ABNA24 - Beneath the Syrian Desert, the Sassanian Persians engineered a subterranean battle that still raises questions among archaeologists and historians.
The confrontation unfolded at Dura-Europos, a city on the Euphrates long held by the Roman Empire. By 256 CE, a new and aggressive power had risen in Iran. The Sassanian dynasty under Shapur I replaced the Parthians and pushed westward with relentless force. Shapur’s trilingual inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam (Ka'ba-ye Zartosht) records that during his second invasion of Syria, he crushed a Roman army and captured thirty-seven towns, among them Dura-Europos. After the siege, the city vanished from history for seventeen centuries.
When French archaeologists rediscovered Dura-Europos in the 1920s, they uncovered a city frozen in time. At Tower 19, along the massive desert wall, a network of tunnels came to light. The Sassanians had dug beneath the fortifications. They chose an entry point where an ancient necropolis had already penetrated the hard limestone, then tunneled some forty meters toward the wall. Their target was Tower 19 itself; by removing stone blocks from its foundations, they intended to collapse the structure. The Romans responded with a countermine, driving a tunnel through the packed earth behind the defenses to intercept the Persian diggers.
Deep underground, the two forces met. Inside the Roman countermine, the French count Robert Du Mesnil du Buisson found a tangle of skeletons, around fifteen soldiers by his estimate, still wearing chain-mail and clutching shields and swords. Among the Roman dead lay a single Sassanian soldier, his arm raised as if to strike, his tiara-shaped helmet beside him. Scattered on the tunnel floor were fragments of ceiling planks, a broken jar of bitumen, and crystals of sulphur.
This physical evidence prompted a dramatic hypothesis: that the Sassanians had deliberately produced toxic fumes to overwhelm the Roman defenders. In that scenario, when the Persian miners realized the Romans were digging towards them, they lit a brazier loaded with sulphur and bitumen. Once ignited, these materials generate sulphur dioxide — a thick, acrid gas that attacks the lungs and can cause rapid suffocation in a confined space. The Persians may have pushed the burning brazier into the Roman tunnel, the heavy gas spreading through the gallery. According to the theory, the Roman soldiers collapsed where they stood, and their bodies were piled up as a makeshift barrier. If accurate, it would represent an extraordinarily early example of chemical warfare.
Not everyone accepts this interpretation. The excavation records were notoriously imprecise: no technical drawings were made, surviving sketches are confusing, and many primary notes have been lost. Furthermore, the “fifteen or so soldiers” may have been far fewer. The existing sketches show only 10 skulls and perhaps as few as 8 bodies. With only eight Roman dead, a gas attack becomes unnecessary; ordinary close-quarters fighting could account for the casualties. Defenders of the theory note that the skeletons show no obvious sword wounds, but two thousand years underground rarely preserves such evidence with certainty.
Whatever the exact cause of death inside that tunnel, one fact remains undisputed: the Sassanians won. They captured Dura-Europos, and the city was never reoccupied. Shapur I returned to Iran triumphant, his victories still proclaimed in stone at Naqsh-e Rostam. Beneath the Syrian Desert, the bodies of Roman soldiers lay undisturbed for centuries — a quiet reminder that even mighty Rome could not hold back the tide of Sassanian arms. The Persians had understood that the weakest point in any defence is often the one you cannot see. Through mining, through fire, and, very likely, through a sophisticated application of available materials, the Sassanian military machine displayed tactical ingenuity that deserves recognition. For modern Iranians, Dura-Europos offers a window into a glorious past when Persian armies marched to the Mediterranean and challenged Rome for supremacy.
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