The Ancients - Dura-Europos: The Syrian Pompeii

Episode Date: November 29, 2020

When we think of Pompeii, we remember the city which became frozen in time after a natural catastrophe. Well, in 1920, exactly 100 years ago, another 'frozen city' was rediscovered. This time it was Dura-Europos, and rather than falling victim to a volcano, this city was destroyed after a bloody siege in 256 AD. Whilst there is no historical record of life in the Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city and garrison, its remains have proven to be a rich source for archaeologists since the 1920s. Between the only complete example of the semi-cylindrical Roman legionary shield and the perfect oval shields with beautiful paintings of Greeks and Trojans or Greeks and Amazons; beyond the regimental records and complete horse armour and the Palmyrene Gate; archaeologists have uncovered the story of the city. Tristan was joined on the podcast by Simon James from the University of Leicester, who talked through what we now know about life in Dura-Europa and the relationships between the Roman garrison, their dependents and the other inhabitants. He also offers a play-by-play of the battle which brought this city to a halt, and possibly one of the earliest examples of chemical warfare, all discovered through archaeology.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are talking about a site that has been described as the Syrian Pompeii,

an ancient settlement that was frozen in time after a catastrophic event in antiquity. I'm talking about the ancient city of Dura Europos, a city that witnessed a siege, a remarkable, extraordinary siege that determined its later history. To talk about the story, the fascinating history of Dura, I was delighted to be joined by Professor Simon James from the University of Leicester. Simon is a leading expert on Dura Europos. He has done excavations at the site, he has written a book about it and it was brilliant to get him on the show to talk through this extraordinary history of Dura, including one of the most insane sieges of ancient history. Here is Simon James. legions of ancient history. Here is Simon James.

Simon, thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Now, the story of Deu Europos, this ancient city, it seems so remarkable. I mean, can we say that this ancient ruin, this is the Syrian Pompeii? It's been described as that really since the 1920s when it was first identified and there are some kinds of similarities. When we talk about Pompeii we think of a city that suddenly threw a natural catastrophe frozen in time and Dura was similarly kind of frozen in time but by a man-made catastrophe of a catastrophic siege. Well we will definitely get onto that during this podcast but first of

all let's start with the background. When does this city, when does it merge? The place name of Dura actually is a local semitic word and we're in eastern Syria here. These were Aramaic speaking people at the time. The word Dura actually means something like stronghold. So the natural formation of the land there created this chunk of rock which overlooked a narrow pass to allow people to get up from the river valley up onto the plateau nearby. That was then turned around 300 BC into a fortress by some of the successors of Alexander the Great after the conquest of the Middle East and the collapse of the old Persian Empire. It was taken over by Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and a fortress

was established at this site which the Macedonians called Europos. So it's either Dura or Europos. It was never both together was it? That's right. The modern hybrid name Dura-Europos is exactly that. It's a modern hybrid name. In antiquity people called it either one or the other depending whether you're a Greek speaker or a Semitic speaker. There are similar sites also in the Middle East like the famous oasis city of Palmyra to the west of Dura was either known as Palmyra to Greek speakers or Tadmor to local Semitic speakers. And you mentioned that Palmyra is nearby in this desert city but looking at the topography around Dura or Europos is it very different terrain to that for instance around Palmyra? Yes. Both are, of course, based necessarily on water sources to support a settlement.

Palmyra is based on a spring, so it's a true romantic oasis, whereas Dura was founded on the banks of the River Euphrates. So you can think of that as being a kind of a linear oasis. The landscape there is, in a way, a little bit like a mini Nile Valley. It's a broad and fertile valley, and Dura sits on the cliffs overlooking it. So although there's so much desert around this place, because it's next to this river,

this seems like this was a very wealthy, a very fertile area, a brilliant place for assessment. Yes, it is extremely rich and fertile land, and of course things like irrigation systems were known in antiquity. We know that Dura didn't stand alone in that landscape. It was actually an urban settlement which dominated what has been described as a world of villages up and down the valley, which in many ways is what it looks like today. There are many villages now dotted up and down the river floodplain.

So Dura, it starts its existence as this Hellenistic city along the Euphrates. How long is it before it's taken over by the next great power in this area? Well in a way it doesn't get taken over, it gets dominated by another power. It remains a nominally Greek city, in fact it's actually culturally very mixed, but the ruling class think of themselves, represent themselves as Macedonians or Greeks. But from around about 100 BC, a little bit before 100 BC, it falls under the sway of the expanding Arsacid Empire, which we often call the Parthian Empire, which became the dominant power then for several centuries in the region. And do we see any change to this city when the Parthians

take over? Not really. It remains a city which thinks of itself, at least in the eyes of its ruling class, as particularly a Greco-Macedonian settlement. It's already on a trajectory of expansion. In some ways, I guess you could say it ceases to be so obviously Hellenising, except in the language, the inscriptions and the titles of its leaders and the personal names of its leaders. They continue to be Macedonian names. The actual fabric of the city, the temples that are being built and so forth, are not classical looking. They're very much Mesopotamian in style

