DURA EUROPOS, Syria - Evidence Of Ancient Chemical Warfare - HISTORY

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Diagram showing the Sasanian Persian mine designed to collapse Dura’s city wall and adjacent tower, the Roman countermine intended to stop them, and the probable location of the inferred Persian smoke-generator thought to have filled the Roman gallery with deadly fumes.

The Persians may have used bellows, but a natural chimney effect may also have helped generate the poisonous cloud.

(Credit:
Image copyright
Simon James)

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                             Archeologist Uncovers Evidence Of Ancient Chemical Warfare






ScienceDaily
(Jan. 15, 2009) —

A researcher from the University of Leicester has identified what looks to be the oldest archaeological evidence for chemical warfare -- from Roman times.

At the meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, University of Leicester archaeologist Simon James presented CSI-style arguments that about twenty Roman soldiers, found in a siege-mine at the city of Dura-Europos, Syria, met their deaths not as a result of sword or spear, but through asphyxiation.

Dura-Europos on the Euphrates was conquered by the Romans who installed a large garrison. Around AD 256, the city was subjected to a ferocious siege by an army from the powerful new Sasanian Persian empire. The dramatic story is told entirely from archaeological remains; no ancient text describes it. Excavations during the 1920s-30s, renewed in recent years, have resulted in spectacular and gruesome discoveries.

The Sasanians used the full range of ancient siege techniques to break into the city, including mining operations to breach the walls. Roman defenders responded with ‘counter-mines’ to thwart the attackers. In one of these narrow, low galleries, a pile of bodies, representing about twenty Roman soldiers still with their arms, was found in the 1930s. While also conducting new fieldwork at the site, James has recently reappraised this coldest of cold-case ‘crime scenes’, in an attempt to understand exactly how these Romans died, and came to be lying where they were found.

Dr James, Reader in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, said: “It is evident that, when mine and countermine met, the Romans lost the ensuing struggle. Careful analysis of the disposition of the corpses shows they had been stacked at the mouth of the countermine by the Persians, using their victims to create a wall of bodies and shields, keeping Roman counterattack at bay while they set fire to the countermine, collapsing it, allowing the Persians to resume sapping the walls. This explains why the bodies were where they were found. But how did they die? For the Persians to kill twenty men in a space less than 2m high or wide, and about 11m long, required superhuman combat powers—or something more insidious.”

Finds from the Roman tunnel revealed that the Persians used bitumen and sulphur crystals to get it burning. These provided the vital clue. When ignited, such materials give off dense clouds of choking gases. “The Persians will have heard the Romans tunnelling,” says James, “and prepared a nasty surprise for them. I think the Sasanians placed braziers and bellows in their gallery, and when the Romans broke through, added the chemicals and pumped choking clouds into the Roman tunnel. The Roman assault party were unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes. Use of such smoke generators in siege-mines is actually mentioned in classical texts, and it is clear from the archaeological evidence at Dura that the Sasanian Persians were as knowledgeable in siege warfare as the Romans; they surely knew of this grim tactic.”

Ironically, this Persian mine failed to bring the walls down, but it is clear that the Sasanians somehow broke into the city. James recently excavated a ‘machine-gun belt’, a row of catapult bolts, ready to use by the wall of the Roman camp inside the city, representing the last stand of the garrison during the final street fighting. The defenders and inhabitants were slaughtered or deported to Persia, the city abandoned forever, leaving its gruesome secrets undisturbed until modern archaeological research began to reveal them.


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Adapted from materials provided by University of Leicester.
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CORBIS

Persian siege tactics, depicted here at the Chehel Sotun Pavillion in Iran, overpowered the Romans at Dura-Europos

Independent.co.uk

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                                          Chemical warfare – ancient Persian-style







By Steve Connor,
Science Editor
Thursday, 15 January 2009
 Independent.co.uk 

The earliest example of chemical warfare has been unearthed at an archaeological site in the Syrian desert, where soldiers of an ancient Persian empire gassed a platoon of Roman troops in about 256AD by asphyxiating them with the smoke from burning bitumen and sulphur.


A makeshift grave of 20 Roman soldiers in full battle armour was discovered at the site of the ancient city of Dura-Europos in the 1930s but it is only now that scientists have been able to figure out exactly how they died.

