Excavations at a ruined city on the plains of northeastern Syria have turned up the oldest known example of large-scale warfare -- a massive campaign that pummeled the city into submission at the dawn of civilization more than 5,500 years ago, researchers said Thursday.
The discovery of the devastated remains of the ancient trading center suggests that the urge to attack and conquer cities is as old and basic as the need to build them, the researchers said.
"This clearly was no minor skirmish," said archeologist Clemens Reichel of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who led the joint U.S.-Syrian team that made the discovery. "This was 'shock and awe' in the 4th millennium BC."
The siege and destruction of the site, now known as Tell Hamoukar, was apparently an early step by Uruk, an ancient Mesopotamian city-state, to establish the world's earliest colonial system, said archeologist Guillermo Algaze of UC San Diego, who was not involved in the research.
"What makes it fascinating is it's so modern," Algaze said. "Change the names and change the time period, and we could be discussing European colonization of the New World 500 years ago."
Experts compared the finding to the discovery of the fabled city Troy, which was thought to be mythological until its site was found in Turkey nearly 3,000 years after its fall.
The people of Uruk were establishing colonies 400 to 600 miles away from their own city, Algaze added. "We never quite realized they could do that in 3500 BC."
The Tell Hamoukar site was discovered in 1999 by a joint U.S.-Syrian team led by archeologist McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute. Before the discovery, researchers had believed that civilization began 400 miles southeast at Ur and Uruk, Sumerian cities in the so-called Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now southern Iraq, and spread northward.
Tell Hamoukar was at least as old as the better-known cities of Mesopotamia. Its discovery indicated that civilizations were already thriving this early in history and that the idea of cities had evolved independently among several groups of people.
Those people had first settled in the area much earlier, about 9,000 BC. That was about 2,500 years before the first settlements in China and 6,000 years before the first ones in Western Europe.
The people of Uruk dominated the region for at least 2,000 years, eventually giving way to the Babylonians and the Assyrians.