and often they're dedicated to deities who will have both Greek and Mesopotamian names. But I love that idea that it becomes more of this hybrid city. As you say, it still retains much of its Hellenistic culture, but you are seeing this Mesopotamian influence as well as the Parthians arrive and dominate as this happens. Yes, the Parthians become the hegemonic power, they rule, but really it's rather a remote and relatively easygoing empire. I tend to think of the Parthian empire as a relatively cuddly empire insofar as empires can be cuddly. It seems not to have placed

a heavy burden on the components, communities, cities and so forth which went to make up this empire. It largely let them to get on and do their own thing so long as they provided troops and so forth to the king and kings when necessary, paid some taxes etc. So what you have here is a continuation of the trajectory in many ways that was already established under earlier Hellenistic rule that the city continues to have this Greek superstructure, which Parthians like. They're Hellenophiles. They like Greeks. But on the other hand, also, most of the population, as far as we can see, are local Syrian Semitic-speaking people. And at this time, was Dura, or Europe, viewed as a strategic settlement in any sense, or was it very much focused on wealth and prosperity?

Well the city seems under Parthian suzerainty seems to become fairly wealthy probably partly on the productivity of the local land and settlements also probably to some extent on trade. There's quite a lot of trade going up the Euphrates valley. It had actually started as a military plantation. It had originally actually as a military plantation. It had originally actually been a military road station halfway between the two great Seleucid capitals of Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes, which is very close to the Mediterranean, roughly halfway between the two. But when the Parthians take over, it of course suddenly finds itself rather cut off from the western areas, which are particularly Antioch, end up falling under Roman power. And it finds itself now fairly close to the frontiers

of the expanding Roman Empire. And so what happens to Dura when the Romans and the Parthians, they start, shall we say, interacting with each other in the military sphere? Yes. Initially, we don't really know exactly when some of the early fighting between Rome and Parthia, including for example the attack by Crassus which ends in the catastrophic Roman defeat at Cari, that's quite a long way upstream from Dura and also when Mark Antony goes steaming across northern Mesopotamia as well. This doesn't seem to involve Dura directly, although I strongly suspect that there may well have been Duran troops requested and demanded by the Parthian king of kings to help him defend his kingdom. So when do we start seeing Dura appearing in the sources? When do we know that it has

direct interactions, for instance, with the Romans? Well, from the classical sources, we have very little reference to Dura at all. One of the things that, as an archaeologist, I've always enjoyed about Dura is the story is largely almost entirely told from archaeology. There's only a handful of references in the general ancient literary sources to the city at all. The texts that we've got have mostly been recovered from archaeology. So with Dura one of the most extraordinary things about Dura is the amount of archaeology that we have surviving and from that archaeology we can construct a timeline of Dura's history in the ancient period and it seems like especially in the second century AD. Yeah I think what we see at Dura today which has been explored since the great campaigns of excavations starting in the 1920s and ending

shortly before World War II it's showing us the city as it was in of course its latest period which is to some extent the remains of the end of the Parthian era and then the roughly 90 years of direct Roman rule. The Romans take over the city far as we can tell probably around about the AD 160s and then they're in charge of it. It becomes part of the province of Syria down until the city is destroyed in the 250s, probably in year 256. When the Romans take control of the city, is this now permanently in Roman control or does it switch sides quite quickly? Or is this now for quite a long term period of time in Roman hands, full stop? The story of the relationship between the city and Rome is quite complicated. We do know that, and again this is from the

archaeology, archaeological discoveries, that the city had been briefly taken by the Romans at the beginning of the second century under the Emperor Trajan when he managed to conquer all of Iraq as it now is and actually managed to get as far as the Persian Gulf. However he was not able to maintain himself rather like the consequences of the second Gulf War, the invasion in 2003. The Romans found themselves facing lots of insurgencies and had to eventually withdraw again so Dura seems in the most of the first half of the second century down to about the 150s anyway to be back nominally in Parthian control and then the Romans come back again when there's a large war at the end of the

160s and thereafter it's in Roman hands more or less up until the time of the siege though there are some hints that it may have changed hands a couple of times in its last few years it's very very fast rapid changes the city might perhaps have fallen to the new eastern empire which succeeds the Parthians the Sassanian Persian empire which very nearly drives the Romans out of the east and becomes Dura's nemesis. Well, you mentioned there how now Rome takes over Dura more permanently until the siege, and we will get to the siege soon. But does it suggest then, from your archaeological work at the site, when the Romans take over, does Dura become more military focused?

It certainly does become more military focused, yeah, in as much as we can see archaeologically and also from some of the papyri and inscriptions that have been recovered from the site, that a large chunk of the interior of the city is taken over by the Roman military. The city is round about 50 odd hectares and at least a quarter, more like a third of that, is taken over for a Roman military cantonment which ends up eventually having a big headquarters building it has baths it has an amphitheater a sucking great imperial palace in it as well so this is a big deal I've sometimes described it especially perhaps for UK listeners as Aldershot on the Euphrates. How does this affect the Durian inhabitants I mean

are they sort of pushed out of a certain part of the town? Is there very much a line drawn between what is the military part of the town and what is the civilian part of the town? There does seem to be a pretty hard boundary line between the Roman military cantonment and the civil town and part of the city at least, but apparently only part of the city, which is slightly curious, there is actually a quite substantial metre and a half thick mud brick wall built between the two areas. And the early excavators in the 1930s particularly thought that the Roman garrison were brutally dominating the civil population. And particularly Mikhail Rostovtsev, the great Russian scholar who was responsible for the excavations in the 1930s, he took a very dim