It was known that they were killed while defending the city against a Persian siege by digging tunnels to counter those being dug by the Sasanian Persian army under the walls of the city. New evidence suggests the Roman troops were deliberately gassed, said Simon James, an archaeologist at Leicester University.

There are no ancient texts that describe the siege of Dura-Europos, which was founded in 300BC by the Macedonian Greeks but its eventual fall to the Sasanians led to its complete abandonment and loss until its rediscovery in the 1920s when the first archaeological excavations began.

Dr James said the Persian siege involved digging mines under the city walls to undermine the fortifications, which would have led to mines being dug by the Roman defenders who would have tried to intercept the Sasanian soldiers in their tunnels.

"It is evident that when mine and counter-mine met, the Romans lost the ensuing struggle," said Dr James. "Careful analysis of the disposition of the corpses shows they had been stacked at the mouth of the counter-mine by the Persians, using their victims to create a wall of bodies and shields. This would have kept the Roman counter-attack at bay while they set fire to the counter-mine, collapsing it, allowing the Persians to resume sapping the walls. This explains whey the bodies were where they were found."

But the question remained: how did the 20 Roman troops die? It would have been difficult to kill too many well-trained and well-armed men in a space less than 6ft high or wide and 36ft long unless something more insidious than brute force was used, Dr James said.

Archaeologists found bitumen and sulphur crystals in the tunnels, which would have been used to get the tunnels burning. But it is also known that these materials give off a highly toxic cocktail of gases when burnt together.

"The Persians would have heard the Romans tunnelling and prepared a nasty surprise for them," said Dr James. "I think the Sasanians placed braziers and bellows in their gallery and when the Romans broke through added the chemicals and pumped choking clouds into the Roman tunnel.

"The Roman assault party were unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes. It is clear from the archaeological evidence at Dura that the Sasanian Persians were as knowledgeable in siege warfare as the Romans. They surely knew of this grim tactic."

The Persians also built a great siege ramp which may have been the deciding factor that led them to overwhelm the Romans and take the city, which was then abandoned, for good.

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                 Dura Europos before excavations

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Dura-Europos ("Fort Europos") was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment ninety meters above the right bank of the Euphrates river.

It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in today's Syria.



wikipedia.org

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It was founded in 303 BC by the Seleucids on the intersection of an east-west trade route and the trade route along the Euphrates.

The new city, commemorating the birthplace of Alexander's successor Seleucus I Nicator, controlled the river crossing on the route between his newly founded cities of Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris.

Its rebuilding as a great city built after the Hippodamian model, with rectangular blocks defined by cross-streets ranged round a large central agora, was formally laid out in the 2nd century BC. The traditional view of Dura-Europos as a great caravan city is becoming nuanced by the discoveries of locally made manufactures and traces of close ties with Palmyra (James).

During the later second century BC it came under Parthian control and in the first century BC, it served as a frontier fortress of the Arsacid Parthian Empire, with a multicultural population, as inscriptions in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Hatrian, Palmyrenean, Middle Persian and Safaitic Pahlavi testify.

It was captured by the Romans in 165 and abandoned after a Sassanian siege in 256-257.

After it was abandoned, it was covered by sand and mud and disappeared from sight.

 


Although the existence of Dura-Europos was long known through literary sources, it was not rediscovered until British troops under Capt. Murphy made the first discovery during the Arab Revolt in the aftermath of World War I. On March 30, 1920, a soldier digging a trench uncovered brilliantly fresh wall-paintings.

The American archeologist James Henry Breasted, then at Baghdad, was alerted. Major excavations were carried out in the 1920s and 1930s by French and American teams. The first archaeology on the site, undertaken by Franz Cumont and published in 1922-23, identified the site with Dura-Europos, and uncovered a temple, before renewed hostilities in the area closed it to archaeology. Later, renewed campaigns directed by Michael Rostovtzeff continued until 1937, when funds ran out with only part of the excavations published.

World War II intervened.

Since 1986 excavations have resumed in a joint Franco-Syrian effort under the direction of Pierre Leriche.

Not the least of the finds were astonishingly well-preserved arms and armour belonging to the Roman garrison at the time of the final Sassanian siege of 256. Finds included painted wooden shields and complete horse armours, preserved by the very finality of the destruction of the city that journalists have called "the Pompeii of the desert".

