Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red.

The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions. Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.

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Other religious groups may have experienced mercury poisoning due to scripting holy texts. In a separate study, scientists from the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel and the Israel Museum found cinnabar on four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include passages from the Hebrew Bible.

(via discovery)