"Shock and Awe" 3500 BC-Style

[Tuckerfan]

I never thought you could lay waste to a city using slings.

The shattered remains of a 5500-year-old citadel that stood on the modern-day border between Syria and Iraq provide some of the oldest evidence for organised and bloody warfare.

The Mesopotamian settlement lies in Hamoukar, on the northernmost tip of Syria, 8 kilometres from the Iraqi border. In 3500 BC the 13-hectare development was subjected to a devastating attack, its edifices crumbling beneath a crushing hail of bullet-shaped projectiles.

During earlier excavations, archaeologists found buildings that had been destroyed or severely damaged by fire. The latest expedition revealed 1200 oval clay “bullets” measuring 2.5 centimetres in diameter and 4 centimetres in length. It also unearthed 120 heavier projectiles measuring 5 centimetres by 10 centimetres.
Impact scars

The team originally mistook the larger projectiles for pots, but both these and the smaller bullets showed impact scars and impressions apparently caused by striking buildings.

The archaeologists also conducted experiments that confirmed the projectiles could easily be launched using slings. The smaller bullets were deformed upon impact, which suggests they were manufactured in the heat of battle and were still soft.

“The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone,” says Clemens Reichel, a member of the team from the University of Chicago. “This was clearly no minor skirmish. This was ‘shock and awe’ in the fourth millennium BC.”

I wonder if they’ll ever turn up a Mesopotamian equivalent of The Iliad which tells us what the war was about?