Desolation and 'discovery'

In the centuries following its destruction and rapid abandonment around AD256, the city was never entirely 'lost'. Bedouin grazed their flocks among the visible ruins, while the main Euphrates road also ran through them in Ottoman times. However, the original names of the place were locally forgotten. By 1900, it was known as Salhiyeh. At that time, few western scholars had ever heard of the city of 'Dura... called Europos by the Greeks', mentioned in a chance-preserved text by the obscure ancient writer Isidore of Charax. It was just one of many places from antiquity whose names survived, but their locations were lost. However, the site was re-identified in 1920, in a strange and rather fitting historical symmetry.

In late March of that year, Indian troops of the British imperial forces in Mesopotamia encamped in the ruins of Salhiyeh. This was during the Anglo-French colonialist carve-up of the Middle East following collapse of the Ottoman Turkish empire at the end of World War I. Fighting local Arab groups who sought finally to be free of foreign domination, the Indian soldiers dug defensive trenches along the earth-enshrouded walls. They were astonished to reveal an ancient wall painting showing priests and local worthies at sacrifice.

Digging further at the request of the visiting American archaeologist James Henry Breasted, on May 4 1920 they found another painting. This showed Roman troops with an officer burning incense before divine figures, one of whom was labelled the 'Fortune of Dura'. On that day, the ruined city was reunited with one of its ancient names. In the following years, excavations would recover further texts mentioning either Dura or its Macedonian name Europos, confirming the identity of the city beyond doubt.

The soldiers in the second painting are now identifiable as men of a Syrian regiment of the Roman armies, cohors XX Palmyrenorum, raised from men of the oasis city of Palmyra 250km west of Dura. Curiously, then, on that spring day in 1920, Asian auxiliaries of one European imperial power came face to face, so to speak, with Asian auxiliaries of another, across a gulf of almost seventeen centuries.