Word: poisoned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Romans themselves had few qualms about incorporating chemical warfare into their tactics. Roman armies routinely poisoned the wells of cities they were besieging, particularly when campaigning in western Asia. According to the historian Plutarch, the Roman general Sertorius in 80 B.C. had his troops pile mounds of gypsum powder by the hillside hideaways of Spanish rebels. When 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...
...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...
...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, but it also urges princes to exercise restraint and win the hearts and minds of their foes. The Roman military historian...
...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...
Interior, born Erick Lee Purkhiser, started the Cramps with his wife, guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, in 1976. From the beginning, they were more an act than a band, their fusion of surf music, punk and rockabilly (psychobilly, as it was known) sounding better in theory than in sloppy 3-min. bursts...