The Bible came alive in a lost city in Syria
The amazing story of Dura-Europos
Published in
11 min readFeb 22, 2023
In 1920, British soldiers were digging a trench in Syria, and saw fragments of paintings. Archaeologists came, and realized they stood on top of an ancient city.
Around 256 A.D., it had been under siege. The citizens were gassed to death in an early use of chemical warfare, and buried. Seventeen hundred years later, the ruins were being raised in the sand.
Persians called it ‘Dura’, as to Romans it was ‘Europos’.
To learn about ‘Dura-Europos’, as the ruins came to be called, is to be consulting mostly scholarly literature. It seems fascinating? A whole ancient city had been preserved like a museum.
But the public, for the most part, has never heard of it.
I look through photos taken by archaeologists during the excavations that occurred between 1928 and 1937.
