Twenty Roman soldiers, gassed in a tunnel in 256 AD | THE KING WHO CAUGHT A CAESAR Part 2

History Onion · Part 2 · 3:00

Under the dead city of Dura-Europos in Syria, in a siege tunnel dug beneath its walls, excavators found twenty Roman soldiers lying where they fell. No sword wounds. One of them was carrying a coin minted in 256, which is how we know the year. They had been gassed — the Persians burned sulphur crystals and bitumen where the two tunnels met, and the smoke did the rest. It is the earliest chemical attack anyone can still dig up. The men who did it worked for Shapur I. Part 2 follows his second war on Rome: sixty thousand Romans destroyed at Barbalissos, the fall of Antioch, thirty-seven towns and cities taken — then Rome's answer, and the day at Edessa in 260 when a Roman emperor was captured alive for the first time in history. NOTES ON THE CLAIMS • "The earliest chemical attack we can still dig up" is an ARCHAEOLOGICAL claim, not a first-ever. Literary accounts of toxic smoke are older. The Dura reading is Simon James's (American Journal of Archaeology, 2009), reinterpreting bodies excavated in the 1920s–30s.