view of the coming of the Roman military. He thought that what had happened was that the city's prosperity ended with the arrival of the garrison, who basically beat up the civilians and robbed them and reduced what had been a once proud Hellenistic trading city on the Euphrates to effectively a terrorised village attached to a big Roman cantonment, big Roman garrison camp. My own view is that this is very erroneous. Now, we certainly would be the first to admit, having studied the Roman military for longer than I'm going to say now, that Roman soldiers could be deeply unpleasant, not only to the enemy, but each other, apart from anybody else. And there's a lot of Roman literature, juvenile satires and so on,

who make it quite clear that if you're a civilian, you do want to keep out of the way of Roman soldiers who you don't know, because they're quite likely to take your donkey or maybe kick your teeth in. They're really pretty unpleasant people. So at one level, it's not entirely implausible this should be the case. On the other hand, I actually found signs in the archaeology that the Roman garrison were actually taking quite a lot of care not to make more of an impression on the city than they actually had to in a negative sense. And one of the best pieces of evidence for this is where they built their dividing wall between the military cantonment and the civilian zone, because they built it within the footprint of the houses that they'd taken over.

Now, if they didn't care about the civilian population living in the next batch of houses, they would have simply driven them out and built the wall through those house plots instead. Looks to me as though they were being very careful to respect property boundaries. And I suspect that what we got here probably is compulsory purchase of civil housing. And the Romans were therefore taking some cognizance of the feelings of the civilians. So I think the idea that when the Roman garrison arrives, all the civilians in the new military

zone are driven out at sword point simply isn't accurate. It was obviously going to be a very difficult time of adjustment for people. But I do think that actually the garrison is going some way to make life easy and even actually better for the civilian population. And so what are those ways where it seems to suggest that the Roman soldiers were actually perhaps making life easier for the local population? Well for one thing the new Roman garrison base incorporated a number of the old traditional temples of the Dura civilian population and one of them was taken over for a military administration complex but one of the things I realised looking at the plan was that the

bits they took over were at the back of the temple they were very careful to leave the central shrine and the front access of the temple open and if you follow the route through the military base outside the perimeter to the civilian city, there is actually a routeway which goes right from the middle of the marketplace, so the centre of civil life, up through the middle of the military base to the front of this temple. And just where this roadway crosses the main crossroads of the Roman military base next to the headquarters building, there's a big, elaborate, what we could think of as a ceremonial arch across the road. And looking at this, it's in a rather strange

position. It looks to me as though it's designed to funnel people from the central marketplace up to this temple sequestered inside the base. It's something the Roman garrison had built. And the way I'm interpreting this is that processions were very important in the religion of cities like Duri Europos throughout the eastern provinces and these would have been regular festivals to do with the temple. I think that the Roman garrison were not only allowing these to continue, so allowing civilians into the base area to get to the temple, but they were actually helping to architecturally elaborate the route and they were pretty certainly joining in because

Romans were generally, although they could be very nasty indeed, they're also very pious people. They respected the local gods so I think they would have been very happy to join in with the religious festivals of the local population too and incidentally this route also happened to pass next to and I think probably through the amphitheatre that the Roman garrison built on the boundary between the military base and the civil town and I think that was probably designed to be a shared facility one of a number which also included bathhouses the bathhouses some of them were inside the base but the two biggest ones were actually in the civil town near the main gates of the city and I think that's the garrison building these largely for the benefit of the

civil population or as a shared facility. On a human level it does seem to make sense that you want to respect the local population and treat them very well because especially if you've got enemies on your doorstep further east and in the ancient times where you could have traitors opening the gates as it were to foreign invasions keeping the local population on side seems to be a win-win really for the Romans. It does appear to be sensible and also of course Dura seems not to have been treated as a conquered city, it was probably treated as a liberated Greek city. It was a place the Romans wanted to maintain, make use of and also they probably wanted the civil population to be as productive and reasonably happy as possible so that they'd be paying taxes for one thing. And indeed a German

scholar Oliver Stoll has written a book arguing in some detail, partly on the basis of evidence from Dura but many other places too, that it was imperial policy to promote harmony between garrisons and civil populations in the east precisely for these reasons, not least solidarity against the potential external threat of the Sasanian empire which is developing in the third century. And we see throughout the Roman empire for instance on Hadrian's Wall we see these auxiliary units that have been shipped all the way to this northwestern frontier of the empire from places like Syria etc. Do we have any idea from the archaeology at Dura where these garrison soldiers in this city actually came from? Yes we know in in very considerable detail. In fact, actually Dura

has given us more information about one particular unit than virtually any other unit from the empire. We have a mixture here in the third century of auxiliary soldiers and legionaries. People might imagine that if you're talking about Roman legionaries, they're going to be coming from the west. In fact, no, they're not. The men at Dura are drawn from the two legions based upstream on the Euphrates, which both actually have been in Syria for centuries, many generations anyway. And they are going to be manned by Roman citizens, certainly, but they'll be Syrian-born Roman citizens who probably speak largely Greek. at Dura is the 20th Palmyrene cohort which is a thousand strong a fascinating outfit because it comprises mostly infantry a large cavalry component and also some dromedary riders as well so it's got a camel element too fascinating outfit but these again are from Palmyra they're local boys at least in origin when the unit was raised and from the details we've got we've even got rosters of soldiers when they join the

