Dura-Europos

Listen first to the wind. On this high desert plateau it moves across loose sand and broken mud brick, and far below it brushes the water of the Euphrates. The ground under your feet is soft and pale, scattered with sherds of pottery. The light is hard and bright. When the sun drops, the cliffs turn the colour of honey. This is Dura-Europos, a city that sat at the edge of empires and then fell silent for more than a thousand years.

The city began as a fortress. After Alexander the Great died, his generals divided his conquests. One of them, Seleucus, built a kingdom that stretched across Syria and Mesopotamia. Around 300 BCE his dynasty founded a stronghold here, on a natural platform above the river. They called it Europos, after the town in Macedonia where Seleucus was born. The local name, Dura, comes from an ancient Semitic word for a fortress. Today scholars join the two names together.

Look at where you stand. The site is a rough triangle. On one side, steep cliffs drop to the Euphrates. On two other sides, deep ravines cut into the plateau. Only the western side faced open desert, so the builders put their strongest wall there. The position made sense. The river was a highway for trade, and caravans crossed the steppe between the Mediterranean and the cities of Mesopotamia. Whoever held this cliff could watch both.

The Greek founders did not keep the city for long. In the late second century BCE the Parthians took control. They were a dynasty from northeastern Iran who ruled a large empire to the east. Under them, Dura grew into a busy market town. Then, in the second century of our era, the Romans arrived and made it a garrison on their eastern frontier. Greek, Aramaic, Persian and Latin all appear in the documents found here. One small town held many languages.

That mix shows most clearly in the religion of the place. Archaeologists found temples to Greek gods and temples to gods from Palmyra, the great caravan city in the Syrian desert. They found a shrine to Mithras, a god popular with Roman soldiers. And they found two buildings that changed how historians think about early Judaism and early Christianity. Different faiths lived side by side here, sometimes on the same street.

The first is a synagogue. Its walls were covered from floor to ceiling with painted scenes from the Hebrew Bible — Moses, the Exodus, the prophet Ezekiel. Many people had believed that Jewish worship in this era avoided images. The paintings at Dura show a very different picture. Here is a surprise most visitors miss. Those walls are not at the site anymore. In the twentieth century the synagogue paintings were carefully removed and rebuilt inside the National Museum in Damascus.

A short walk away stood an ordinary house that a Christian community changed for worship. It is the earliest known house church that archaeologists have identified anywhere. One small room held a baptismal basin under a painted canopy. Its wall paintings include some of the oldest known Christian images, such as scenes of healing and women walking toward a tomb. Those paintings travelled even farther than the synagogue. They now hang at the Yale University Art Gallery in the United States.

Why did so much survive? The answer is war. In the middle of the third century, the Sasanian Persians, a new Iranian dynasty, advanced on the Roman east. The defenders at Dura prepared for a siege. They piled earth and mud brick against the inside of the western wall to make it thicker. Houses, temples and shrines along that wall were filled and buried. They tried to save the city. Instead, they preserved it for us.

The siege itself left some of the most dramatic evidence of ancient warfare ever found. The Persians dug tunnels under the walls. The Romans dug counter-tunnels to meet them. Excavators found the remains of soldiers inside one of these passages. One modern researcher has argued that the attackers burned materials like sulphur and pitch to fill the tunnel with choking smoke. If he is right, it is among the earliest known examples of chemical warfare. The city fell in the 250s and was abandoned.

Sand covered everything. Shepherds passed. Centuries went by. Then, in 1920, British soldiers dug a trench in the ruins and uncovered brightly painted walls. The discovery brought scholars. Through the 1920s and 1930s, teams from Yale University and the French Academy excavated large parts of the city. They found papyri, parchments, armour, painted shields and everyday objects. Because the desert air is so dry, cloth and leather survived that would rot almost anywhere else. People began to call it the Pompeii of the desert.

The recent story is harder to hear. During the Syrian civil war, this region saw fighting and lawlessness. Satellite images taken in those years showed the ground inside the walls covered with thousands of looting pits. Diggers searched for coins and objects to sell. Much of the city's buried evidence was destroyed before anyone could record it. Today the site carries those scars beside the older ones from the Persian siege.

If you are here in person, look west toward the Palmyrene Gate. That was the main entrance, where the road from the desert came in. Its stone still rises above the mud brick. Then turn east, toward the cliff edge and the river. Think of the soldiers on that wall, watching the horizon. Think of the families in their painted rooms. The view they saw was close to yours — river, cliffs, sky.

As you walk away, notice the small things at your feet. A fragment of glazed pottery. A piece of fired brick. A curve of plaster. Each one belonged to someone who lived here, traded here, prayed here. The paintings went to Damascus and New Haven. The scrolls went to libraries. But the ground stayed, and the wind still moves across it, as it has since the city fell.