Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. “Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”
More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.
The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today’s Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means “hill”) offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.
Like hundreds of other mounds in this region, Brak was built up over millennia as homeowners knocked down their decaying mud-brick houses and erected new structures on top of the remains. This tell towers over all others in the region, rising about 130 feet above the plain. The site contains a mini–mountain range of eroded hills and valleys covering more than 120 acres, surrounded by a sprawl of smaller mounds circling the central core like satellites. People lived here for at least 3,000 years, and probably much longer. Brak was abandoned around 1200 B.C. during the chaotic time when the Hittite empire collapsed and the Bronze Age ended.
The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in the conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.