regiment and so on and from their names too like the legionaries most of the soldiers of the 20th Palmyrenes are again they're Syrians so many of them are Palmyrenes so they are very much our local boys so this I think again is a part of the evidence for suggesting that in fact these are not very alien foreign troops this is a unit which is probably being raised and developed at Dura so they will be familiar people from the outset. That's very interesting they said that they actually don't come from very far away to actually serve at Dura and so do you think these soldiers are they accustomed to the way of fighting in this terrain in this climate in the Near East? Yes, very much so, particularly the 20th Palmyrenes. The fact they got camel ride as part of the unit

is clearly an indication of this. I think this is a... We might think of this in modern terms as a specialist desert warfare regiment, or step warfare, I should say, because we're not actually in true desert here. There is some rain at Dura. It is very, very dry and barren.

But they are adapted to the kind of warfare which also the Parthians pursued, which does involve some infantry to hold ground, but also cavalry, horse archers and heavy armoured lancers. This is the kind of warfare we're dealing with in the region. So we know about the troop types, do we know anything also about their equipment? Well this is where I came in really with Dura Europol studies because I started off fascinated by it was the astonishing state of preservation of some of the arms and armour from the site which included nearly complete painted wooden shields including the only complete example we have of one of the famous semi-cylindrical Roman legionary shields covered with bright painting and a couple of oval shields with beautiful paintings of Greeks and Trojans and Greeks and Amazons. And also complete horse armours too,

belonging to the heavy cavalry I was just mentioning, which may well have belonged to the 20th Palmyrenes. That's remarkable. So you have these extraordinarily well-kept, intact pieces of equipment, arms and armour surviving from what we can ascertain even more about the garrison. Yes, there's a slight caveat there in as much as the arms and armour were nearly all deposited

in the course of the siege and it's possible in fact actually I think we're now increasingly sure that for a while just before the siege the city had been in Sasanian hands the Romans then got it back again there's a question of who were the soldiers who came back into the city I'm pretty satisfied that it was at least in part the same garrison had been there before they managed to come back again and we do have one papyrus which helps to prove this from the year 254 which seemed to be after the year or two of the Sasanian occupation and this rather sadly actually is a divorce document of a soldier of I think it's legion four Scythica just gone out of my head which legion it was I think it's

four Scythica who was married to a local Dureen woman it says which itself is an interesting detail so that shows that at least some of the legionaries came back yes well you mentioned divorce there and you mentioned married to a local Dureen woman. So, of course, it's the garrison, it's not just the soldiers. What do we know about the dependents, as it were? What do we know about the women and the children and the traders who would have also been in this military camp? Well, this is a relatively new development, really, because this aspect of Roman military communities is something that has come onto our radar much more in the last couple of decades. When Dura was initially found it was assumed that this Roman garrison which we

could see through archaeological remains and through the text was essentially just all soldiers but now we understand that especially where you have soldiers stationed for a long time they do put down roots they start to acquire or bring together many dependents, because there is this old idea that Roman soldiers weren't allowed to marry, which was always an exaggeration because there was nothing to stop them owning slaves. They could also form marriages according to local law, it's simply that they weren't officially recognised marriages. So many soldiers tended to acquire families. Also, we increasingly understand how many servants there were in Roman military formations

that where in modern armies you might have logistic specialists and so forth attached to units who were themselves soldiers. In the Roman world these would be slave servants, some of them maybe in free status who would operate the baggage trains. Cavalrymen would have their own servants, it's rather like a knight having a medieval page and I certainly suspect that a lot of those cavalry servants were probably teenage wannabe soldiers, maybe themselves sons of soldiers who were learning the ropes before they were old enough to enlist. So you can imagine that a garrison like Dura, which may have had perhaps 1,500, maybe even 2,000 troops, for each soldier there was probably at least one, maybe even two or three dependents of various kinds, families and also slaves and servants. So that's a big grouping within the city. Of course then there's the issue

of where did these people come from? The legionaries who came to Dura may have been on short-term postings, we just don't know whether they're rotating from their main depots far up the Euphrates, but the 20th Palmyrenes will have acquired its very large tale of dependence probably actually at Dura. And I suspect many of them were themselves Durenes. And this is another way in which through intermarriage, for example, and through buying slaves, perhaps locally, who eventually may well become freed and then go on and have their own families as free Roman citizens. This is another way in which the garrison is going to be interacting with and then merging with over the several generations it's there with the civil population. Do we have any idea where these wives, slaves, servants, do we know from the archaeology where they would have

lived? Would they have lived on the camp as well? Would they have lived in the same barrack block as the soldier that they're with? Well for one thing what we do know at Dura, give people a picture of the base, it's not like the kind of forts we're familiar with on Hadrian's Wall where you have custom-built barrack blocks. In the east here at Dura what they did was they simply minimally converted civil housing by adding extra partitions to make smaller rooms. Exactly how they're occupied is not very clear. They do look as though there are lots of ovens and things built into courtyards and so on. It's all quite ramshackle. But my own suspicion and expectation is that the women and children, all the slaves and servants, they're all just

