The sudden onset of plague in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East in the winter of 1346-47 which began the epidemic known as the Black Death inspired among contemporaries and among historians down to the present day various attributions concerning the geographic origin of the outbreak. Based on evidence of varying degrees of reliability, and heavily interdepen-dent, these attributions all have one thing in common: they place the point of origin well to the east of the first identified point of human outbreak in Southeastern European Russia. It is the contention of this paper that the Black Death did not originate in China, India or" Central Asia" as has been supposed, and was not" brought" westward by the Mongols or anyone else. It was probably moved northward over the course of centuries, by means of transmission among the wild rodent colonies, from Kurdistan and Iraq to Southeastern Russia, from where it spread to Europe, the Middle East, Turkestan, the South Siberian steppe and, eventually, to Mongolia; but not to China, which received the disease via India and Burma. To demonstrate this thesis we must explain the fallacy of theories of rapid,