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RUINS OF SYNAGOGUE

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Dura-Europos was a cosmopolitan society, controlled by a tolerant Macedonian aristocracy descended from the original settlers. In the course of its excavation, over a hundred parchment and papyrus fragments and many inscriptions have revealed texts in Greek and Latin (the latter including a sator square), Palmyrenean, Hebrew, Hatrian, Safaitic, and Pahlavi. The excavations revealed temples to Greek, Roman and Palmyrene gods. There were mithraea, as one would expect in a Roman military city.


 
The Jewish synagogue was dated by an Aramaic inscription to 244. It is the best preserved of the many ancient synagogues of that era that have been uncovered by archaeologists. It was preserved, ironically, when it had to be infilled with earth to strengthen the city's fortifications against a Sassanian assault in 256.

It was uncovered in 1932 by Clark Hopkins, who found that it contains a forecourt and house of assembly with frescoed walls depicting people and animals, and a Torah shrine in the western wall facing Jerusalem. At first, it was mistaken for a Greek temple. The synagogue paintings, the earliest continuous surviving biblical narrative cycle, are conserved at Damascus, together with the complete Roman horse-armour.



There was also the earliest identified Christian house church, preserved by the same defensive fill that saved the synagogue. "Their evidently open and tolerated presence in the middle of a major Roman garrison town reveals that the history of the early church was not simply a story of pagan persecution".

The surviving frescoes of the baptistry room are probably the most ancient Christian paintings. We can see the "Good Shepherd" (this iconography had a very long history in the Classical world), the "Healing of the paralytic" and "Christ and Peter walking on the water". These earliest depictions of Jesus Christ ever found anywhere date back to 235 A.D.

A much larger fresco depicts two women (and a third, mostly lost) approaching a large sarcophagus, ie. probably the three Marys visiting Christ's tomb. The name Salome was painted near one of the women. There were also frescoes of Adam and Eve as well as David and Goliath. The frescoes clearly followed the Hellenistic Jewish iconographic tradition but they are more crudely done than the paintings of the nearby synagogue.

Fragments of parchment scrolls with Hebrew texts have also been unearthed; they resisted meaningful translation until J.L. Teicher pointed out that they were Christian Eucharistic prayers, so closely connected with the prayers in Didache that he was able to fill lacunae in the light of the Didache text.

In 1933, among fragments of text recovered from the town dump outside the Palmyrene Gate, a fragmentary text was unearthed from an unknown Greek harmony of the gospel accounts — comparable to Tatian's Diatessaron, but independent of it.

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THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO DURA EUROPOS - THE PALMYRA GATE

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The buttressing of the walls would be tested in 256 CE when Shapur I besieged the city.

True to fears, Shapur set his engineers to undermine what archaeologists called Tower 19, two towers north of the Palmyrene Gate.

When the Romans became aware of the threat, they dug a countermine with the aim of meeting the Persian effort and attack them before they could finish their work. The Persians had already dug complex galleries along the wall, when the Roman countermine reached them. They managed to fight back the Roman attack and when the city defenders noticed the flight of soldiers from the countermine it was quickly sealed leaving the wounded and stragglers trapped inside where they died. (It was the coins found with these Roman soldiers that dated the siege to 256 CE.) The effect of the countermine was interestingly successful, for the Persians abandoned their operations at Tower 19.

 
Next, the Sassanids attacked Tower 14, the southernmost along the western wall. It overlooked a deep ravine to the south and it was from that direction that it was attacked. This time the mining operation was successful in that it caused the tower and adjacent walls to subside. However the Roman countermeasure which bolstered the wall prevented it from collapsing.

This brought a third approach to entering the city. A ramp was raised again attacking Tower 14, but, as it was being built and the garrison fought to stop the progress of the ramp, another mine was started near the ramp. Its scope was not to cause a collapse of the wall -- the buttress had been successful --, but to pass under it and penetrate the city.

This tunnel was built to allow the Persians four abreast to move through it. It eventually entered the city and pierced the inner embankment and, when the ramp was completed, Dura's end had come. As Persian troops charged up the ramp, their counterparts in the tunnel would have invaded the city with little opposite, as nearly all the defenders would have been on the wall attempting to repulse the attack from the ramp.

City survivors would have been marched off to Ctesiphon and there sold as slaves. The city, once pillaged, was never rebuilt.

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A view of the southern wadi and part of the walls of the city of Dura Europos



RETRIEVED FROM


wikipedia.org