living in with the soldiers. They're not kept separate in any sense. For example, there are the kinds of some of the artefacts which are unlikely to have been used actually by Roman soldiers themselves. For example, things like loom weights inside the garrison area, which suggests there are probably women there. Obviously that's not absolutely certain but it's an indication. And there are actually also items of female dress which have been identified in the military housing too. So you can think of the military garrison area as actually being a city within the city, a military town within the civil town. That's the kind of way I think of it but as we're exploring it even though they're to some

extent physically demarked in terms of personal relationships they were probably getting tighter and tighter over the generations yes it seems to have this divide but also seems to be very permeable dividers there is interactions but you can also see a division in the line in this ancient city now we've been building up the suspense simon we've mentioned it a couple of times already, the siege. So who are the Sassanians? Well, this does in a sense relate directly to why the Romans ended up in Dura in the first place. We mentioned earlier on that the Emperor Trajan had tried to conquer Mesopotamia, roughly modern Iraq. That's because the Romans were constantly harking after continual expansion. They wanted glory and more and more territory. they wanted to conquer the Parthian Empire. They kept trying and they kept failing. They got to the stage where they

could start to nibble away bits of the Parthian Empire, including Dura, and take that. But all they really succeeded in doing during the course of the later second century, the beginning of the third century, was gradually weakening the Parthian Empire without actually being able to overrun and hold it. And they created what we might think of as one of the most disastrous bits of imperial blowback in history, in as much as they managed to overthrow the Parthian Empire, but not by conquering it. What they managed to do was to trigger regime change, as we now say. There was a revolution within the Arsacid Empire, and the Parthian King of Kings was overthrown and a new

Persian Empire, as the Romans called it, of the family ruled by the Sassanid family was established. We call it the Sassanian Empire. They incidentally called themselves Iranians. This was established and the Romans suddenly found themselves up against what proved to be a much more formidable military foe. So Dura had been conquered partly as a forward operating base, a jumping off point for more invasions down into Mesopotamia. But suddenly, with the rise of the Sasanians, particularly from the 220s or thereabouts, Dura found itself as an exposed frontier outpost of Roman military defence, because now the Romans were increasingly under attack from the Sasanians. So what is the road to the siege of Dura? When

does it happen and what's the background to it? It's a bit obscure but there are a series of wars from particularly the late 230s onwards and there are some important Sassanian invasions of Roman territory, some of which get as far as Antioch and reach the Mediterranean. And for a while at that period, it looks as though the Romans are going to lose control of the entire eastern Mediterranean world to the Sasanians. It's one of the biggest existential threats the Roman Empire faces in this period. We are familiar with the barbarians in the west attacking from the north, the early Germans. For the Romans, they were a big nuisance. The Syria strategic threat was the Sasanian empire in the east. So the Sasanias raid deep into Syria and at some stage, probably in 252, in one of these raids

they take Dura briefly. The Roman emperor Valerian then comes into Syria with an expeditionary force and the Sasanias withdraw and that's probably the circumstances around 254 when the Romans come back to Dura and this time they're expecting another attack they're determined to hold it so they start to transform the city into much more of a military stronghold and it's probably around this time this is certainly according to the work of my colleague Jen Baird who studied this in detail that much of the housing civil housing seems to be abandoned and she's argued that probably many of the civil population left in a kind of around this period probably just fled, abandoned the housing. So probably

it's only the garrison in the city. And what they do is they strengthen the vulnerable western defences of the city. The city itself has very rocky, precipitous slopes on the north, the south and on the river cliff side. But to the west the city is just built on the flat plateau. It's only defended by the walls that have been built in Greek times. They need to reinforce these because they already know that the Sasanians actually are really very good at siege warfare which is what we're about to look at in some detail. So they build a massive earthen rampart behind the old Greek stone city walls and they build a sloping mud brick glacis on the front of it to

stop it falling over forwards make it harder for battering rams and things like that and then it seems from coin evidence probably around 256 the Sasanians come and they make a determined effort to destroy Dura. So you mentioned how the Sasanians are very good at siege warfare and how the Romans seem to know of this so when the Sasanians get outside the at siege warfare and how the Romans seem to know of this. So when the Sasanians get outside the walls of Dura, from your archaeological work, how does it seem that they try to break through the defences? Well, much of the research on this was done in the 1930s by a very talented French soldier, Monsieur le Comte Dominique de Buisson, which is a name I always love saying.

