It turns out that attempts to use toxic substances during the battle were made in antiquity. Simon James, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester, who is currently excavating and studying the ancient city of Dura Europos, located on the banks of the Euphrates River, claims that he was able to find evidence of the use of chemical weapons during the Roman Empire.
Dura Europos, ruled by Rome in 256 AD, was besieged by the Sassanid forces. Scientists have found out that the Persians tried to bring down the walls of the city, digging under them.
The Romans, in turn, also dug passages to prevent the Persians from advancing inland. In one of these tunnels in 1930, archaeologists discovered the remains of the bodies of 20 Roman soldiers with weapons and full uniforms.
James decided to find out exactly how these people died. An analysis of the location of the corpses showed that someone had folded them in a dug passage so that they partially blocked the opening of the passage. The archaeologist believes that this was done by the Persians who dug from the opposite side. To explain how 20 people could have died at once, the researcher proposed a theory about the use of chemical weapons.
In the "Roman" part of the tunnel, traces of bitumen and sulfur crystals were found. When ignited, these substances give off thick toxic fumes.
James believes that the cunning Persians, instead of engaging in open battle, installed a brazier in their tunnel, placed bitumen and sulfur on it and, when the Romans broke through the earthen wall, with the help of furs directed the deadly vapors towards the 11-meter tunnel where they were their opponents. Within minutes, they were all dead.
True, despite the Persians' familiarity with chemical weapons, they did not manage to bring down the walls of Dura Europos with the help of dug tunnels. The same cannot be said about the ancient Hittites, who, long before the times of the Roman Empire, were able to successfully use … no, not chemical, but biological weapons!
According to Canadian researcher Ciro Trevisanato, surviving Hittite documents indicate that the Hittites used tularemia-infected sheep to weaken the military power of their neighbors.
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As you know, the Hittite kingdom was formed in the II millennium BC in eastern Anatolia (the territory of modern Turkey). Warlike Hittites regularly staged ruinous raids on neighboring states.
The surviving correspondence of the Phoenicians with the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton reports on a terrible and strange epidemic that struck the Phoenician city of Simira around 1335 BC. According to Trevisanato, the symptoms of the disease described, called the "Hittite pestilence", correspond to tularemia, a particularly dangerous infection.
Rodents are a natural reservoir of tularemia, and infection of sheep, pigs, horses and other domestic animals is also possible. A person becomes infected with tularemia through the bites of blood-sucking insects.
Soon after the outbreak of the pestilence, the Hittites captured and plundered Simira. After that, the tularemia epidemic began in the Hittite kingdom itself - most likely, the disease was brought by pets stolen from the Phoenicians.
Several years later, the Hittite kingdom, seriously weakened by the epidemic and internal conflicts, had to go to war with the Asia Minor state of Artsava. The Hittites' chances to withstand this war were slim, but a new epidemic prevented Artsava's victory at the very last moment.
According to Ciro Trevisanato, before it began, abandoned sheep began to appear in Artsava, which local residents took to their flocks. As the Canadian researcher suggests, these animals were planted by the Hittites specifically in order to cause a pestilence in the enemy's camp.
By the way, the victims of the first "biological weapon" in history also associated the epidemic with the "cursed" sheep that appeared from nowhere.
Gennady NIKOLAEV