Word: ancient
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...kicked up by a strong northerly wind, the dust became a severe irritant, smoking the insurgents out of their caves. The use of such special agents "was very tempting," says Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist and author of Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological & Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, "especially when you don't consider the enemy fully human...
...reminder that chemical weapons are nothing new - in fact, they are nearly 2,000 years old. Simon James, a researcher at the University of Leicester in the U.K., claims to have found the first physical evidence of chemical weaponry, dating from a battle fought in A.D. 256 at an ancient Roman fortress. James concluded that 20 Roman soldiers unearthed beneath the town's ramparts did not die of war wounds, as previous archaeologists had assumed, but from poison...
...Tyre catapulted basins of burning sand at Alexander the Great's advancing army. Falling from the sky, the sand, says Mayor, "would have had the same ghastly effect as white phosphorus," the chemical agent allegedly used during Israel's recent bombardment of Gaza, not far to the south of ancient Tyre. A Chinese ruler in A.D. 178 put down a peasant revolt by encircling the rebels with chariots heaped with limestone powder. Accompanied by a cacophonous troupe of drummers, the charioteers pumped the powder into a primitive tear gas even more corrosive and lethal than its modern equivalent. The peasants...
...Still, in the absence of the Geneva Conventions, ancient peoples did maintain "some sense of what it was to cross the line," says Mayor. Across cultures, it was customary to deplore trickery and extol the virtues of the noble warrior. The Brahmanic Laws of Manu, a code of Hindu principles first articulated in the fifth century B.C., forbade the use of arrows tipped with fire or poison. Written in India a century later, Kautilya's Arthashastra, one of the world's earliest treatises on war and realpolitik, advocates surprise night raids and offers recipes for plague-generating toxins...
...Even in antiquity, many feared the lurking consequences of unleashing what we now call chemical weapons - indeed, the ancient Greek tale of Pandora's box offers a continuing metaphor for their use. And its moral proved true in the collapsed tunnels of Dura-Europos: among the Roman bodies, James spied one corpse set aside from the rest, which wore differing armor and carried a jade-hilted sword. This was a fallen Persian soldier, James concludes, also asphyxiated by the gas. The warrior who released the poison very likely succumbed...