And what I and some of our colleagues in the wider Dura project have done is to try to re-evaluate the work that was done in the 1930s, only partially published, and also have a look further on the ground where we can. And when I first went to Dura, I was just astonished at how well preserved the siege works are from all those centuries ago. So we can actually walk around them, you can see them. And the most prominent item of the siege assault assault which indicates that the siege itself lasted for many weeks if not months because the scale of building work involved is a huge siege ramp at the southern end of the western defences which as i say was excavated by dumain neil and has been further excavated by my colleague pierre lariche i also fortunately got to do a little bit of digging on that for a couple of days which was fascinating as well and this was really a mud brick box up against the walls

of the city which was then filled with earth and the idea was to create a sloping roadway up which some kind of a siege tower, a siege engine could go to allow troops to drop over the walls and the excavations that happened in the 30s showed that this was a huge fight here that of course the Romans didn't simply wait for this to happen they took countermeasures they raised their own wall so as the ramp was going up the city wall was going up too to make it difficult for the Persians to get over it but also simultaneously the Romans were digging a mine underneath the Persian siege mine at the same time as the Sasanians were undermining one of the Roman towers because the tower was a platform for catapults and things which was obviously

slaughtering the Persians or probably the actual local slaves they were forcing to build the ramp so the Sasanians decided to knock out the tower at the same time as the Romans were undermining to knock out the ramp and apparently they both fired their mines burned the pit props the tower came down that became useless but the Romans also fired their mine under the siege ramp roadway. That collapse made that useless, so you could think of it as a bloodstained one all half time, so to speak. Yeah, so it sounds like a stalemate so far, but they're doing stuff overground and also underground. At that point, yeah, both. They're trying to go over the walls, they're trying using mining to also affect the defences there. They do also attack on the surface. Something that our French colleagues have excavated over the last 20-odd years is around the great main gate, the Palmyrene Gate, as we call it now, through the Western defences. Unsurprisingly, gates were always a main target of assault.

target of assault and they found evidence in the front of the gate there again of a ferocious fight lots of burning fragments what might be part of a Sasanian siege engine or nothing very diagnostic shield bosses and all sorts of things lots and lots of iron catapult bolt heads stone artillery projectiles so there's a ferocious fight there but again the Sasanians do not seem to have managed to break into the city there either. So what do they decide to do then? I should emphasise we don't know the sequence of this. This is simply that we got a number of loci along the defences where we can see there were siege assaults happening. They were possibly throwing all of these things at the Romans at once but the other place where we got a lot of detail

which has produced some of the most dramatic archaeological evidence for warfare of any period, in my opinion, and having studied this and looked at many other sites, was some distance, 100 metres or so to the north of the gate, around one of the towers, which is today known as Tower 19. And this was another kind of assault again. In this case, the Sasanians had tried to go over the walls at the ramp, they tried to go through the city gate on the surface. At this point, their objective is to bring down part of the city wall and again send a column of troops charging across the step from their camp into the city that way and they're going to undermine the wall by digging

a siege mine and what they do is they break into one of the chamber tombs only actually about 40 50 meters outside the wall so they're really close in already and they dug a tunnel under Tower 19. It's only the way we found this or Dumainil found this in the early 1930s was he could see this tower had partially collapsed and part of the wall also was disrupted. So he wanted to know what was going on there. He was himself an experienced soldier who'd been in the First World War so he was concentrating on this. He dug this area and he found the evidence that we're talking about here now. So what he discovered was that the Sasanians had undermined Tower 19 and they dug this gallery under the wall and also along an adjacent stretch of the city wall about 15 meters long. So the idea was that once their mine was

ready they'd take all the stones out, put pit props in, make some air holes, fill it with brushwood, set fire to it and interestingly one of the things we know they had for setting fire to it were things like sulphur crystals and also were in the world of crude oil they had a jar of crude oil as well. The idea was to use those accelerants to get the pit props burning, they burned through and then the wall would come crashing down and there'd be a breach and the troops could go in. But of course the Romans could basically see this digging going on. They could see the mouth of the mine. They must have seen all the earth being taken out. They knew perfectly well what's happening. They could probably hear the miners too. A known siege defence technique. You could use metal shields and things to amplify the noise of the miners.

They dug their own gallery to intercept the Persian siege mine. Again to emphasise this is entirely from archaeology, this is unknown to history. So what Dumaniel actually found was he found this Roman counter mine, as it's called, which connected with the Sasanian siege mine. And in that mine he found a large number of bodies. The mine itself had been burned and he found a tangle of about 20 bodies who were crammed into an area of the gallery which is still partly open at the time only about two and a half meters long and if you stretch your arms out either side you could easily touch both walls of this gallery and it was

probably barely head height so these bodies were really crammed into a tiny space nearby there was a seed of burning again with crude oil and with sulfur crystals and next to that was a body in armor as well this tangle of bodies and i studied their equipment because it still survives they're definitely romans and they got some of the latest coins still in their purses these bodies when they were found they're wearing mail shield bosses in there some swords and so on so they're definitely romans the guy on the other side of the focus of burning in the roman counter mine he's got very different kind of armor and a very interesting helmet.

And he's certainly a Sasanian. He's probably the guy who set the fire to bring this mine down. So what seems to have happened is that the Romans broke into the Persian gallery before it was finished just to try to capture it to stop the undermining happening. But they all then rapidly ended up dead. The Persians captured the Roman mine, piled the Roman bodies up to make a wall to stop the Romans coming back in again while they burned the Roman mine to stop the Romans interfering anymore,

in which that single Sasanian perished. Then, at their own leisure, the Sasanians carried on with their mine. They actually further blocked the Roman gallery with stuff they were taking out from the underside of the Roman wall. A very convenient place for them to dump all this extra stone. They even mortared it together to stop the Romans breaking in again. Then they fired their mine and it failed, that whole damn thing. The wall, instead of tipping over into the plain and making a breach, it simply came unzipped at each end and sunk vertically into the ground about a

