letters, clay tablets discovered at Tell el-Amarna in eighteen eighty-seven, written by desperate vassal kings to their pharaoh.