Afterlife

Once the Sasanians had captured the city, they did not try to hold the site, and the Romans did not try to take it back again; the region became a kind of no-man's land between the empires as wars raged on for decades. Parts of the city had burned, but others were abandoned still standing. Eventually roofs caved in, and over the centuries the mud-brick upper walls of the houses gradually melted under wind and rain to a flat surface, with the occasional mound marking a major building. This was the scene awaiting archaeologists in the 20th century.

A century after the siege, another Roman army on yet another ill-fated invasion of Babylonia, under the last pagan emperor Julian in 363, would hunt animals through Dura's deserted streets. Later still the desolation of the citadel attracted Christian hermits, and in medieval times a small Arab settlement.

The Euphrates road passing through the site continued to carry soldiers, travellers and traders of the Muslim era, down to Ottoman times and beyond.

Identification of the ruins of Salhiyeh as the ancient 'Dura... called Europos by the Greeks' led to the excavations which made this place a media sensation between the World Wars. In the later twentieth century, the enterprise of the new Franco-Syrian expedition, coinciding with growth of cultural tourism, looked set to make Dura an important heritage destination, and likely a candidate UNESCO World Heritage Site. But tragic political events would derail these ambitions.

Image: the walls of Dura seen from the north-west across the dry steppe plateau. The track at right is roughly the line of the ancient Euphrates road. (Photo Simon James)