meter and a bit and it stayed upright. So in fact the Roman ramparts and glacis worked, it helped keep the defences intact even though they've been undermined. So tragically those poor guys who died in the fight in the mine perished for nothing. So the Sassanian gallery actually failed and in fact we still don't know how the Sassanians got into the city. That's absolutely astonishing that story that you can possibly deduce from the archaeology and the remains that you have as well learning about the equipment being able to deduce what remains were Roman what was the Sasanian and like the mine and the counter mine and you mentioned earlier how you have these 20 soldiers very close in all together what's the

theories around how they perished? Well Dumais Neill published some papers around about World War II on what he thought happened and he thought what had happened was that the Romans had a sword fight basically a hand-to-hand fight with the Sassanians in the mine, and they started to lose. They were being pushed back into their own mine, and a Roman officer panicked that the Sassanians were actually going to come into the city through the Romans' own mine, which would be a bit of an own goal. So what Dumanil thought was the Roman commander had deliberately collapsed the mine on his own men to stop it coming in. I never really thought this was very plausible. And then what was great about Dumanio's records was they were detailed enough for me to put them back together and reconstruct in detail how the bodies had

actually been stacked. He did very good drawings. And actually, I was able to demonstrate that this wasn't a group of men who'd been trapped in the mine and collapsed where they fell when the Sasanians filled the mine with fire. These guys were already incapacitated or dead, and they'd been stacked in a pile to make a wall across the mine. So this then leads to the question of how and where did they actually die? So I was puzzling about this, and my first idea was that maybe, in fact, this was the sort of thing, sadly, we've seen at football stadia in recent decades perhaps have been a crowd crush incident of guys pushing at the back to try to get into

the mine and the guys at the front are being worsted and they're trying to push back and people were asphyxiated through crushing so that people died that way didn't seem to be entirely convincing and then my colleague kate gilliver suggested the possibility that they may actually have been smoked that this might actually have been an asphyxiation attack and that proved to be the key that made really excellent sense of what was happening here if these guys had actually encountered some kind of fumes now the reason why this immediately started to all fall together is that this is a known ancient tactic is to deny tunnels to the enemy by filling them with smoke using smoke generators basically bellows and things they use just nasty things like burning feathers just to make really horrible acrid smoke however what we have got in the mine here at Dura we've got crude oil and we

got sulfur crystals because we know the Sasanians used those to burn the Roman mine once they killed the Romans so what I've suggested following on from Kate's original insight, is that just as the Romans heard that the Sasanians were coming, the Sasanians heard the Roman counterminers. They knew they were about to have a nasty interruption. So they got together a smoke generator themselves, probably a portable brazier of hot coals, which they put near the entrance into the gallery under the tower. And when they heard the Romans break into the gallery they simply let rip with perhaps bellows certainly throwing crude oil and sulphur onto this brazier and then you get thick petrochemical smoke and also poisonous sulphur dioxide rapidly filling the Roman gallery

because the gallery is now connected there would have been a chimney effect between the Roman approach tunnel and the actual siege mine which is at high level under the walls of the city. So it would have very quickly filled the Roman gallery with poisonous smoke. So I think that is my interpretation. This actually would, in modern terms, count as a chemical weapon, chemical warfare. And this will be, if it's correct, and this is a circumstantial argument, then this will be one of the earliest attested examples of such warfare. From what you're saying there, this seems like a chemical warfare trap by the Sasanians against the Romans. Yeah, I think it is. They were kind of ambushed with a smoke generator. And this is testimony, as of course is the sophistication of the siege ramp and the implied machine that went

on that, and apparently Sasanian use of artillery. they were as technologically sophisticated and had stratagems just as complex as the Romans did. That's absolutely remarkable. And this possible series of events, almost all of it, if not all of it, has been gained from the archaeology at this site. The story of the siege at Dura is entirely from archaeology. There is no historical reference to it whatsoever. And it's been tremendously fascinating also quite

horrifying of course to work on this and now to think about how actually did this come about where for example then did the Sasanians actually apparently suddenly develop this siege technology because the preceding Parthian empire doesn't seem really to have had the capacity to besiege cities, so far as we know. What the Sassanians do is show that they had mastered all aspects of siege warfare, just as known to the Greeks and Romans. Everything from building siege ramps, to mining, to apparently use of catapults, torsion artillery, to including things like the use of chemical smoke generators. So where did they get this? And I think it's fairly clear that they got it from the Greeks and the Romans. The preceding Parthian Empire, of course, had always respected Greek culture and learning. Greek soldiers had developed a lot of these kinds

of techniques. The Romans learned them from the Greeks, largely. So I think that Parthians and then Sassanians will have had access to the same kind of manuals of warfare and stratagems for generals that Romans would have had. There's also another interesting clue that the historian Cassius Dio writing at the end of his history just at the time the Sassanians are arising in the 220s and 230s he comments on how some of our troops are going over to the enemy and I suspect that there may well have been some we might think of the Romans were certainly thought of as turncoats also perhaps just people who were looking for a better fortune perhaps Roman trained soldiers themselves Syrians

who threw in their lot with the Sasanians this is a phenomenon which is quite well known in antiquity of people changing sides going across the frontier so I suspect it may be that some of the Sasanian engineers at Dura might actually have been Romans. That's very interesting. And of course, I guess it once again stresses the interconnected nature of the ancient world. There were people passing bat to and fro all across. And that was an amazing story about the siege.

