The prospect of chemical and biological warfare in this age of anthrax scares and WMD can feel — like the threat of nuclear Armageddon before it — like a uniquely modern terror. But a British archaeologist's recent find offers a reminder that chemical weapons are nothing new — in fact, they are nearly 2,000 years old. Simon James, a researcher at the University of Leicester in the U.K., claims to have found the first physical evidence of chemical weaponry, dating from a battle fought in A.D. 256 at an ancient Roman fortress. James concluded that 20 Roman soldiers unearthed beneath the town's ramparts did not die of war wounds, as previous archaeologists had assumed, but from poison gas.
The findings, announced in January at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Philadelphia, have caused a stir in archaeological circles, bringing to light proof of deeds usually encountered just in classical texts. Conducting a CSI-style cold-case forensic analysis of the site, James pieced together clues from records of earlier excavations at the Roman city of Dura-Europos, whose ruins are in modern Syria. An army of Persians had sacked the city and abandoned it, deporting its captive population deep into Persian territory. Dura-Europos became a ghost town, engulfed in sand until joint French-American teams dug it up in the 1930s.
During the final siege of the city, the attackers burrowed beneath the walls in order to breach the Roman defenses; the Romans heard this and started digging a countermine to fend off the assault. But the Persians, James told TIME, "prepared a nasty surprise," pumping lethal fumes from a brazier burning sulfur crystals and bitumen, a tarlike substance, with bellows into the Roman tunnels. The brazier was only doused, James suggests, "when the screaming stopped." Afterward, the Persians stacked the Roman corpses in a wall to prevent any reprisal, then lit the scene on fire.
War in antiquity rarely matched the heroism of its myths — it was ugly, nasty and desperate. To stave off a Roman siege in A.D. 189, the defenders of the Greek city of Ambracia built a complex flamethrower that coughed out smoking chicken feathers. At Themiscrya, another stubborn Greek outpost, Romans tunneling beneath the city contended with not only a charge of wild beasts but also a barrage of hives swarming with bees — a rather direct approach to biological warfare.