Ancient Chemical Warfare

[D B Campbell]

Trying to track down references to Dura Europos. (Chemical)

This sums it up well.

Apologies for resurrecting this old thread. Moi/Vindex just reminded us about it.

In my opinion, Judith Weingarten (the blogger in question) is right to question Simon James' "chemical warfare" theory, but for the wrong reasons.

(1) She thinks that, if the Persians had used chemical warfare here, we would have evidence that they also used it elsewhere. (Think how fortuitous the discovery of Dura-Europos was!) And, furthermore, the Romans would have adopted it, too. (Think how sparse our late Roman sources are.)

(2) She thinks that the dead Sassanid in the Roman countermine couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to light a fire with sulphur crystals right under his nose. But he was certainly stupid enough to linger too long in a collapsing siege mine, otherwise his body wouldn't still be lying there. (It's worth noting that this Persian doesn't actually play the part that Judith Weingarten supposes in Simon James' gassing scenario -- James actually alleges that the gas was created far away in the Persian tunnel, underneath Tower 19, and drifted up into the Roman countermine.

(3) She thinks that Simon James is wrong to say that the Romans wouldn't have blocked their own tunnel, because any tunnel builder would be "oddly negligent if they did not have blocking materials to hand". James' theory certainly requires the countermine to have remained open. But Du Mesnil's own report shows that the countermine had been blocked -- whether deliberately or accidentally cannot be said. We don't need to appeal to Judith Weingarten's opinion of what the defenders ought to have been doing. We can look at Du Mesnil's own sketch and description to see that the tunnel had caved in.

In the end, she appears to endorse the original excavator's theory -- correctly, in my view -- but then hedges her bets by saying that "it could have been entirely unexpected that the gas released by the fire turned poisonous and killed the Sasanian officer as well as the 20 men hovering near the blocked exit".

You can't really have your cake and eat it, Judith. A blocked tunnel means no draught to carry Simon James' hypothetical fumes up into the Roman countermine. A blocked tunnel means that the Persians had no need to gather Roman bodies and stack them as a barrier.