I'm guessing the Sasanians do emerge victorious in the end. They certainly do. We don't know how they broke into the city finally but we know that they did and one of the things that came out of my own research going back through the unpublished records of the excavations of the 1930s is that actually some bodies were found in the Roman garrison area. There's a teenager apparently who was found lying on the floor of one of the rooms and also a man still in armour was found. None of this appeared in the publications but it's in the archive which is why going back through archives is such an important part of archaeology today. So the Sasanians got

in, there was apparently fire and sword through the city but what they don't seem to have done this time is to try to hang on to it. What they did was they apparently either killed or enslaved and carried off any survivors. So the city was left effectively abandoned thereafter. And is this why, this fact that it's left this ruin, this desolation, is this why so much archaeology survives at this site to this day and is so extraordinary? Yes it is. There was a little occupation thereafter. There's probably a Sasanian period, a bit of farming going on there, and the medieval a small Arab village but really as a city that is the end in the 250s and in the later medieval period you start to get towns reappearing in this zone which for centuries was something of a no

man's land between Rome and the Sasanian empire once you get through the Islamic period then new towns are established on different sites this one doesn't get rebuilt so it's left as sort of the archetypal well it's not actually a desert ruin, it's a ruin in the steppe, but an abandoned town out in the boonies, where things like the siege preparations are just left untouched. Of course, had the city been reoccupied, those would have been all removed and disposed of to get the city back to life and restore the defences. So the tragedy of the city of Dura and its occupants, of course, has been, as is so often the case, the good fortune for modern archaeologists. Absolutely, absolutely. And one last question regarding the siege.

Do we have any accounts in late Roman writers of sieges happening in the eastern part of the empire against the Sasanians, which perhaps may have a very similar story to that of Dura? perhaps may have a very similar story to that of Dura. Yes, there's a fascinating literary comparator for Dura, which also has an interesting Dura connection in a sense. And that is in my favourite late Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who himself was from the East. He was a Roman officer and he was caught in the siege of the city of Amida, which is a couple of hundred kilometres, maybe a bit more north of Dura now just into modern Turkey in a siege in 8359 where Dura was besieged by Shapur I his descendant Shapur II besieged Amida and Ammianus gives this fascinating description of this ferocious siege there which again involves things like ramps and artillery and so on it's well worth a read to compare because many of the features of that very vivid

account are remarkably similar so for example he talks about the Sasanias managing to get some men into the top of one of the Roman towers and then the Romans use their arrow shooting catapults to shoot these guys out again and he talks about the catapult bolts sometimes going through two men it's a really very vivid nasty stuff He allegedly escapes by postern gates as the city is falling and being sacked and lives to tell the tale and fascinatingly he himself a little while later, a few years later, is in a Roman expedition to counter-attack the Sasanians led by the last pagan emperor Julian who again invades Mesopotamia and they march down the Euphrates and we have this eyewitness description by Ammianus of the army passing through the abandoned city of Dura, where they

hunt gazelle and so forth, because there's just nobody there anymore. It's just going back to nature. And I think it's rather wonderful that Ammianus, who'd gone through a siege very similar to this, should then go and become this sort of historical connection with the archaeologically attested siege of Dura on their way into the ultimate defeat and Julian's death in Mesopotamia because once again the Romans unfortunately tried to invade Mesopotamia and failed. It seems to be a repetitive strand that in Roman policy and you mentioned how they went past the ruins of Dura. I feel kind of sorry for the Durians when you hear that. For instance when they left Dura when they became more militarized and they were forced out, and then they were never able to

come back because following the siege, it's just a ruin. Should we feel that the Durians, were they helpless victims of foreign imperialism? They have sometimes kind of been depicted that way since Rostovtsev's time. Frankly, he wasn't really interested in the indigenous people. He was only interested in the Greeks, the civilized Greeks. He saw this as an island of Hellenistic civilization, which was tragically crushed between the nasty Romans on the one side and the equally nasty Sasanians on the other side. And I think that is a rather simplistic view. Of course, this was an appalling tragedy for anybody who was caught in the city. But throughout its history, Dura itself was, I think, quite an active military place. The original

Macedonian city was founded by soldiers. It was a little city-state. I'm sure it had its own armed forces for controlling the territory around it, for controlling the local Bedouin tribes and so forth, who were already at sometimes odds anyway with the settled people in the river valley. And then in Roman times, again, they weren't just an oppressed people with a nasty foreign Romans. They were themselves becoming Romans. They were into marrying with their local people who were themselves Roman soldiers. So it's a much more complex and personal story than this, even though, of course, it does end in the kind of tragedy of people having to flee war, which we have seen with the Syrian civil war in recent years, which tragically itself, again, has also led to another destruction of Duri-Europos, because like many of

the other cities in this part of the world, the ruins have been themselves massively plundered for antiquities to sell to keep the fighting going. But of course that particular disaster for Syria's heritage does pale into insignificance by comparison with the suffering of the people which include the villages who live near the site. Simon that was an absolutely amazing chat. The siege itself seems like the topic of a movie. It's so absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks very much, Tristan. It's been my pleasure.